Inspiration
Nullification reenacts the Gleaners by Millet in the light of contemporary society’s ordinary everyday lives of neurodivergent people. This artwork naturally sprung from my long-term moral dissatisfaction and confusion regarding the order in which the neurodiversity awareness movements have been taking. So far, the faces of celebrities who have dyslexia, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, or Tourette syndrome have been utilized and advertised to the public to show the surprising benefits of neurodivergent minds and their commonness around us. Similarly, activist movements have tried to communicate different conceptions and facets of neurodiversity, leaving the side effect of conceptualizing extreme positivity and extreme negativity about neurodivergent people. These complex systems that have cast a net – like a spider web – seem to capture and hold back the very ordinary lives of neurodivergent people. Beyond and beneath all these external forces and influences, however, there is a driving force that moves the very ordinary everyday lives of neurodivergent people, diagnosed or undiagnosed, around us.
What it does
This project lets/makes the user experience the first person perspective of ordinary neurodivergent people living their ordinary every-day lives -- similar to the repeated actions of picking up something from the field, regardless of the external forces acting on their them. The user also gets to hear/listen to the background noise/sound of the voice narrating the colloquial conversations within the online neurodivergent communities.
Nullification reperforms what is happening inside the image of The Gleaners by Millet. Three people, who can be anyone who signed up to be performers, pick up the worms in the soil and put down the worms unto the soil. They repeat these seemingly same actions, yet they still somehow progress. Progress is not fully visible or noticeable, though. The worms make the soil healthy and fertile by making it breathe more easily. Likewise, there have been lives of people who continued on with their lives despite being misunderstood by their centuries. They have slowly made the world a better place for their descendants in near and distant futures, making the location and time more breathable. They have done this with every breath they took until they departed, although the progress of being understood more accurately and accepted welcomingly is invisible through the lens of one life. What is the meaning or significance of the unglamorous or less glamorous lives of many neurodivergent people? Can we finally know the answer if we actively fight against the world through three generations? I want Nullification to be embodying these kinds of questions.
How we built it
- Unity for first person perspective.
- Text-to-speech tech integration to Unity via C#.
- Avatar/character body movement integration/alignment
- many more mistakes...
Challenges we ran into
It was my first time making an actual project using Unity. Integrating the text-to-speech, albeit the fact that I use this tech everyday for my audiobook, into Unity took some time and research. Deciding to leave my team because I felt I wouldn't be able to learn something new by doing the team's project took some life lessons. Doing it solo was challenging but I learned to see the big picture and decide on which part is more critical in demonstrating the concept/project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Embarking on the process of practically/technologically integrating different techs and functions into one experience/perspective. Deciding on my directionality.
What we learned
It was my first time making an actual project using Unity. Integrating the text-to-speech, albeit the fact that I use this tech everyday for my audiobook, into Unity took some time and research. Deciding to leave my team because I felt I wouldn't be able to learn something new by doing the team's project took some life lessons. Doing it solo was challenging but I learned to see the big picture and decide on which part is more critical in demonstrating the concept/project.
What's next for Nullification
Integrating everything in Unity, trying Oculus to see if the VR set would make sense or if the computer screen and mouse cursor would make more sense for the particular experience in the project, and trying the bigger integration for engaging three senses:
Nullification appeals to the three senses by interacting with and engaging the audience from the public through the installation of interactive artwork and open performances. Regarding sight, the The Gleaners actions are happening in real-time by other audience and/or the artist in an open space in Zone 0 (half of the entire installation space) when the audience enters the exhibition space. Regarding tough, the audience has to pick up at least one worm to go from Zone 0 to Zone 1 (the other half of the entire installation space). The worm will move in the audience’s hand, smelling very soil and natural. This artistic choice is made because I want the audience to experience the in-between of the Gleaners – our neurodivergent ancestors – and the physical ground, performing actions of being grounded and ungrounded repeatedly. Half of the worms will be natural alive ones, and the other half will be made with soft robotics. Regarding hearing, in Zone 1, depending on the 2-dimensional coordinate when the audience members step on or cast their shadows on the ground, a Text-To-Speech function will be generated to read the sentences on the online neurodiversity communities in real-time. This speech-and-hearing generation will be unfiltered but rehearsed to see the intention is not distorted or errored. This artistic choice is made to let the audience feel, if they want to, the somatic feeling that they are physically and metaphysically stepping into the present that is always changeable and unpredictable.
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