– A selection of my project videos –
SUPERPOWER! is an initiative that enables people to explore their relationship with their cities and complex urban issues through their own subjective perception. Working with UK as well as international communities over several years, designer and artist Ling Tan has developed SUPERPOWER! Toolkit – social, gesture-driven and data-collecting technology and digital platform that enables groups of people and communities to make sense of self-determined issues through devising data experiments that capture participants’ own perception data of their environment including data capture of subtle body gestures (which is important when people don’t want to be conspicuous in public).
Project video of Playing Democracy 2.0, a large-scale multiplayer game of Pong exploring the principles of democracy. Players rewrite the rules of the game to explore its limits and its potential collapse while experimenting with different forms of social structure through play.
Project video of Wild Imaginarium, the primary entrance for Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Designed to showcase life ‘bursting’ out the building, the project integrates interactive elements with public space design and architectural form.
A project trailer of Low Carbon Chinatown, an environmental initiative that combines food, data science and community participation to explore different ways that we can all help respond to the Climate Crisis.
Low Carbon Digital Cookbook Platform is a digital tool used in Low Carbon Chinatown that enables people to learn about the impact of food on the environment, and ways to tackle the climate crisis through cooking.
Taking Root is a collaborative community growing project that explores the relationship that people living in the UK have with bamboo plants as a sustainable material, as a carbon sink, and its role and ours in tackling the climate crisis.
What does Coventry mean to you? How can we change our city through our actions? SUPERMOMENTS was trialed as part of the Random String Festival where the performing participants and the audience explored these questions through an interactive participatory performance using wearable tech. In this version, a group of young local performers and members of the public together embodied and performed the stories told by a group of Coventry residents of their hopes, concerns, and special moments in the city.
Growing Riversiders is a participatory project involving residents from Barking Riverside collaboratively growing a large-scale plant-based installation that represents their collective identity for Barking Riverside. Almost 100 families (Plant Parents) spent 6 weeks growing and nurturing 400 plants in their homes and together, assemble a spectacular community-created image artwork that ‘grows’ and ‘thrives’ for months to come.
Climate Exploration Cookbook is a pilot participatory project that involves working with a diverse group of Chinese participants aged 20-70 years old living in and around Chinatown, London to make sense of issues surrounding climate change through Chinese cooking culture and eating habits. Over a period of 3 weeks, participants discuss and make sense of climate issues while experimenting with cooking low carbon versions of two of their chosen traditional Chinese dishes – Mapo Tofu and Braised Pork Belly.
SUPERMOMENTS is an interactive outdoor performance that uses wearable technology to explore people’s personal agency, empathy, and collective actions towards changing the environment we live in. The project emphasizes the unique and heightened experiences that different and diverse communities have – sharing them with each other while reflecting on people’s own urban experiences and hopes for the future.
Playing Democracy is a giant multiplayer game of Pong, exploring the principles of democracy. Structured as a competitive game of Pong, the audience controls the game paddles using their body movement tracked by a camera. Players can choose to cooperate with each other, modify the rules or violate them, which can cause the game to fall apart.
Pollution Explorers is a participatory project in which people make sense of the quality of air in their environment through their innate subjective perception using wearable technology and air quality sensors, with the aim to harness collective behaviour change to improve air quality.
SUPERGESTURES is a participatory project co-created with young people across Manchester, UK which explores the relationship between a smart city agenda and the impact it has on people’s everyday lives. Commissioned by UK’s first smart city demonstrator, CityVerve, the project uses wearables to help question how much tangible impact smart city technology can have on future generations. The co-creation work culminated in a large-scale outdoor multimedia performance through which people expressed their relationship to the city and their visions for the future with body gestures performed using wearable technology.
Co-Scriptable Bodies is a body of works that explores our personal agency and responsibility as a citizens and as an individual in our complex interactions with our cities. Using wearable technology as an expressive interface, participants co-create body gesture sensing wearables that enable them to actively record their subjective perception of the city through their body gestures and performing them as they walk around various parts of the city using the wearable devices. Past projects ranges from mapping quality of air in Tower Hamlets, London (UK), safety, cultural diversity and wheelchair accessibility in Finsbury Park, London (UK), to perception of safety in Braamfontein, Johannesburg (South Africa).
WearAQ look at how school children could make sense of the complex issue of air pollution and to consider how people might combine their innate subjective perception and intuition with wearable technology and machine learning algorithms to investigate air quality issues.
Fakugesi Social Wearables made use of wearable technology and public engagement workshops to explore how citizens of Johannesburg in South Africa perceive their experience of safety in the city. This project explores what constitute a resilient community where citizens are empowered to contribute to their city.
Transformer is a game of strategy structured as a social experiment in team building where participants engage in a competitive game that involves heightened self-awareness and proprioception mediated through body tracking sensors, visual perception and audio actuators.
Transformer from Umbrellium on Vimeo.
Reality Mediator is a series of experiments designed to question the extent to which human behaviour can be altered with wearable device or technological prostheses during interaction with, and inhabition of the environment.
SEED investigate the limits of human bearability to technological prostheses through a speculative narrative on a future where embedded prosthesis forms a symbiotic relationship with the user’s body, taking on the DNA and characteristics of the user through prolonged period of growth and interaction.
The Norway Experiment was created as a performance-based experimental film, to elaborate upon the notion of the human body’s ability to bear extreme conditions. In this case, the extreme cold and discomfort, through the use of electrical shocks.
