WESLEY CHAU

MFADT Process Blog #MS1 #7in7#IdeasInForm

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Video essay:

Ambiguous Modes of Production / 3min 5sec / 2020 All video, imagery, and audio created by Wesley Chau

About the sound: recording of the 3D printer at work translated into Ableton as a MIDI track. I love how the sound libraries converted this machine sound into a mysterious track with vintage sci-fi film vibes.

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Final 3D-printed paper pulp studies.

Visualizations of imagined world utilizing this ambiguous mode of production.

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Ideas in Form - Digital

Experimented with facial tracker in p5js to create a mouth drawing tool. I was interested in playing with the physicality of the body as a mode of production (as a wasp would construct its hive using raw materials and the mouth).

Try the drawing tool here. Click the screen in the sketch to save the image and press on your keyboard to start a new drawing.

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Ideas in Form - Physical

3D-printed paper pulp test 03

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Ideas in Form - Physical

3D printed paper pulp test 02

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Ideas in Form - Physical

Hand-made paper pulp test 01

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Ideas in Form — Narrative

The Queen

The leader. The superior. The monarch. The architect. The mother. She holds many roles and operates with a holistic mindset. During autumn, she secures a suitable mate (the drone). Fertilization commences. By winter, she seeks shelter and rests. It is during winter when true calm and leisure occurs. Come early spring, the queen scouts for the site. She drafts initial plans and sets intentions for the coming season. Expansion begins. The initial groundwork is laid out and she is ready to birth the offspring. Thirty days later, the first cohort of workers emerge...

The Worker

The worker is vital to the community and contributes to the majority of the population. She is loyal, focused, meticulous, and relentless. In the early days, she sets out to forage raw materials for the project and food for the young. For a majority of her life, she is producing and expanding the project — using her body constantly to convert raw-material into end-product. As she ages, she graduates to the roles of caregiver and defender. Messaging and high-level communication are delivered through the interdependent relationship between the worker and the young. By early fall, the worker is no longer needed and reaches retirement.

The Drone

The drone is supportive, emotional, a romantic. When the drone is young, he supports the workers as they expand, forage, and care. Once he becomes of age and reaches maturity, he embarks on his greatest task: the drone must leave the community and is deployed to find a new queen to mate with. After he matches and mates with a queen, his body and presence is no longer needed. He faces retirement.

The Youth

The youth are the receivers and senders of food and information. They rely on the adult workers and drones to tend to their needs. In return, their bodies produce nutrient-rich byproducts and transfer announcements from the queen via pheromones and chemical-communication.

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Forming Identity (7/7), 2020

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Forming Identity (7/7), 2020

For the last 7in7 project, I was interested in exploring the intersection of two aspects of my identity that have shaped my experiences—queer and Asian identity. This p5js sketch is merely a study to visually/textually investigate accounts of queer+Asian experience. To form an understanding of this duality of identities, I consulted with twenty queer Pan-Asian friends. I asked them to submit a word that comes to mind when they reflect on being queer and being Asian. I was grateful for the results (see the word list in my process documentation). A majority of the participants forwarded one word (some offered more) that encompasses their feelings towards queerness+Asianness. I wanted to create a visual that offered space and reflection for these feelings. 

During the process of receiving words, I was delighted to have deeper conversations with my friends. We would unpack, discuss, reflect on, and connect over the contextual meaning of their word submission. In these conversations, I uncovered extremely widespread feelings and experiences: declarations of pride, feelings of longing for acceptance from the wider LGBTQ community, love, internal conflict, family values/customs, diasporic feelings, etc. As I received more and more dm’s and texts from friends, I found snippets of stories that resonated and aligned with my personal narrative. This project was a means of shedding light on the complexities (and implications) of intersectional identity. Further, it suggests the power of bridging gaps through participation and discussion with others in the community. It gave me a lot of joy and pride to step outside of my work and talk to people. What does the next conceptual iteration of this direction of work look like? I hope to continue these interactions somehow in future work. 

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Molding Body (6/7), 2020

Today’s experiment got weird, fast. Good weird. The kind of weird that makes me uncomfortable yet curious to explore further. I’ve always wanted to try 3D scanning and merge that technology with my background in CAD modelling. I tested a bunch of free 3D scanning apps from the App Store on my phone. The one I found the most success with was Bellus3D. I was able to export the scan as a .OBJ file. From there, I pulled the file into Solidworks and Rhino and investigated the limits/possibilities with my 3D head. The images were rendered in Keyshot.

For molding body, I wanted to created a simple visual depicting a rectangular mold with my suspended head within it. The “head” as sculpture has been investigated by numerous artists throughout history. This archetype can be found in eras as far back as ancient Egypt and the Greco-Roman world. Today’s experiment gives nods to some of my favourite heads in art history including: Marc Quinn’s blood head, Marisol’s Women and Dog, Brâncuși’s Sleeping Muse, and David Altmejd’s heads. The presence of the head has been emphasized more recently in tech with the advent of facial recognition services, biometric data collection, etc.

