Updated on 2021/01/15
1. Working title.
"Je me souviens"
2. A short statement: try to formulate the entire project in 2-3 meaningful sentences. This may include your current practice and research interests.
My homeland cannot follow my will, and a foreign land cannot remove my sleepiness. Why do people leave their homeland? ——All about Nostalgia.
3. Expand the statement further articulating it with one or two research questions. For instance:
What are you researching?
I want to focus on using virtual reality as the medium to express the feeling of nostalgia. My subject will revolve around myself and the stories I collect from the Strangers (maybe the immigrants, international students, expatriates, etc.). I intend to do a poetic project that uses virtual reality's immersive environment to bring visual and auditory impact on the audience. I hope that the contents of my artwork can resonate with the audience.
At the same time, I would like to explore why people leave their hometown and come to a foreign country. And how the development of the digital world has improved people's Homesickness when they are far from home (this direction seems immense, and I have to think about making my research more specific, I'm also eager to hear from supervisors during the making process.)
What are you exploring in your work?
There are some possibilities that I will explore in my work:
Research
1. Why do people have to leave their homes and then live far away from their homeland?
2. To what extent has modern technology helped people in foreign countries to relieve their Homesickness compared to the world of the past?
3. Can game with ethnic identity content help native ethnic immigrants abroad to construct their sense of ethnic identity?
4. How can immersive technology like virtual reality be used to bring about artworks that resonate strongly with human emotions? How can virtual reality be used to bring the audience into the feelings of the creator?
Technique
1.How to use Unity 3D and C# to create poetic poetical art style.
2.Learning using C# to create the shader graph.
3.Exploring how to realize the art style than Marshmallow Laser Feast made in their artworks. (Figure1)
Figure1
Why are you undertaking this project? The Homesickness is an emotion that every traveller will experience in their journey; this is also the topic that I have interest in for a long time. I was sent to boarding school starting in the fifth grade of my primary school, and I had to take a two-hour bus ride from my home to school every weekend and only go home on weekends. This process continued until I'm enrolled in University: when I left China and begin to study in Canada, since then, I've had even fewer times to go home. Whenever I left home, I felt reluctant and depressed. Although I have been experiencing this separation for almost fifteen years, I never get used to saying goodbye to my family even now. I think there will always be a place in my heart that is lacking. Nevertheless, every time I decide, I still firmly choose to go to the outside world; even though my heart is full of reluctance, I still want to set out to explore the world. Being in a distant country and missing my hometown seems to have become a habit for me. This process has been going on for over a decade. For me, it has taken up half of my life so far and has gradually become a symbol of senses that can recall a series of my homesickness memories. I am always attracted by the people I meet in life who have similar emotions as me, or in this kind of literature and artwork. They could be the boy named Santiago in the novel The Alchemist, or the paintings by Chagall in a foreign country, or an Asian peasantry I met on the street in London who smuggled herself into Europe to work in a restaurant (a conversation with her made me very sad...), or the non-Chinese citizen of Chinese ancestry that I met in Canada who didn't want to admit his Chinese identity, or Canadian who carries on the French bloodline on Quebec soil…and etc. I keep asking myself why people leave their homeland to live in distant places. Actually, the answer is not necessary for me, but this kind of mood is incredibly precious. I once read in a Chinese novel that "every creator has a specific subject that he must create in his life," and for me, my specific subject is
"Homesickness(nostalgia)," which is engraved into my life.
What are the approaches you will take? (for instance: which conceptual or practical positions will you adopt or deploy?) Can you connect your practice and the dissertation/essay project? Explain how they will inform each other.
This is one of my biggest problems at the moment, I seem to be having a hard time finding any concepts or theories that I can combine with the topic and content I have chosen, so I would really like to get some advice from my tutors.
4. Outline the context of the project and the research you are planning.
Every time I left home, I felt like I'm diving into the deep ocean. The Homesickness for my family and the familiar environment have become things on the shore. I must say goodbye to them and then explore in the sea experience the loneliness of the journey. Before I can embark on the road back to the shore, I must face the eyes from the bottom of the sea that examine me and explore in the deep sea.
