Except for the present me and my memories, I‘ve never owned anything else. I made an AR pop up book for myself and those who roam around the universe and never think about when or where they would stop.
“Conversation with Myself” is a self-reflection, summary and interpretation of my past experience. This AR pop-up book shows the process of reconciliation between me and my karma from the perspective of time. These connections between the reinterpreted memories will be presented in my linear pop up book, with non-linear AR storytelling technology.
Around ten years ago, after failing an exam at school and crying the whole way back home, I received a book called Conversation with God from my father as a gift. Since then, this book has taught me the importance of experience, feelings and expressions, and has helped me through many difficulties in my life.
Something interesting happened, when I start to look back and think about the experience I had as well as the influence it would bring me someday in the future. If I hadn’t watched the creative art show called “Art Attack” when I was a child, I wouldn’t have grown a seed of art in my young heart. If I hadn’t studied hard and gone through those high pressure moments during the preparation for the college entrance exam in my high school, I wouldn’t have been accepted by my favorite college and been able to study the German language. If I hadn’t happened to join the drama club in college, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to be a part of my favorite immersive theatre “Sleep No More” during my internship and fallen in love with immersive experience design. If my roommate hadn’t complimented my talent for art and design when I worked in a marketing department for a perfume company in Germany and encouraged me to chase my dream, I wouldn’t have gotten the nerve to give up everything I had and gone to NYC on my own to apply for art schools. If all of that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been accepted by Parsons or be working on this project now.
These wonderful connections are like me unconsciously walking on a road that has already been planned for me. My conscious does not know, but my subconscious is constantly leading and pushing me forward through my decisions and actions. So, what if I could talk to my subconscious? What if I could make my subconscious a part of my consciousness? When I’m at the crossroads of life the next time, will I be less irritable and uneasy, and have more calmness and enjoyment? This idea was also inspired by the book “The Road Less Travelled” by Morgan Scott Peck.
For me, having conversation with god means having conversation with my subconsciousness, which also means reconciling with my karma.
So I try to stand at the current time node, look back on the past experience, and stand outside the one-direction timeline to try to understand and express the relationship and connections of each experience. In my work, the story in the pop-up book is told according to the passage of time; each page symbolizes the reproducibility and fragmentation of memories through the form of collage. The AR part hidden in each scene shows the unseen correlation I found when I looked back to those experiences. The AR interspersed breaks the one-direction rule of elapsed time and subtly reveals the karma. For instance, when the viewer scans the “Art Attack” picture inside the TV, they will see a video of me (20 years after that scene) working and studying in the field of art and design. When the viewer scans the diary I wrote during high school and where I complained about the high pressure of that time, they will see the admission letter from my college. When the viewer scans the zoom window of the Parsons online class in the last scene, they will see me talking to myself in front of the real windows at different times in the past.
The mechanism structure of each part of the pop-up book is designed to fully meet the needs of narration and the fun of interaction, just like when I break the limitation of a single direction in time, I also want to break the traditional two-dimensional method in the narrative space by increasing the spatial and sensuous dimension.
This book is just like my life; it will continue developing and changing, making the reader and the author look forward to it at the same time.
