the process
For my capstone project, I was interested in exploring the use of space with media art. My work in the Media Studies program thus far has been purely digital — live-action film, animation, creative coding presented on a 2D screen. I wanted to take the exhibition opportunity to try presenting my work in a new format, and take advantage of the space that I currently have access to by creating an installation piece.
As someone who has completed an English minor where I have developed a strong interest in academic research, I started my project by diving into texts about memory, migration/the diaspora experience, and community. Examples of this are Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings, and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life. I also read a collection of personal writing — such as Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Karen Cheung’s The Impossible City, and Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish — that informed the ways I tell my personal story. The book 香港遺美 (Hong Kong Reminiscence) also served as a visual guide for modelling the stores in my animation.
Eventually, I landed on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Brian Sze-hang Kwok’s Fading Neon Lights as the key guiding texts. Ahmed argues that to be orientated is to turn/be turned towards objects that help us find our way. A path is an example of an orientating object. To take a queer orientation is to move away from the path, and create one’s own path. To Ahmed, this queer orientation does not only apply to queerness in terms of gender and sexuality. To her, migration is also an example of taking a queer orientation. To take a queer orientation is to deliberately choose disorientation, and becoming reoriented by becoming familiar with the new.
Kwok’s text dives into Hong Kong visual culture, specifically neon lights. He points out how in Hong Kong, a city that never sleeps, lights are often used as guides to find one’s way home in the dark. This notion of physical light being central to life in Hong Kong ties well into my metaphorical concept of lights — things that bring joy —that are important to becoming re-oriented to new homes.
trials and tribulations
The process of creating the lights will take you home 隨光尋家 was convoluted. Many iterations of the project were created during the conceptualizing phase. I knew from the start that I wanted to tell the story of migration and the process of finding new homes since I felt like this experience was key to my university journey. However, initially, I wanted to create an immersive room, with animation projected onto all four walls of the room. Due to a lack of space for me to do so, I had to find an alternative way to present the content I had decided on since the beginning.
To maintain the element of immersiveness, I was firm that I wanted it to be ceiling-to-floor projection. Unfortunately, I did not know what space I would be able to get for the final exhibition and thus, I did not know how wide the projection could be. I wanted to do 2D animation since that is the type of animation I prefer, but I decided to create 3D animation for greater flexibility in case I needed to make changes based on the physical space. This meant completely learning Blender from scratch — while I had done simple 3D animation in Autodesk Maya before, I went for Blender since I wanted to use the Grease Pencil functions.
Going with my experience with 2D animation, I started the lights will take you home 隨光尋家 by modeling and texturing all my assets myself. As a result, all the assets for the Hong Kong street scenes were created from scratch. However, as time went on, I felt that it was no longer realistic to model everything myself, so I used copyright-free models for much of the nature scene instead.
Through innumerous hours of learning Blender, lots of trial and error with the animation, and a copious amount of rendering, the lights will take you home 隨光尋家 was created.