Hi, I’m Phoebe.
Hi, I’m Phoebe.
CODING COLONIES
Medium: Live coding, audiovisual performance, poetry
Tools: Hydra, Ableton
London, United Kingdom, i Fall 2024
‘Coding ‘Colonies’ is a live coding performance that acts as an extension of previous
research, where I examine the internet and media technologies as embodiments of digital
colonialism. Through this framework, modes of extraction, exploitation, and appropriation
between the West and the global South have worked closely with the development of
technology; the age of colonialism has not been erased but merely transformed and codified
through embodied processes and procedures by emerging technologies. This performance then,
aims to highlight the legacy of colonialism across time and (cyber)space, and to shed a light on
how it fixates roles within the tech space across race, class, and gender, defining a ‘digitized’,
‘innovative,’ ‘modern’ West that both subjugates and relies on ‘pre-digital’, ‘technologically
illiterate’, and ‘primitive’ global South.
Performance Video
Tools: Hydra, Ableton
London, United Kingdom, i Fall 2024
‘Coding ‘Colonies’ is a live coding performance that acts as an extension of previous
research, where I examine the internet and media technologies as embodiments of digital
colonialism. Through this framework, modes of extraction, exploitation, and appropriation
between the West and the global South have worked closely with the development of
technology; the age of colonialism has not been erased but merely transformed and codified
through embodied processes and procedures by emerging technologies. This performance then,
aims to highlight the legacy of colonialism across time and (cyber)space, and to shed a light on
how it fixates roles within the tech space across race, class, and gender, defining a ‘digitized’,
‘innovative,’ ‘modern’ West that both subjugates and relies on ‘pre-digital’, ‘technologically
illiterate’, and ‘primitive’ global South.
Performance Video
CIVILIZED BODIES
Medium: Audiovisual installation, sound art
Tools: Python, Stable Diffusion, Ableton
Shanghai, China, Spring 2024
This audiovisual installation investigates Wenming (文明), which translates to ‘civilization,’ ‘civilized,’ or ‘culture,’ as the interplay between identity, ethnicity, and digital space. While Wenming is often found in street signs, propaganda, and policy in the context of constructing a civilization by economic and technological means, I highlight how social media platforms like Kuaishou, through their visual, auditory, and textual icoonography, reft a corporeal dimension of the term, acting as sites for constructing ethnic identity and cultural authenticity. My building of the public restroom, a pinnacle of Wenming in modern urban space, combines a phsyical elements y with re-imagined Kuaishou videos generated through machine learning and a soundscape of layered real Kuaishou audios. Emulating the corpeal vulnerability of using the toilet, the installation aims to show how Wenming moves though on and offline structures of power, oppression, and identity, fixang not “what” is civilized, but “who”.
Full documentation
Tools: Python, Stable Diffusion, Ableton
Shanghai, China, Spring 2024
This audiovisual installation investigates Wenming (文明), which translates to ‘civilization,’ ‘civilized,’ or ‘culture,’ as the interplay between identity, ethnicity, and digital space. While Wenming is often found in street signs, propaganda, and policy in the context of constructing a civilization by economic and technological means, I highlight how social media platforms like Kuaishou, through their visual, auditory, and textual icoonography, reft a corporeal dimension of the term, acting as sites for constructing ethnic identity and cultural authenticity. My building of the public restroom, a pinnacle of Wenming in modern urban space, combines a phsyical elements y with re-imagined Kuaishou videos generated through machine learning and a soundscape of layered real Kuaishou audios. Emulating the corpeal vulnerability of using the toilet, the installation aims to show how Wenming moves though on and offline structures of power, oppression, and identity, fixang not “what” is civilized, but “who”.
Full documentation
MEMORY: FORGETTING HERITAGE, REMEMBERING CHILDHOOD, & IMAGINING NOSTALGIA IN CHINESE ADOPTION
Sometimes, memories come back to me in dreams. Other times, dreams come back to me in memory.
Medium: Installation, C-prints based on fine-tuned image model
Tools: Python, Stable Diffusion
Shanghai, China, Fall 2023
This project is an autobiographical photo essay reflective upon how Chinese adoptees construct memory, recount early childhood, and imagine becoming. I trained an image-generation model on a dataset of my own family photos captured on film during my family’s adoption trip in 2003. I then synthesized new photos that embody the fragmented, broken, and lost memories that arise from adoptees' often turbulent beginnings, rewriting what nostalgia means for me.
Full documentation
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Tools: Python, Stable Diffusion
Shanghai, China, Fall 2023
This project is an autobiographical photo essay reflective upon how Chinese adoptees construct memory, recount early childhood, and imagine becoming. I trained an image-generation model on a dataset of my own family photos captured on film during my family’s adoption trip in 2003. I then synthesized new photos that embody the fragmented, broken, and lost memories that arise from adoptees' often turbulent beginnings, rewriting what nostalgia means for me.
Full documentation
THE SPACE BETWEEN
Medium: Interactive narrrative game
Tools: p5.js
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Fall 2022
Where do I belong if I am in-between two cultures?
This simulative, storytelling game expands on my navigation of multiple cultures as a Chinese adoptee growing up in a Korean-American household. It also draws from fieldwork I conducted within the Shanghai adoptee community in the Fall of 2021. Each chapter presents the user with a simple task, paying homage to iconic game styles of the 90s, while at the same time being a metaphor for one of the many challenges of juggling cultures.
Watch gameplay
Full documentation
Tools: p5.js
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Fall 2022
Where do I belong if I am in-between two cultures?
This simulative, storytelling game expands on my navigation of multiple cultures as a Chinese adoptee growing up in a Korean-American household. It also draws from fieldwork I conducted within the Shanghai adoptee community in the Fall of 2021. Each chapter presents the user with a simple task, paying homage to iconic game styles of the 90s, while at the same time being a metaphor for one of the many challenges of juggling cultures.
Watch gameplay
Full documentation