Kevin Chen Artist Talk

Kevin Chen was a very interesting artist that spoke in the Wells Fargo Auditorium on campus.  His main focus of art was generally based around cartography, maps, and population.  In addition to being an artist, he also talked about works that he has helped with being a curator.
One main quote that he mentioned a couple times during his talk about his own work was, "Its not the size, it's the scale."  He practically lived by the meaning of that quote, and that was entirely represented by his work.  A lot of his work was depending on the study of population growth, and where and how rapidly our population will grow to.
One of his works was a time counter of population growth.
He had a few global color scale maps of population density.
His main works that he showed us was his very small fictional city scapes, which were about the size of a penny in height.  His miniature city-scapes included various architectural styles worldwide.  In some of his exhibitions displaying his work, there were magnifying glasses to help the viewers see his cityscapes.  These tiny cityscapes were produced on paper and mounted on aluminum sheets.

Art 451: Video of final game being played in exhibition

Before the exhibition we finished our game.  We had troubles trying to get the trees to change color, so we stayed with the environment that we already had finished.  In addition to that, we created many more sounds, and also added more objects for each of those sounds as well.  During the exhibition, I decided to film one of the visitors playing the game, unfortunately you cannot see the full effect of the room because of our dimming the lights to enhance the projection.  Nonetheless, here it is: 

Art 451: 2 Object Creations

We created two more objects that emit very unique sounds in our game environment.  Here is the first one:

This is a ghost-like tree that has wiggly and moving branches.

Here is the next object we made:  

This object is a rectangular prism shape that has a translucent appearance, but also has a soundwave-like aesthetic on each face of the prism.

Art 451: Object creation

Here is one of the objects we have created to emit these sounds.

This object changes forms rapidly and is very angular.  It creates its own very unique sound.

Art 451: Game Progress

After focusing on structuring the environment of the game, we started collaborating with each other specifically on how are game is going to be designed and function.  Finally we came to the conclusion that our game will be a free-roaming environment with slightly color changing grass.  Considering it's a sound-exploration game, we had to think of just how we were going to utilize sound in the environment we had already constructed.  We came to the decision that we were going to add various objects that look different from each other, and the closer you get to each of these individual objects, they will emit loud and strange sounds.  The sounds the objects emit, will get quieter the further you travel from it, and louder the closer you travel toward it.

Art 451: Progress

We've started focusing a lot more on structuring the environment of the game for the time being.  Here is a photo representing a small portion of the area.