The final outcome was fun to conceptualize and render. After uploading and downloading my head numerous times and translating it through various softwares, it was interesting to see how the resolution degraded but the overall gesture of my head shape remained. Casting myself within a pristine, transparent solid box within a digital context seems awfully permanent and narcissistic (think: museum heads and busts in glass display cases). On the other hand, it feels very temporal and non-precious, as the image I constructed is made up of pixels, meshes, surfaces, and simulated materials/environments/lighting. Nothing in this image is real. What we see are data entries of a single snapshot (or series of numerous snapshots woven together) of reality. This project made me think about my identity within my work and sense of self when positioned in the broader contexts of design/art/tech.

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Machining Sound (5/7), 2020

I have a confession: I became an undercover DJ during the pandemic. My love for music/sound and upbringing in music training (drums and piano) led me to this fun personal pursuit of exploring the world of DJing and mixing. I bought a used DJ controller, learned how to operate Serato and Rekordbox, even trained with a trial of Ableton Live. I eventually landed a few fun gigs playing for collectives and parties (both online and outdoors at local parks). If you ever feel inclined to have a dance party in your bedroom, put on one of my mixes ;) 

For today’s prompt, machining sound, I wanted to make a sound composition with appliances and tools that required power and contributed to the motions of everyday life. The recording process was crude, simply using my voice memos app on my phone. I uploaded the recordings to Ableton Live and split, consolidated, and repeated clips to craft an orchestra of domestic machinery. The process was rough but very fun to explore. I had aha moments when discovering that certain appliances created sounds that acted as percussion (ie. stove), sustained sound (ie. coffee grinder, dehumidifier, drill, vacuum), and melodic notes (ie. instant pot, rice cooker, microwave). It was fun to assemble this abstract orchestra and organize these tools in a way that forces them to communicate within the same audio context. 

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Drawing Code (4/7), 2020

The words for today: drawing code. Learning to code with p5js this semester has been a journey. I used today’s exercise as a way to visualize, make sense of, and speculate some of the concepts I’ve learned so far in Critical Computation. Similar to yesterday’s project (joining body), drawing code allowed me to represent the unseen and find meaning within the binary nature of code syntax/framework. 

I took inspiration from Dear Data, the drawings of Christine Sun Kim, and Tauba Auerbach’s mathematical art. Creating these drawings was super informative to my understanding of coding. It feels like an alternative visual analogy for a language that I am sort of struggling to grasp. It would be interesting to visualize coding projects that I’ve completed. 

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Joining Body (3/7), 2020

Today’s words were “joining body”. My mind went to the prolific work of physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey and American photographer Eadweard Muybridge from the late 1800′s. Marey often collaborated with Muybridge, recording successive phases of movement on a single plate (aka. Chronotography, the predecessor to cinematography and moving film). I set out to interpret this photographic technique and use my body as a medium for drawing movement. 

The process of this project was very manual in nature. I would definitely employ more efficient techniques in the future. I went to various outdoor sites and recorded myself doing morning stretches/exercises. I then uploaded the video and extracted stills from each exercise. I layered the stills in Photoshop and played with Effects to visually showcase the motion and rhythm of each exercise. 

The outcome was very satisfying! I was thrilled to see the forms and shapes that the captured movement created. It made me think about the space (positive and negative) that our bodies take up as we move through our day-to-day. It made me think of energy input/output, auditing efficiency in physical labour spaces. These photographic outcomes feel sort of antithetical to the works of Marey and Muybridge — video technology didn’t exist back then. My approach to capturing movement relied on video, photo, and digital manipulation whereas Marey and Muybridge captured rapid successive images of motion using multiple cameras.

I’m motivated to explore this more in the future as a means of representing what the human eye can’t perceive. How could the principles of chronophotography be applied to other entities (ie. animals, plants, machines, large groups of people)? 

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Forming Light (2/7), 2020

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Forming Light (2/7), 2020

This prompt was exciting to conceptualize. I thought about the implications of “forming” in a manufacturing context - a process typically applied to sheet metal or other malleable materials. The punch, the die, the pressurization of material. Form, conform, deform. With light, I think about the Sun and the Earth and our ability to perceive wavelengths. Light is energy. Light is material. 

For today’s exercise, I wanted to experiment with p5.js and explore 3D shapes and lighting. The forms I chose suggest the physical setup of a forming press, consisting of the punch, the material, and the die . The viewer moves the mouse over the image to control the direction of the light—the only way to perceive the geometric forms and grasp the spatial relations. 

I wonder how I could expand on this idea in another iteration. Is there potential to deform/conform real light in real space? What other techniques could I employ that bridge the physical side with the digital?

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Joining Nature (1/7), 2020

This week, I’ve been spending time in a cabin in northern Ontario. The cabin is by a small lake, where I’ve been observing the stillness of the water, the changing leaves, the movement of the sun. Whenever I’m by the lake, I often forage a handful of rocks for my collection at home. This habit seemed to lend itself nicely with this first 7in7 brief “joining nature”. This word pairing makes me think about our obsession as humans to design and manipulate nature (think: oystertecture, genetic modification, bio design). When I think of joinery, I go back to my wood and metal studio classes in undergrad. Lap joints, bridal joints, finger joints, dovetails — additional examples of how we manipulate nature and raw materials for our own benefit. How could I simulate this notion of manufactured joinery and combine these hand-picked rocks?