here

2023, with Alina Liu, Jessica Shen, Michelle Wu
-Currently exhibiting on the ITP Floor 
Remember the last time you found a seat on the train and it was warm? Someone was here! I’ve always wondered: Were my friends here? Was I sitting here last week? What were they doing?

This installation intends to reveal people's existence by exposing their traces around a certain object: A bench. Audiences can sit, observe, and interact with it.

“here”, serving as a bench, captures the silhouette of people sitting on it. After an adjustable delay from 1 second to an hour, it plays back the animation on itself with embedded LED matrices.

“here” is designed in an abstract language with limited woodworking resources in mind, not to mention it has to hold up to 140 kg (300 lbs) for people to sit on safely.

Due to the brittle nature of acrylic, square-shaped frames are placed beneath acrylic sheets with nano tapes on top to evenly distribute the pressures being applied.

The final design features double-layer plywood, solid acrylic tubes, and double-stacked 1/4 acrylic sheets.
“here” consists of over 3000 LED pixels (50 meters in length). Such a large number requires a benchtop power supply that can provide up to 60A in 12V. All LED pixels are controlled through a DMX device, where data is sent from MadMapper, a projection/pixel mapping software.

Without any kind of sensor on the bench, “here” in fact, uses a Kinect camera to capture depth images. openFrameworks process (warp, filter, etc) these images and send the processed images to MadMapper.
“here” was exhibitied in the ITP Winter Show 2023.