EMBACLE


Composition, 3’
2023

A sound montage generated from a Sonic Pi script, experimenting with granular synthesis and a Markov decision process, featuring samples from winter snow and rivers in New England. Inspired by Horacio Vaggione, Japanoise, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria.











Render


Frame-by-frame animation, 1’42”
2021



This frame-by-frame animation deconstructs the mediatic process of architectural rendering, a common practice to present a convincing design by making it look “real” and hiding the digital artifacts. Realness fabricated this way is a hybrid of subjectiveness and excessive control. Taking inspiration from Harun Farocki and Stan Brakhage, it distances the spectators by exposing the interfaces of the modeling, rendering and post-processing applications. In addition, a flow-based difference-of-Gaussians filter (fDoG) was applied to abstract the image and enhance the defamiliarization. The project seeks to question the definition and formation of the “real” by exploiting the rendering algorithms aesthetically and technically.  


GitHub













exhibition poster



alluvial


Single-channel videos, mixed media
Thesis Exhibition in Visual Arts
Advisors: Kenneth Tam, Pam Lins
2020

Recipient of The Lucas Award in Visual Arts, 2020
Supported by The E. Ennals Berl 1912 and Charles Waggaman Berl 1917 Senior Thesis Award in Visual Arts, 2019




alluvial is a show about the time and space between our memories and the actual past, as well as in between the projector and the screen. In this interim time and space, light transforms from an intangible material to an image carrying legible information; it is the same process specific to digital time-based media that conditions our memories, identification with the past and connections with the world. Like water, the camera and the projector generate (non)time and (non)space where memories and time are eroded and deposited, corrupted and preserved.

Originally conceived to be installed in a gallery, the majority of the installations were installed and documented in a college dorm room due to covid-19. The poster, which was installed and exhibited in a group exhibition in February 2020, was the only piece spatialized in a physical gallery.



Virtual Exhibition
Event Page
















Through the Meadow Lens

Single-channel video, 5’54”
Part of the video installation “Liquid Landscapes” featured in the 12th Architecture Biennale of Sao Paulo
2019



The film is an audiovisual montage of the birds, bird watchers and other visitors in DeKorte Park in Lyndhurst, NJ. While the site - tidal marshes at downstream Hackensack - was heavily polluted by adjacent landfills, it is now a popular destination of waterside recreation and bird watching. The film brings together the perspective of migratory birds and the documenting lens of the bird watchers to present the many unofficial accounts of the meadowlands being threatened by pollution and sea level rise.








Princeton Environmental Institute Symposium Presentation














Realistic Games For Those Who Feel Lonely

Narrative Film, 34’39”
Role: cinematographer
2018



Realistic Games For Those Who Feel Lonely is a short film about fantasies, nightmares, and people who get lost in them. I collaborated with the writer and director, Nicholas Judt, and worked on the storyboard and cinematography.

Watch on Vimeo










©  2024 | Yunzi Shi