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a multisensory designer @ los angeles
grad term 4
creative tech
spring 2025
Touchdesigner
deliverables
poetry zine
interactive installation
Set in Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco Park, this is a sensory reflection on bodies, memory, and the traces we leave—both human and nonhuman. The project consists of a gestural interaction prototype built in TouchDesigner using 3D scans of the park, and a zine of poems exploring nonlinear time.
Through the digital interface, users “speak” to a reconstructed landscape not with words, but with gestures—raising the question: can technology truly understand our embodied intentions? What might it mean for emotion to be expressed in nonverbal ways, and how might a virtual space respond?
In the end, this project became a way to think about how people and places remember each other—and how even the emptiest-looking spaces are full of traces, if you learn how to look (or move) differently.
project title
zine for poems
3d scaning collection
interactive progress
final presenting
(missing...not record yet)
context
It's just a historically significant and natural area where people just come to walk and relax. After my online research I found some interesting angles: people never stop planning, imagining and using this place. Some things never happened, some are just legends, and some don't happen within people's view. But it all relates to the name and place Arroyo, giving me a sense of overlap. None of this can be described by a linear trajectory or physically touched by people. At the same time, most interactive systems see the body as a tool for optimizing control. But in life experience, our gestures are often messy, expressive, and full of emotion. So I thought of using digital space to re-express our relationship with it.
focusing problem
- What are we missing when we reduce gesture to input?
- Can an interface understand the emotional weight of a gesture?
- Can movement itself become a language for navigating memory and space?
article 01
article 02
precedents
- Lauren Lee McCarthy – LAUREN
- Memo Akten – Learning to See