This year’s Ars Electronica Festival — Radical Atoms — is from Sep 8 to Sep 12 in Linz, Austria. I felt  very honored to show my work on Campus Exhibition —  Animate Worlds by Tsinghua University.

These are three works on exhibition I participated in: InstaBooth, Metal Life and There’s always somebody who’s nice enough to shoot the souvenir photo …

InstaBooth visualizes a link-up between two cities. Beijing and Linz, two cities that can each look back on a long, rich cultural tradition, teamed up to produce this exhibition. InstaBooth transposes locations on the city maps of Linz and Beijing. Installation visitors can position cubes on both maps; the animated sequences that then appear provide a means of comparing and contrasting the two cities.

We reconfigured Beijing and Linz into one map because we found they have some common features, such as long history, attractive culture background, beautiful lanscape, etc. Even though people in both cities didn’t know each other before. They have different language, different culture and life style. But cities themselves have something in commom, for instance, the distributions and functions of areas, such as shopping centre, residential district, theatre and so forth.

What is life? When a drop of liquid metal can hunt for game, digest its prey and move about, can it be said to be alive?

MetaLife is a series of interactive installations in which liquid metal molluscs are raised. The liquid metal molluscs that inhabit the installation seem to be sentient. When interacting with installation visitors, it exhibits shy, curious or even slightly insolent behavior, and prompts its human interlocutor to give some thought to what life actually is.

Nine emoticons with human facial expressions represent nine classmates. You take out your cell phone, activate the flash and take a snapshot, only to realize that some classmates were making funny faces. Out of curiosity, you take another picture, and lo and behold—now two others are making faces! … So who knows if you’ll ever succeed in taking a perfect souvenir photo?

This is a group work by all my classmates. Facial Expressions like emoji are popular around the world. We want to make it dynamic and alive. More details of this work.