Bridge Made of Ashes

This is a short film made as a meditation and reflection of grief and personal loss during a global pandemic. It looks at how we learn to cope with death, with the loss of family, and loved ones in a situation of social distancing, increased anxiety and digitally mediated mechanisms for grieving.

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吃吃吃播播播（eat-broadcast-erase)

A new kind of Mukbang/Chi Bo 吃播/ Eating ASMR.

A GAN was trained on 43 different Korean Mukbang and Chinese Chi-bo eating videos to recreate new visions of humans eating large amounts of food.

In August 2020, after a large increase in food prices in China, the PRC govt banned live broadcasts of excessive eating. The crackdown on binge eating is part of a wider campaign against food waste, started as “Operation Empty Plate” (光盘行动)

Since the live braodcasts have stopped in China, I've decided to train a GAN to continue its legacy for me as an empty shell.
Machine ASMR

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Carrots

I recorded the sounds of myself eating at different points during the 2020 pandemic lockdown period. These sounds were then trained with a recurrent neural network to use machine learning to generate more sounds of me eating. human biological machine and biosurveillance machine eating asmr as window into lockdown anxiety. Eating as closeness and sharing erased by caution and social distancing.
Machine ASMR, artificial carrot symphony

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Audio-Visual/ Sound and Moving Image

Collection of various work related to audio-visual, music video, sound and moving image

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Blue Marbles(And Other Spherical Objects)

A meditation on modern surveillance, rare earth materials, labor, and shifting landscapes in an age of surveillance capitalism. It looks at the seemingly "mundane" aspects of watching, being watched, and data collection. Blue Marbles repurposes the symbols of modern surveillance branding from Chinese surveillance hardware infomercials/tropes into a reflection on the complex nature of surveillance metadata and hardware.

Exhibited as part of XCOAX 2021, here's a link to a more detailed write up about the project

Blue Marbles at XCOAX2021

Emerald Teeth

T. Gowdy & Kai-Luen Liang | "Emerald Teeth" from Constellation Records on Vimeo.

“Emerald Teeth” short film/ music video Corona Borealis Longplay Singles Series Constellation 2020 Video by Kai Luen Liang Music by T. Gowdy

An étude on the sculpturality of resilience. Timbres are squeezed together in a small suction filled compression chamber to produce a warped temporal mould, highlighting the role of pressure as a shaping element. Zooming out to see larger circumstantial compression chambers forming curves in the broader structures of social organization. Across the various permutations of scale, resilience is an engraving in time.

Flag ASMR

1) 5 channel Sound Composition/Installation:

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Duration: 10 mins 20 seconds.
Wooden Box textured by strips of the American Flag (manufactured by Anley, Made in China), miniature tabletop flag attached to subwoofer.--------

"What is the sound of a silent memory? The sound of it being touched, taken apart, and reordered."

On Sept 11th, 2001 I watched the twin towers falling with my father. Glued to the TV. A silent demolition. An American reality TV show. In the weeks that followed, I started to see American flags everywhere. Especially from immigrants of all colors, flying the flag out of a sense of fear of appearing to be on the wrong side.

The sound of the twin towers falling in my memory is silent. Filmed from far away. As the second plane hit, there was no sound on TV. I heard the sound via the sound of my own heart beating and the breath of the newscaster trying to be as professional as possible as they had to report a major catastrophe in real time, live in front of the world.

Flag ASMR is the attempt to recall a memory. An attempt to close a schism caused by a fear of the lines people cross and the fears of uncertainty, harm, and danger. What is the sound of a silent memory? The sound of it being touched, taken apart, and reordered. I recorded the sounds like an ASMR video. The sound of me “interacting” with the flag. The flag became an object that was activated by other objects. Hands, scissors, the brush.

By the end, as I was listening back to the sounds I recorded, the sound of the flag didn’t seem calming at all, but rather to take on characteristics of the memory itself. The imagined sound of the twin towers falling. The high frequencies of the paint brush against the flag started to sound like bodies of water, the New Jersey Waterfront looking towards Manhattan. And from that, I decided to extend that narrative and my memory with sound.

2) 3 channel ASMR Video.(compressed here as single channel)