"Mortal Digits" is the outcome of the Crossing Boundaries 2023 supervised by Professors Shahrokh Yadegari and Victoria Petrovich. Cross Boundaries invites emerging artists and graduate students from UC San Diego's Music, Theatre & Dance, and Visual Arts departments collaborated and collectively create a novel performative experience through the fall and winter quarters.The program opens with one pre-show work and follows seven pieces narrating various perspectives on the connection between humans and machines.
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As a visual artist & creative technologist, I have contributed on several different projects visual design, the event projection setup and built the visual control patch for the large screen display of the entire show. Below are the documentation of the projects I participated:
Inspired by Zendegi (Life), a text by the contemporary Iranian poet Erfan Nazar Ahari, and Silence, a book by a Japanese Catholic author Shūsaku Endō (1923-1996), Gravebirth depicts human life struggles for freedom in resonation with the current "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran.
Contributors:
Kosuke Matsuda, Director;
Elba Emicente Sanchez, Light, Choreography, Co-director;
Di Fang, Performer;
Eugene Vang, Performer;
Nasim Khorassani, Visual Designer, Video Editor, Co-director;
Mingyong Cheng, Visual Designer, Video Editor;
Kevin Schwenkler, Composer, Video Editor;
Janet Sit, Composer;
Timothy Gmeiner, Composer
Natural resources vital to human life are often controlled, restricted, monetized, and exploited for financial gain; corporations rake in profits while framing the resulting ecological disasters as an issue of individual responsibility and broadcasting a sensationalized philanthropic facade - This piece represents the moment when we who perceive ourselves as so powerful and eternal are revealed to be so very small, fragile, and ephemeral; the moment when one realizes that what we think we can cage is immutably free and in fact surrounds, envelopes and engulfs us all and will remain long after we have departed; the futility of our attempts to restrict and control something in far more control of us than we are of it.
Contributors:
Nathaniel Haering - Director, Composer, Performer, Video Editor;
Mingyong Cheng, Visual Artist; Tornike Karchkhadze, Performer;
Nasim Khorassani, Performer;
Kevin Schwenkler, Performer;
Tim Gmeiner, Creative Consultant
Underneath the deepest of pain we often find an even deeper beauty that only exists because of the stakes it was developed under; Our connections to each other and collective memory is what sends us on the search through this pain to experience that beauty. "Do You Smile In Your Dreams?" journeys through a mind with dementia to paint the walls with sound: music and words that poke through the fog and isolation to invite colorful memory and human connectivity. This visual design integrates open-source MRI videos and 3D brain-scanning models with a computational visual system, remapping the scientific data with artistic expression. A.I., viewed as a representation of our collective memory, gathers text-based inspiration and elements to co-create visual elements.
Contributors:
Timothy Gmeiner, Director & Composer;
Mingyong Cheng, Visual Designer, Creative Contributor;
Nathan Haering, Sound-Design & Spatialization;
Padra Crisafulli [they/them] , Creative Consultant
Original Video:
Performance onsite documentation: