Johnny Zhou

My artwork reveals how technological innovation could alter our perception of space. Technology has blurred the traditional-defined boundaries of space, private or public, small or big, and that influences our way of perception of space regardless of whether its inherent attributes may or may not change. I choose to work with a broad range of mediums: physical installations, animations, virtual space designs, and web projects, allowing me to pick the most suitable one, and that determines how the work is interpreted and its relationship with the audience.

 

My work invites users to reflect on how technology reshapes our relationship with these spaces. In each project, the interaction is uniquely designed to match different senses, including visual, verbal, motional, and sentimental. Regardless of the medium choice, they all invite the viewer to feel the space in a way deviant from the normal practice, providing an experimental chance to challenge one’s perceptions, perspectives, and assumptions.

 

Interested in the invisible components within space, I built artistic physical installations inviting the audience to experience the materialization of spoken communication and, in addition, contemplate its effects on public physical space and collective memory, as well as navigation and comprehension of its archives. Gradually, I realized space’s functionality as a medium and my focus shifted from the inherent attributes of space to the relationship between the audience and space. I designed meditation visualization spaces augmented with aesthetically beautiful visual patterns and reassuring music to help the audience to embrace the intangible daily pressure as part of their lives to improve their mental wellness. Other than those intangible aspects, through the recreation of tangible forms of interaction, such as motion, and facial recognition, our experiences within the space can also be changed. I implemented the methodology of design thinking and the ideology of human-centered design to build interactive 3D hologram maps to address the difficulty of navigation through similar configurations on different floors in an unfamiliar environment, altering people’s perception of physical spaces through their virtual representation.

 

Beyond the perception of space, computational technology, and the way we interact with it permeate and reshape every aspect of our ordinary lives. From a bigger picture, art and technology have and will remain unpredictable sources of imagination, allowing endless possibilities of how we perceive the world outside of the conventional education system’s boundaries. It doesn't rush new and wacky ideas into people’s heads like a raging river, but it does affect the public like a trickle, and maybe someday a spray will be the spark of change, completely overturning our relationship with the world just as Bauhaus’s success in combining distinct artistic vision with utility-focused mass production methods.