I wake up (2018)

Interactive and immersive experiences

Various media and materials

Class: The Self and the Human Being, Fall 2018

For my first concept studio, my professor tasked us to design an alter ego and make art with it for the entire semester. I transformed into Ahnxe, my anxious self, and created four pieces that illustrate how my anxious brain interacts with the world.

Introduction to the Alter Ego: Brainstorm

Immersive installation

Cardboard, poly stuffing, ping pong balls, twine, popsicle sticks, hot glue, Arduino, 2.5’ x 2.5’ x 4’

Artist Statement

I like to make art that represents or evokes abstract thoughts and feelings from my viewers. I think this provides a way not only for me to express my own confusing thoughts but for other people to discover their personal feelings. With this piece, I ask my viewers these questions:

Have you ever had to experience the feeling that the world is uncontrollable? Loud? That there is too much bright, sensory information at one moment? That, as a result, you feel empty — or dark?

Lightness vs. darkness is a common motif among artists, and there are many interpretations of their meanings. I have chosen to represent light and dark through a thunderstorm installation, speaking to my strong passion for mental health. To me, this piece is a physical manifestation of a panic attack: sporadic periods of brightness and darkness, unpredictability, and fear. By going inside the strings and underneath the cloud, being trapped inside the jerking movements of the lightbulbs while hearing the loud thunder illustrates my artistic perspective of anxiety.

Imagining Utopia: Obsession

Immersive installation

Plywood, mirror, wood glue, 2.5’ x 2.5’ x 2.5’

Artist Statement

As we’ve developed our alter egos through throughout the semester and I have explored different mediums in my other studios, I have learned that I really love making experiential and interactive sculptures. Not only have I found that it is the best way to represent my alter ego’s utopia, but I feel that it also helps me to connect with my audience on a deeper level as opposed to other types of art. It’s personal; no one’s experience is the same as another, and I think that’s special.

The title of this piece is Obsession. One of the many things that coincides with anxiety is obsessive-compulsive tendencies, especially the habit of over-analyzing situations so much that one works themselves into a frenzy, spiraling down dozens of paths of hypotheticals and becoming overwhelmed at what is unknown. With this piece I intend to literally reflect (or at least metaphorically describe) the place where this feeling comes from — an infinite dimension of possibilities that ultimately stems from yourself. You are forced to look at yourself from every direction forever, showing how anxiety is mainly personal and introspective. You are the only person that controls your mind but yet you are out of control while in this state.

(Unfortunately this piece was vandalized before I got the chance to properly document it.)

Online Identity: Fight or Flight

(Click on the figure to interact with it.)

Digital interaction

Processing

Artist Statement

For my third project, I wanted to explore how my alter ego’s social experiences differ on the Internet as compared to in the “real world.” In my two previous projects, the thunderstorm installation and the mirror box, I intended to represent pure feelings of anxiety as they would exist in real-time — in an uncontrollable environment. However, behind a screen, anxiety is often appeased; you can completely control how others perceive you, and your or someone else’s online actions can’t directly affect you right then and there. Therefore, at least in my experience, there is a certain level of confidence that is gained on the Internet/on a phone.

One of the important ideas that I’ve been applying to these projects is the fact that anxiety is different for everyone. To illustrate this, I used Processing (an arts coding software) and sets of randomly repetitive data (Perlin noise) to infinitely generate ghostly shivering “figures.” I think this best visually represents the unpredictability and individuality of anxiety, as every eight seconds the figure regenerates, and no two figures are ever the same.

This idea has also challenged me to explore interactivity within my art, in order to allow each viewer to have a personal experience with the piece. When the viewer taps the screen, one of two random responses occur from the figure. One is the “anxious” response, where it shrinks, turns red, shakes harder, and indicates its stress with an exclamation point. This response represents how anxiety still always exists in the back of the mind, no matter the circumstance. The other is the “confident” response, where it moves closer to the viewer and indicates its curiosity with a question mark. This represents its ability to feel more comfortable expressing itself, a result of its currently controlled and anonymous existence on the Internet.

Transforming the Fiction Into Non-fiction: Fear Not

Personal Piece

Sculpture

Plywood, ping pong balls, sharpie, hot glue, 2’ x 2’ x 3.5’

Public Piece

Participatory sculpture

Plywood, ping pong balls, sharpie, hot glue, 3’ x 1’ x 3’

Artist Statement

For my first project, I used ping pong balls to represent rain in my thunderstorm installation. Because I only used 16 out of the 150 balls that came in the pack, I had been wanting to put the rest to use ever since. So I ordered 450 more.

In the beginning of this process, I thought that in order to both effectively bring my alter ego into the real world and make the piece interactive, I would have to illicit and capture anxiety from my viewers. As a result, I decided to make a pair of sculptures, one personal piece made solely by me, where I’ve forced myself to publicize my deepest anxieties, and one collaborative piece made by various CMU students which forced them to face their worst fear.

The first sculpture is my own anxiety tree. It contains my own anxieties, fears, and secrets — about 100 of them — those of the people that are closest to me — about 50 from my family, my best friends, and my peers from this concept studio — and, once the structure started getting too heavy or unstable, support balls — the 100 balls which are labelled sorry, one word that constantly tugs at me from the back of my mind.

This is a physical manifestation of my mind as I live with anxiety. Other people’s anxieties become my own. It grew organically — I didn’t really pay attention to where I was placing the balls, which is representative of how anxiety often works in my mind. It is random. It is consuming. It is complex, and frustrating, and controlling. My structure is very unstable — if it is not positioned correctly, it will fall over. This is what it means to have anxiety alone.

The next part of the project was getting random participants to collaboratively create a structure containing their own fears, those that have nothing to do with me. I stood outside the UC for a few hours during Dance Symposium to do this. I set up a sign that said “What do you fear?”, threw out a bunch of candy on a table, and called people over as they walked by. I started the sculpture at the bottom with a few of my own fears so that people would think others had already participated, but from the fifth ball or so, I let CMU decide how it would grow. If there were times when it became unstable, I did add support balls — but this time, I numbered them instead of using “sorry”. This is to represent the common counting strategy that many people with anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and any other nervous experiences use to calm themselves down — just count until your mind becomes stable again. As a result, this structure is very stable.

With this piece I convey that while it is scary to reveal pieces of ourselves that may not be obvious from the surface, it is important to take that risk because when we come together as a community, we all support each other in our vulnerability and are able to create beautiful connections.