I will name this project "Je me souviens". I heard this phrase when I was studying abroad in Montreal (the French-speaking region of Canada). It's the official motto of Quebec, the province of Montreal. This motto, translated literally into English, means: "I remember." It may be paraphrased as conveying the meaning: "We do not forget, and will never forget, our ancient lineage, traditions, and memories of all the past." When I saw this short French sentence for the first time, I felt a strong resonance —— a feeling that comes from a sense of longing for my homeland and the understanding of the complex emotions of drifting far away from home. Therefore, I would choose this French sentence as the name of my project.
I will use the Unity 3d game engine to make an immersive VR experience and use a shader graph to create my personal aesthetic style. In the virtual environment, the users will be asked to put on a diving mask and then dive into the sea. They will gradually sink into the sea. They will see many familiar items around them in the process, rising to the land gradually disappear. Until the player sinks to the bottom of the sea, they will meet a plant with big eyes; they need to fight with this plant. After that, they could find a gallery exhibiting the works related to "Nostalgia in foreign land" that I have collected. Then at the end of the gallery, users will eventually be sucked into the torrent of memories. They will feel the collective emotional waves and usher in the climax of this work. Finally, the waves will push them back to the land.
5. Include an initial bibliography, relevant artworks, relevant coding problems.
[1] Sabine Marschall (2015) 'Homesick tourism': memory, identity and (be)longing, Current Issues in Tourism, 18:9, 876-892, DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2014.920773 [2] Akhtar, S. The Immigrant, the Exile, and the Experience of Nostalgia. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 1, 123–130 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023029020496 [3] Bellelli, G., & Amatulli, M. A. C. (1997). Nostalgia, immigration, and collective memory. In J. W. Pennebaker, D. Paez, & B. Rimé (Eds.), Collective memory of political events: Social psychological perspectives (p. 209–220). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. [4] Susan J. Matt, You Can't Go Home Again: Homesickness and Nostalgia in U.S. History, Journal of American History, Volume 94, Issue 2, September 2007, Pages 469–497, https://doi.org/10.2307/25094961 [5] Hiller, H. H. and Franz, T. M. (2004) 'New ties, old ties and lost ties: the use of the internet in the diaspora,' New Media & Society, 6(6), pp. 731–752. DOI: 10.1177/146144804044327. [6] Art style inspired from IN THE EYES OF THE ANIMAL TEASER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJMA0Nj_zsA&t=33s [7] Coelho, P., and Clarke, A., n.d. The Alchemist. [8] "My homeland cannot follow my will, and a foreign country cannot remove my sleepiness."- My little airport
6. Description of written element: Will you follow the dissertation or portfolio route? Can you roughly indicate how your argument will be structured? or the topic of each specific essay?
I'm willing to follow the dissertation route, but I'm not sure if it's the right way for me, as I'd like to use this opportunity to submit a paper.
7. What results/output are you planning for your project? What will you produce? How will you present it and document it? (A performance, script, intervention, website, exhibition, book, journal?)
I want to eventually produce a VR application, then record it and editing a video, then display it on my personal website. In the meantime, I hope to write a paper that I can submit.
8. Timeline for the realization of the project. Try to plan a working schedule for undertaking your project and writing your essay (this too will evolve, but it is useful to have a trace to follow). January
1.19-1.26 Painting the scenario design in SAI. Build Unity scenes.
1.26-1.31 Collect the works of other peoples related to the topic of Homesickness. Research the films/books/artworks. Preparing the exhibition in February.
February
2.1-2.8 Learning the shader graph, make the visual effects. Modelling the items. Finish the contents of the first scene.
2.9-2.15 Celebrating Chinese New Year!
2.16-2.22 Research how to realize the visual effect that Marshmallow Laser Feast made.
2.23-2.28 Develop the method "walk in place" of navigation to simulate the feeling of swimming.
March
3.1-3.7 Finish the design of Gallery. Design the UI items.
3.8-3.14 Make the feeling more immersive, evaluate the VR contents with the form of "sense of presence"
3.15-3.21 Finish all the VR contents design.
3.22-3.28 Start to draft the dissertation. Motivation/Background.
3.28-3.31 Research method(Qualitative)/ Implementation
April
4.1-4.8 Experiment (???) / Results
4.9-4.15 Conclusion
4.16-4.23 Polish my dissertation.
4.24-4.30 Submit?
Comments