Yifan Liu

Aug 2018

Collaboration with Hanwen Zhang

See details: Documentation

In The Shadow is an AR project created with Unity 3D game engine and Vuforia AR toolkit. It reveals the stories of a few people who suffered from sexual violence or harassment. In this project, I took 4 different scenes where sexual violence / harassment could happen: Office, School, Friend’s Home, Bedroom, and projected images of these scenes in small boxes. I then encouraged the audience to scan these scene images with a smartphone, where the stories would appear. By scanning these scenes one by one, the audience unravel the series of stories in a sequence.

Dec 2017

Collaboration with Chengchao Zhu

Dance! is project that encourages people to dance in front of a screen. It uses Kinect to track body movement and let the movement to trigger interactions on the screen. The visuals also respond to the music beats. Created using P5.js.

For more details see: Documentation

Music: Firework edm by Patrick Ballard on Youtube

May 2018

Collaboration with Yang Yang

No One Wanna See You is an interactive sketch that is intended to let people “disappear” in front of the camera. When a group of people are there at the same time, it eliminates a random person and switch to another every five seconds.

The programming is done in Processing, using a Kinect to detect people and capture their movements.

May 2018

Collaboration with Yang Yang

What if we create an illusion that makes people feel that they can control the time?

It’s Time to Go to Time is an installation for which we use a 360 camera to capture live video around a person who is wearing a VR headset, and then display the video in that VR headset. The person who wears the VR headset is able to control the speed that the live video plays, or pause the video, which gives him an illusion that he is controlling the speed of time passage.

July 2018

Collaboration with Hanwen Zhang

See details: Documentation

Peeking is an experimental interactive video art piece that discusses about nowadays privacy security and the fear people are experiencing due to the feeling of insecure.

Tools & Softwares used:

Arduino Uno & Distance Sensor

MAX MSP

Mad Mapper

WebCam

iPhone x2

Air Beam & Team Viewer (for the purpose of live video streaming)

April 2018

Collaboration with Chengchao Zhu and Danxiaomeng Huang

Reborn is a VR piece that tells a story of an alcoholic leaving his family for some fun outside but falling in a trap, which is a horror scene. While the audience is seduced to walk into the horror scene and then encouraged to escape from it, The story is told through the horror experience as well as the breaking of anticipation. The audience is guided to make choices one after another along the way. “Should I walk towards the beauty?” “Should I take the stairs or the elevator?” “Is this weird room worth exploring?” “Which is the right way?” The audience will find out by themselves. If the audience succeeds in escaping from the horror scene, he/she will be brought back to place where they started. The place that alcoholic lives in will look quite different then. At the end of this piece, the guy decides to go home and starts a new life with different decisions.

July 2018

Collaboration with Hanwen Zhang

See details: Documentation.

Unreflected is an interactive light installation piece that reflects on the confusion that social media bring us.

The entire piece is a big wooden box with a small square hole from which people can peek through. At the square hole there is a mirror box which is also like a tunnel bridging the outside and the inside world. The mirror reflects people’s image while they are some distance away from it. But as they approach the mirror and attempts to look at the inside world (the world of social media), the hidden distance sensor will detect them and therefore trigger the lights in the box. The inside world then becomes visible, however, the reflection on the mirror will disappear (or becomes hard to see, depending on the exterior light condition). If taking a step back, people will see their reflection again as the lights automatically go off.

Questions we are trying to ask through this project include: What shapes our vision? What do we find difficult to get rid of in our sight? If it’s so hard to see ourselves clearly with so much going on, what effort would we make to get our reflections back?

Music: Guitar by Polar Beats - Syndrome

Dec 2017

Collaboration with Aidan Nelson

For more details see:

Documentation 1

Documentation 2

Dec 2016

An installation that discusses how light pollution affects birds migration in the city.

When the users hit the light switches on the wall, they hit the lights in the miniature city. When the lights go on, they will see birds flying away from the bushes, shrubs, and the woods in the urban landscape.

Oct. 2017

Software: Dragonframe, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere

Feb 2018

Collaboration with Chengchao Zhu and dancer Nier Dong

An experimental choreographic interventions demo that integrates a P5.js sketch with choreographic performance, attempting at innovative narratives.

Sep 2018

Stretching Strings is an interactive instrument that is made using stretch sensors as the strings themselves, which allows people to play with the rubber strings and to compose their own sound. As the performer stretch each of the strings to various extent, the sound is generated from the computer, including both synthesized sound and human sound samplers.

Sep 2018

Let Gravity Play is an experiment on interactive music instrument made during the class New Interface for Musical Expression.

See details: Documentation

The idea is to give up some control to the gravity in the music performance and let it play a role in the making of the sound. This is not seen very often in most of the traditional instruments we play today, but I found it interesting to experiment with the “controlled randomness”.