【中文字幕版】 'Empathy' 交互作品介绍视频 Original

In the interactive work Empathy, I tried to build an environment and imagine the communications between human beings and plants. It is a dialogue of imaginary life. We all know that colors can influence people's emotions and spirit. Indian philosophy believes in Chakra, which they think is humans' central energy and it has a close relationship with color. They derived color therapy, which uses the color energy or light in life to carry out natural therapy on the body and mind, and to give a sense of physical and mental comfort for us to return to a balanced state of health. Plants are more dependent on lights than human beings. If we want to grow some indoor plants, we best project LED lights on them. Plants mainly live on lights of red, blue and purple. What I want to do in my work is to simulate an empathy environment with people and plants. The colors of light that projected on the plants will be changed due to peoples' movement and the sound that we are hearing will also be changed by those plants at the same time. The plants can also influence and interact with each other. It is as if we are hearing their feelings and communications. We know that people cannot really know the feelings of other creatures, but we can use this form to experience and imagine this kind of empathetic emotion. Those experiences are keeping growing. In this work, I used a software patch which was made by Max7 to change the color of lights projected on the plants. When people move under the camera detector, the process will start working. I placed two groups of plants on each side of the table. When the light above one plant has changed, the detector above the other one will catch it and make the other side also start working. There is also an audio setting in this software patch. When the light is changing, the sound will also change randomly. I created several sound pieces for each side. When the whole process is working, each side will play different sound pieces. It makes us feel like the two groups of plant are talking and reacting to each other. During the time I was conceiving this installation, I also thought about other plans, such as using color sensors to react to different colors and trigger the change of sound. I can even make a program which has presets of pitches and tones to let the plants make their own music. Those are some installations more complicated than which I made and I will keep exploring and researching. However, I think no matter what kinds of forms I use for the interaction, the essentials are the same. Although a deepen research can make the atmosphere closer to the environment that we want to simulate, it is still impossible to have the same feeling with plants. The purpose of this interactive work is to make us concentrate on feelings and help us imagine the life of plants and the connection between human beings and other kinds of creatures. Our internal perception is part of the truth.