Author: Hubert Chang

While I’m not super into theater and that entire world, I remember Ben mentioned that FFV uses trackers on the actors to influence the backdrop. I think that’s a really cool feature that can be implemented in more than just theater. Perhaps it could be used in sports like football for more explosive effects? I think I’ve seen something like this being implemented into a basketball court so who knows where this tech might show up next.

When it came to their immersive experiences, I really would have loved to see the Da VInci one, I believe it was called the Genius Immersive Experience, in person. I think the concept itself was really interesting but the execution looked like a good experience even through photos.

I found it pretty interesting that a partial measure of success for the team was that kids enjoyed the exhibition and left happily. I think that’s really important to me because I was a really bored kid all the time. Nothing my parents took me to would make me give the slightest bit of my attention. To hear kids enjoy this pretty cool thing without completely comprehending it must mean a lot.

I really applaud the studio’s ventures into their original IPs like Utopian Garden. I think their original works don’t lose to their stage performances and brandings at all from what they’ve shown. 

It was overall a pretty good studio visit, I think Ben did a good job presenting everything to us even though he wasn’t the original and intended guide.

“Interactive Media is about what you put into it.” -some guy

I can’t remember which exact “some guy” told me this, but I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s incredibly easy for me to match the criteria for most interactive media assignments, but what if I was told to focus on the creative process instead?

Now I wasn’t completely sure what I might learn from Professor Aaron when I sat down on my first day of class. “Creating? Yeah pretty sure I know how to do that” is what I would’ve said if I was narrow-minded, but I kept open-minded and read all the given material (very rare for me to do) and took everything thrown at me seriously.

When Professor Aaron first told the class to focus on the creative process without worrying about making the final product high quality, it was like an input error that caused my system to malfunction. Making high quality stuff and showing it was the most entertaining part to me. However, I realized through our various readings and many making projects that what I actually care about is sharing the creative process that entertained me. 

I’ve come to discover that as long as I’m entertained by what I’m doing, things just turn out magically well anyway! I’m not going to say “oh my jeebies this class reminded me of how much I love making things” because making things is literally my career choice, but this class did facilitate me to have dedicated assignments where the result doesn’t matter. The classroom gave me a space to just design various funky things like mazes or browser game UIs. As I strived to have fun during the process and reflected on our readings, I felt my creative potential increase. The upgrade wasn’t a significant margin because a lot of the readings, especially Art & Fear and Flow, introduced many things I was already consciously aware about from other sources (that likely got it from these books), but I’ve greatly embraced the seemingly counterintuitive value of setting restrictions of creativity to actually ideate better. That’s one of my favorite takeaways from the class.

But beyond the classroom was another thing I frequently asked myself: whether being in Berlin made a difference in this J-Term class. Afterall, Professor Aaron is an IM professor at NYUAD and I wasn’t exposed to many non-NYUAD students outside of the orientation. So, why was this J-Term chapter of my Summer set in Berlin? 

Was it the guests that visited us? I think obviously these guests were specifically chosen because we’re in Berlin but that felt like too straightforward and unsatisfying of an answer for me.

So then I asked whether there was something in general that I could only acquire here in Berlin? To answer that question, I used a little bit of lateral thinking we learned in class and asked myself the same question for Abu Dhabi. Sure, there are courses or opportunities I could only find in NYU Abu Dhabi or even NYU New York, but was that really it? Was the answer still something so shallow and unromantic?

Well, the conclusion I’d like to believe was that Berlin as a whole is significant. Berlin isn’t just the roasted pork knuckle I get at Maximillian’s, it isn’t just the guests that have visited our classroom, and it certainly isn’t just the change of ceiling I look at when I wake up in the morning. I’ve listened to a vulgar German bartender tell me how he feels about minorities in his country before letting me pay for my beer. I’ve taken photographs of all the beautiful streets but also all the plain ones. I’ve bought skateboard parts from all over the city to get a glimpse of the skater culture.

Everything here was a learning experience, from the weird to the funky. 

This is especially important to me as an artist, designer, and storywriter because my passion is to depict things. If I can’t experience these things first hand then I’d never be able to depict things meaningfully and tastefully. 

Berlin will have an impact on my work, just as any other place I’ve lived. Even though my Google Calendar tells me class is from 1:30pm to 4:30pm, that’s just the time I sit in Professor Aaron’s classroom. Every (waking) moment here in the city of Berlin is class for me.

I believe I may have mentioned this briefly in another blog post, but I actually wanted to be a biologist and engineer before I became an IM major. Biomimicry was and still is one of my favorite topics to talk about, and I really liked how Marco references nature so frequently and prominently in his work. It’s consistently very interesting to see how he got the ideas for what he makes.

I really enjoyed his project on the fungal network, simply titled fungi. I didn’t know a leading theory of plants on land was because of fungi. That would be pretty interesting if it was true. Either way, the fact that different characteristics of data affect how the sound comes out the speaker was really cool. The biodiversity value doesn’t directly affect the sound but shakes the speaker so it condenses the sound, that’s pretty neat. It lets the viewer see exactly why the speaker might be shaking intensely as long as they know what data affects what.

