Shannon Ha – Looking Outwards 11

Video taken from Nova’s website: https://www.novajiang.com/projects/ideogenetic-machine/

Nova Jiang: Ideogenetic Machine

Nova Jiang is a Chinese installation artist who grew up in New Zealand and is currently based in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in media art from UCLA and has exhibited her work in numerous museums and biennales around the world. Her work encourages tactile and creative engagement between visitors and her artwork. One project that I found particularly interesting was her Ideogenetic Machine, a machine that incorporates portraits of participants captured with a camera and a database of drawings made by Jiang about current news and events. Visitors are prompted to respond to the storyline by adding their own performance and expressions in order to personalize the comic strip. The layout and configuration of images from which new narratives continuously form never repeats. The software also adds blank speech bubbles into the composition which participants can fill with their own dialogue.

What I really admire about this piece, in particular, is that it gives the audience something to take away from the whole experience. Nova allows her art to be used as an ‘open source’ so that everyone can experience it to their own liking and add their own narratives to an incomplete story. This interactive experience not only highlights her own artistic style but also promotes collaboration between people, suggesting that the audience themselves are also artists that hold creative agency in this process of creating.