gracie zheng // senses
Artist Statement
I am an Asian American multimedia artist with an interest in video and digital interactivity. Social media is always on my mind especially during these restrictive circumstances. I experience a negative feedback loop where the more time I
spend on social media,the more influence it has on my self-esteem and confidence. I attempt to make projects that ameliorate by encouraging reflection, one of the building blocks of making a healthy behavioural adjustment amidst the horizon
of digital stimulation
Project Statement
Senses is an interactive media website that allows viewers to explore their senses using their mouse, speakers, and camera. The interactivity works best if it is given camera access, becoming the background of the page, and the volume is on.
The camera pushes you to become comfortable with yourself as you constantly will be going back to the home page as you explore the digital site. By clicking on the shapes on the site, viewers are overwhelmed by many elements that they can
interact with or view. This project is inspired by the pop-up immersive exhibitions held in New York City as they are spaces that you can experience with your five senses.
xinyan yang // take it
Artist Statement
My name is Xinyan Yang, a new media artist who focuses on digital drawing, haiku writing, and video editing. As an immigrant to the United States, learning English as a new language pushed me deeper into the online world. I can view the
information in the language I know and friends communicate in the social media I am familiar with. The frequent usage of the well-known media caught my interest and attention to begin my journey to analyze the relationship between my
real-world behaviors and digital behaviors. Therefore, I begin to observe, capture, and imagine the impacts of participating in the internet world.
Project Statement
Take It is a video demonstrating my relationship with the internet world. With significant development in technology, media is a platform where people quickly gather information. I insert myself as a participant in the social media world and
capture how the media “forms” me into the person I am today (such as developments in emotional and behavioral changes). In my understanding, the internet affects my performance on these social platforms. The way I respond to events, the mood
I change so quickly due to anxiety, and maybe the behaviors I enact to a particular situation. Like an interdependent organism, we keep changing as the world of the internet keeps changing. This project focuses on personal emotions. In
addition, I will also write up a short haiku as the description of my feelings to another self. No matter what, I accept all parts of myself. I hope this project will also catch your attention and provide a moment of contemplation on what
makes a perfect you.
gregor erdman // interfaced
Artist Statement
My name is Gregor Erdman, and I am a multimedia artist based in Brooklyn. Focusing primarily on the emotional and physical ramifications of capitalism. I explore how physical and mental health, power, and control are quantified, commodified,
and manipulated. My struggles with my physical and mental health have informed my work in much the same way that they have changed the way I navigate the world. I draw on techniques from mixed media, physical computing, film, animation, and
performance art to create unique works that elicit an emotional reaction about topics that often persist silently in the background. I strive to make the invisible visible in ways that provoke discomfort and anxiety while simultaneously
providing enough pleasure to keep the viewer engaged, mirroring the intermittent reinforcement present in many of capitalism’s most addictive processes.
I play with psychedelic, jagged, and surreal textures as a counterpoint to modern aesthetics that cast beauty as minimalist and “clean.” I also work to dismantle omnipresent binaries as a process maneuvering towards creating my own non-binary
identity. I am fascinated by physical and digital spaces and how we traverse them in search of meaning and belonging. As a result, much of my work centers around breaking down physical and mental processes into their metaphorical components
and re-imagining them as rituals, events, or personal narratives defined by exaggeration and/or compression. From installations designed to physicalize the invisible labor of globalization to a musical instrument that uses various sensors to
measure a room's anxiety, my work attempts to make the intangible, tangible in an absorbing fashion.
Project Statement
Presented as a short video blending real-life digital video and animation, the work follows a narrator who works for a dystopian data-mining firm, feeling insecure as they peer into the lives of people they consider better or more
well-adjusted than themselves. The short points to the omnipresence of data, the comparison culture crafted by social media, and the quantification of emotional and physical states represented by the characters' constant checking of an
anxiety app to validate their anxiety. It digs into the deep ties between our physical and mental health and our culture of constant surveillance, where having the data to closely observe our bodies leads to health anxiety, and having to
watch your peers succeed in intimate, curated detail can send viewers into a spiral of depression.
keith hernandez // self-less
Artist Statement
My name is Keith Hernandez and I am a Queens, NY based digital media artist. My works dissect the effects of social media on the general population. Since the rise of social media throughout the early 2000s, the effects of these platforms
have largely seemed positive, until more recent times with all the negative light being shed on social media platforms such as Facebook. I have mostly been on the sidelines in terms of using most major social media platforms such as
Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, etc, mostly because social media has been a tool for comparison by many people. Most of my previous works revolved around the idea of reflection, interactions with people, and social stigmas through the use of
both photography and open source game engines. My intentions are helping the public better understand who they are to connect to their own ideals instead of ones that are socially engineered. Within more recent works, I have decided to use my
lack of knowledge within these platforms, as a leverage to learn more about social media from the perspective of an outsider.
Project Statement
Self-Less is a game focused on emphasizing the role of social media and its effects on the way we interact with the world around us. It is clear that social media’s intention is to retain and monetize its users at any cost. Self-less is aimed
at bringing out the negativity in the forefront for the player to question these “social” ideals. The game is aimed at questioning the trends/carbon copies of today's social media content by making remarks that are negative on the surface. As
retention within these platforms become more and more intrusive, many users are also blurring the line between our real personality and our internet persona. Self-Less tries to capture the essence of what it is to be human and how important
it is to be yourself.
jason introna // in quick succession
Artist Statement
My name is Jason Introna from Brooklyn, New York. I am half Malaysian-Chinese and half Italian. I am influenced by animated movies and tv shows. My art primarily consists of landscape photography and net art web design. I use various colors
to light my subject in my photography to portray different emotions such as sadness and anger. Using my photography skills, I create gifs to shed light on what it feels like to have different psychological disorders. As an artist, I want to
create a conversation about mental health and show people who are unaware what these disorders can feel and look like. I combine my photos, each representing a different emotion to create a sequence of forever looping gifs representing the
change of emotions someone has when dealing with a psychological disorder.
Project Statement
My project, IN QUICK SUCCESSION, is a glimpse into the emotional state within the minds of people with different psychological disorders. Through my work, I am investigating these disorders by recreating the overwhelming feeling emotions
can have, especially when a person is going through something dark. I use gifs and repeated imagery to represent different disorders like depression and anxiety. Each gif is a flash of different emotions, some very obvious as to what you
should be feeling like sadness or anger but, some extremely confusing and fast to limit you from fully processing what you see. Through the use of movement, I wanted to show how quickly emotions can change and fluctuate.