One more thing I found humorous was the fact that Marco likes monkeys but is scared of them. I find that pretty relatable because monkeys are honestly pretty lawless animals if you’ve seen one.

I really wish I was in a better physical state today to fully take in what Marco’s work had to offer. I hope the studio visit tomorrow is just as interesting as what we’ve seen so far.

My first impression of Robert Seidel’s work in the first video was that it reminded me of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The ink technique was really reminiscent of the way landscapes would be depicted on these rough paper scrolls. I always really liked that style of painting so Robert Seidel’s initial works resonated with me there.

The second video he showed us made me feel like I was watching the intro sequence to an action thriller movie of the mid 2000s. This felt like something I would see from Sam Raimi when he directed the Spider-Man films in the early 2000s.

A lot of scenes made me feel like I was watching a microscope view of an amoeba or microorganism. It was pretty eerie but all the movements on screen felt really natural and mesmerizing. It was nice.

There was one thing in Robert’s long presentation of various works that really caught my eye: the projection onto the direct physical environment. I think it looks really fantastical when placed on that building in Seoul he showcased.

Robert mentioned something along the lines of “not adding to the noise of the city but calming it down. I think this only works if it’s in a big city where there’s a lot of monotonous lights like Seoul though. The colored projections on a building in Seoul didn’t feel like “noise” because it was like the accent color of a tame color palette. The projections on the smaller buildings he showed on the other hand made his projections look like someone changed their color palette too late into the painting process and overdid the tertiary and accent colors.

Just the other day, I borrowed a basketball from the security guard and walked over to the nearby park. Shooting hoops helps get my mind off things so it made me feel very relaxed, much more than I was before I borrowed the ball.

For some reason, I was just unable to miss for a good few minutes and I felt like I was tapping into flow state while playing sports for the first time in a while. This nearby Arab kid came over and asked me something in German, which I politely but awkwardly responded with “English?”

This kid thought about it and conjured up “one v one?” I didn’t really want to do anything more than move my arms at the time so I asked him if he wanted to play some HORSE. He didn’t understand what I meant so I just pseudo sign-language communicated my way into taking turns shooting.

All was good and I felt pretty relaxed balling with this random kiddo until this German kid and her friend kicked a football way off mark. Before I could really process the situation, my body acted on its own to intercept the ball. I somehow intercepted the ball midair with my weak foot, was able to control it perfectly, and sent it back right back to where the kids were on the field.

I was genuinely surprised how smoothly I pulled that off. It was like since the situation dictated someone to save the ball from bouncing over the short fence and into the traffic, I was instinctually able to control a football. That definitely gave me some rep boost at the local playground, but it really showed how flow state pushes me to do things I didn’t know I could do when I need to show off in front of a bunch of grade schoolers.

This made me think back to a chapter of a manga called Blue Lock I read a couple months ago. Ego, essentially the coach of the players, basically says they’re all at their physical limits, so the only difference that’s left is being in “flow” state. Ego shows this exact diagram they show on page 74 that’s still in my head today.

This literally reflects what happened at the playground that day. I had skills much higher than the challenges demanded of me so I was relaxed but admittedly bored (A2). Then a challenge appears, to intercept the ball that’s closest to my weak foot rapidly approaching my direction while bouncing on uneven terrain. That moment, my skills were barely just in range for the challenge posed to me, thus I was able to visit the flow channel (A4).

It’s not that flow is an unfamiliar feeling or concept to me, but it truly does surprise me when my body is able to do something I wasn’t able to visualize in my own head before it happened. I was also really surprised to see the concept of the “invisible hand” be brought up on the topic of flow. As an econ student back in high school, I’m all too familiar with the invisible hand and yet I never realized how well it applies to this flow state when you visualize it using this exact flow chart.

And no, I didn’t get a standing ovation from the kids for stopping their ball. They just said a timid “danke” and continued kicking the football.

“But for most art, there is no client, and in making it you lay bare a truth you perhaps never anticipated: that by your very contact with what you love, you have exposed yourself to the world. How could you not take criticism of that work personally?”

In this generative AI uprising we’re experiencing, it’s become more clear to me than ever what the human element of art is. Human art has soul while generative AI art is soulless. Why is that? 

It is my deep belief that whatever an artist puts onto the canvas is a reflection of themselves. Of course our art is not literally a reflection of our physical appearance but one of our passions and interests. 

I like art styles with sketchy lines over clean and beautiful lines. It’s both what I gravitate towards but also what I convey when I put brush to paper because it reflects the chaotic nature of my mind. Obviously, the topic of what you’re drawing(or lack thereof) is also a big reflection of your mind. I like drawing stylish streetwear on my characters because I love streetwear myself. 

Others like to draw their characters smoking because they have a thing for cigarettes. Some others might like posing their characters very heroically because maybe they like Star Wars movies and their respective movie posters.

