MULTIMEDIA ART
Endless Return
Endless Return is a video art installation exploring the theme of failure through the structure of a fictional video game. The piece follows a lone protagonist preparing for his final battle, an encounter he can never complete. Instead of presenting failure as a simple loss, the work reframes it as a looping and poetic inevitability. The game appears to reset itself, glitch, and repeat, creating the sense that the character is trapped inside a cycle he cannot recognize.
The animation was created through hand drawn frames and digital illustration, then processed in MAX to generate live glitching, distortion, and corrupted transitions. These visual interruptions act as both aesthetic texture and narrative disruption, revealing the instability of the world itself.
Endless Return uses repetition, glitch, and video game language to question what it means to fail, to restart, and to be caught in an infinite loop you cannot escape. This installation was shown at the Bread and Salt Gallery in San Diego.
When You Are Near
“When You Are Near” is a kinetic sculpture that reimagines a houseplant as a form of artificial life, exploring the intersection between human presence, technology, and nature. The artwork uses an HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, a servo motor, and LEDs to let the plant respond directly to viewers who approach it, animating with growing excitement as they draw near. The sculpture’s movements become livelier and its lights pulse like a heartbeat in direct response to a viewer’s proximity. This creates the feeling that the plant is acknowledging and reacting to human presence. When someone approaches, the plant begins to breathe and its light emits a slow, steady heartbeat. As a hand moves closer, both the movement and heartbeat quicken, as if the plant is responding to gentle care, like being watered or having its leaves trimmed. Just as people have projected emotion onto technologies from early Tamagotchis to modern AI chatbots, this piece examines how humans naturally attribute personality and intention to things that respond to us. The fluid swaying motion and rhythmic illumination give the plant a sense of liveliness. Overall, the work invites viewers to reconsider the relationship between natural and artificial life.