Analogue Design Skills
In Analogue Design Skills first year students learn foundational analogue techniques while developing their creative process. They learn how to be comfortable at experimenting, drafting, projecting, making mistakes and finding solutions. Students explore observational drawing, collage, painting, printmaking, bookbinding, and pop-ups to design a travelogue about a fictional world that have characteristics and dynamics created by themselves.
Ouyang Wenfei, Environmental Design 2, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Peng Yunling, Visual Communication Design 2, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Ring Jiayi, Environmental Design 2, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Zheng Yuting, Digital Media Art 4, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Hu Xiao, Visual Communication Design 1, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Gas Yiyang, Digital Media Art 1, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Ji Zia, Digital Media Art 3, Analogue Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Fall 2022.
Digital Design Skills
In Digital Design Skills first year students learn foundational digital techniques while developing their creative process. They learn how to be comfortable at experimenting, drafting, projecting, making mistakes and finding solutions. They get familiar to software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Premiere to create digital artifacts: posters, vectorial illustrations, digital drawings, brochures, logotypes, gifts and stop motion animations. Students learn how to combine analogue and digital processes by creating their digital artefacts based on the analogue work that they produced in Analogue Design Skills.
Zhu Xingyun, Visual Communication Design 3, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Cao Xinran, Digital Media Art 1, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Qiongyn Du, Environmental Design 1, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Xu Xinran, Visual Communication Design 3, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Lin Ruixuan, Visual Communication Design 2, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
He Chenyue, Environmental Design 1, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Wang Xiaohan, Digital Media Art 3, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Wang Chuchun, Digital Media Art 3, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Zhao Yingmiao, Digital Media Art 4, Digital Design Skills, ICI, Xiamen University, Spring, 2023.
Fields & Frames
In "Field & Frames" third year Digital Media Art students explore concepts of visibility and invisibility as well as the various ways that things—communities, locations, objects, ideas, and histories—become blurred, obscured, focused, or erased throughout time and space. With lectures and workshops centered around the concepts of collaboration with non-human creatures, feminist art histories, queer worldbuilding, and speculative futures, the unit investigates the role that emergent technologies play in processes of erasure.
Students create their own independent projects that are based on ideas and issues of their choices. Students are allowed to utilize any artistic medium including games, VR, animation, moving images, multi-media installations, interaction design, sculpture, and performance. Many investigate the critical and creative potentials of AI, imagining how to use contemporary technologies to creatively comprehend present difficulties while also rewriting old histories and views. They experiment with creating art for and in response to various settings, thinking about how their individual creations relate to the larger structures and interfaces that they are a part of.
HU Yueyi
Fermentation Musical
HU Yueyi created an interactive installation born of an interest in the process of fermentation, as enacted through the brewing of various beverages. For this work, he brewed multiple bottles of honey wine, using sensors to detect the gas produced during the fermentation process and convert it into unique sounds and visuals. The work drew exciting links between nature, science, art, and technology - presenting the ancient technique of fermentation – which continues to play an important culinary role in our lives today - in a new and dynamic way. Yueyi invited his audience to taste the honey wine, turning a visual installation into a participatory event.
WANG Zinuo
A Cactus’s Gaze
WANG Zinuo created an interactive installation and animation that critically explores the relationship between humans and nature. She transforms a sense of Anthropocentrism, creating her own world in which humans are planted in soil as ornaments, plants walk on the road, and cacti have voices that can express pain. Inspired by a visit to Xiamen’s Botanical Gardens, where she observed graffiti adorning the surfaces of many cacti, her work presents a humorous but important comment on the suffering of nature at the hands of humans. As shown in the video documentation, a real-life cactus invites the audiences to touch it, with the human touch activating a “scream” from the cactus.
LI Muyang
The Nameless Stone
LI Muyang’s multi-channel video installation draws upon the biblical allusion to the Tower of Babel, fictionalizing a “Tower” that has the power to transform language into reality. The work explores the limitations and alienating effects of language, and the possibility of poetic language as a form of resistance. Drawing upon the nature in which our consumer society promotes the consumption of symbols, Muyang argues for a reconstruction of the existing symbolic order. The stone at the centre of this work functions as a metaphor for each individual who plays a role in building the structures of language.
JING Xinyi
ThisIsNotAGame.exe
JING Xinyi’s surreal and psychedelic game environment takes the user through a version of her own mental space. She has created a visually rich landscape with five distinct scenes: Dog Room, Meat Mountain, Uterus Pipe, Dog Maze, and Bottom of the Well. Xinyi created music and a narration that deepens the dreamlike experience, leading the user on a bizarre and humorous journey through the unknown. In Xinyi’s words, “the concept of the game is simple and not simple, because recognizing yourself is difficult”. She has created a mysterious world that invites the user to explore their own imagination.