This ties it back to what brought up this topic in the first place. A critique on a personal work is essentially a critique on a person. Some people take critique on their work better than they take critique on their personality/interests and some others versa, but a critique on a personal work might feel like a critique on both one’s work and the person’s interests.

Another thing the book mentions I want to talk about is the topic of “acceptance versus approval” in art. 

“Acceptance means having your work counted as the real thing; approval means having people like it.”

I personally don’t share anything I work on online publicly because as much as I want to say hearing critique doesn’t affect me, it kinda does. I feel like this section is a part of the artist experience I won’t fully be able to understand quite yet. Maybe some time in the future.

Randomly Generated Words:

draw & oven

So when I saw the word draw and the word oven together, I actually interpreted the word draw as the verb for extracting an object from a container. The reason why I thought of this was because I was thinking about school festivals back in high school. They’re a pretty common event for schools to have in Taiwan and a very frequently used attraction is a raffle box (抽獎箱). 

抽, the first character in Chinese for “raffle box”, means “draw”, and the third character, 箱, means box. The direct translation of the raffle box character-for-character is “draw-prize-box.” 

The Chinese word for oven is 烤箱. The second character(箱) is the same as the third character in “raffle box” (抽獎箱). The direct translation for oven would be “bake-box.”

So from this connection, I came up with an idea for a raffle box. The idea is that I would combine the raffle box with an oven, using the heat of an oven as a challenge/anti-time wasting measure. 

A lot of people in these festivals tend to put their hand in the box and swirl it around for way too long, so the heat will make them quickly reach in and quickly take it out. (I am not liable for whoever decides to actualize this oven raffle box and accidentally burn children’s hands in a festival.) 

First, I made a design for an oven based on a Google search of an oven. I did it on Canva because I couldn’t be bothered to open Illustrator. Don’t tell my design professor.

Next, I incorporated the raffle box aspects onto the oven. I added a hole on the top of the oven and added some raffle balls on the side to help sell the idea so the viewer can tell what it is even if they can’t read the Chinese on the display. I also moved the buttons to the side of the display to fill up the negative space.

This is a small breakdown and explanation of each part.

Now that I’m writing this, what material do I make the raffle balls so they don’t start melting inside the oven? If I use plastic it’s going to melt and if I use metal it’ll be too hot to touch even with gloves on. Maybe ceramic balls? I’m not sure.

Either way, I hope everything here made sense to read and I explained the Chinese characters sufficiently.

“When you act out of fear, your fears come true.”

I think the state of our technology and our ease of access to it has unfortunately deterred much of my generation from pursuing something they love deep down.

For example, the amount of gorgeous illustrations you can find on my Twitter feed is insane. I think a lot of people look at art like that and lose their morale. They tell themselves that they’ll never be able to create something like that, and that’s exactly what happens.

This wouldn’t happen nearly as much just a few decades ago. Even if 50% of the world are skilled artists than yourself, it would never possibly kill your morale because you wouldn’t be exposed to it if not for the modern internet. To the untrained mind, looking at good art can be extremely unmotivating, and it doesn’t matter if it’s visual arts, audio arts, or any form of creative work. It just sucks when you see millions of people better than you. 

“While you may feel like you’re pretending to be an artist, there’s no way to pretend you’re making art.”

I wish this book came to me one or two years ago when I needed to hear it. I feel like a lot of takeaways from this book feel like a repeat of what one of my favorite YouTubers, Marc Brunet says. There’s a good chance he’s probably read Art & Fear before as an art instructor but I think I prefer the way he presents it to me humorously through a YouTube video. 

It’s kinda weird to read this book because a lot of this mindset they preach has already been drilled into me in some other shape or form elsewhere. However, I like the section on “Magic.” This was a pretty interesting section because of what the author mentions about flukes and omens.

If you did good, it’s nothing but a fluke.

If you mess up, it’s an omen.

“Buying into magic leaves you feeling less capable each time another artist’s qualities are praised.” 

I think the only thing one can do for themselves when they see art that blows their mind is to not idolize it and see it as magic. Once someone genuinely believes it’s magic then they’ve removed themselves from any responsibility to work harder.  At least that’s my reading of this chapter.

Today’s FIELD trip was pretty fun.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect after looking at their website yesterday, but I wish they gave us more details on their exact creative process. I guess I wanted specific things I could try and mimic on an individual scale.

I was very happy with their response to Jackie’s question regarding using generative AI. Since this was a passionate topic for me, I was a little skeptical when they introduced their studio with generative AI being the first in their list of things they specialize on, but I suspended my judgment and I’m very glad I did.

They basically agree with the stance I’ve also taken regarding embracing the technology. The tech is definitely not going away so we should embrace it and use it as ethically as we can. I appreciate their sentiment with using it to do what was truly previously impossible before.

I think a lot of AI bros act like making a quality illustration was impossible before, which is complete BS because they literally just don’t know how to. Field can do the work they’re using AI for, just not to the scale in which they expect a big impact like that one project in Euston station in the UK.

All in all, I really liked all the projects they showed but wished they would go deeper into the technical aspects of their work.