Stage Magic

The project aims to create a performance of a synthetic sensory experience in the scope of a theater space. The revealing of the backstage mechanism and its bleeding into the front stage is the key agenda of the performance.

At the center of the performance is a machine that metaphorically visualizes the digital simulation process, which acts as the back of house driving mechanism of the performance. The machine generates a turbulence flow of the liquid, vectoring forces for the organic mutations happening in the performance. The machine simulation logic was then enacted on the whole theater space.Varies angles of projections on the established surfaces are generated by the simulation software as image products.

Limit of time is broken within the scene. Seasonal changes of nature are blended with imprints from man-made artifacts. Architectural elements of the hall are distorted in similar ways, revealing a new spatial and theatrical experience that weaves performance and audience into a holistic sensory, revealing the making process of forms.

The simulation process could be understood as the breaking and reorganizing of the entity bonds. This chemical reaction obliviates the recognizable forms of entities, interpreting them as pieces of material samples or form attractors. The resulting organic digital form will have an intrinsic material and form relationships with its physical origin. It offers an alternative to visualize the information, especially under the current roaming of digital asset collections.

The project presents a workflow that could be employed to stage design and multimedia discourses, as an exploration of how machine learning could generate multidimensional sensory experiences that are still anthropocene. It is a performance of both the ending result, and the process of making. The ending result generated from the Houdini logic of forms blending and evolving is a synthetic sensory experience of both frontstage and backstage, a juxtaposition between soft-edges, natural assets and crisp edges of architectural elements, a conversation between 2D projections and 3D structural elements, a sense of orientation with being above, being fronted, being surrounded.