(^ It’s actually 50 secs long idk why it shows up as over 2 mins??)
Timestamp
I decided to create a work to (sort of) recollect my experience from 2017 to 2020 when I was staring at my postcard holder that I used to collect all sorts of ephemera and pieces of printed matter over the last few years. I couldn’t recall the exact reason why I started to collect these things but I ended up with this postcard holder being all filled up (and even it weighs a lot, it was one of the first things that I decided to carry along with me when I moved from New York to Pittsburgh this Summer).
I was thinking about how this habit of collecting ephemera tracked the passing time and what I could reflect upon them, so I created this set of four AR sculptures using images from printed tickets I collected as tracking image sites. Each sculpture represents one of the four years and is made up of two parts: a 3D model of a roll of film using photos I’ve taken in that year as texture, covered by an orb with some text I wrote down when I was looking through the photos.
Besides learning about how to do augmented image and image tracking, figuring out how to show transparent background video in Unity was also a great learning experience (although it took a while…). I first recorded my writing in Procreate and then edit out the background with chroma key in Premiere, and finally imported into Unity as video texture with alpha channel. I also embedded sounds in the videos. The sounds are extracted from other videos I took in that year.
I kept the movement of the sculpture pretty minimal and focus on the composition of the scene, including the tickets that I used as trackers. Although the tickets have more specific dates other than the years (and they are actually all from MoMA), I focused on the years only.
As for why MoMA tickets… I actually don’t have a specific reason other than the quantity (ended up having 14 like why) and the quality of the images they used are good for being trackers.