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Final Year Thesis: Deconstruction/Reconstruction-Experiential Catalogue of Time Passes

2021

Role


Researcher

Project Brief

This was an open project for my graduation at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It was a system design, investigating the framework of exhibitions and how digitising exhibitions and catalogues would change when a UI/UX point of view comes in to shape the design. Especially on what was important in the exhibition.

You can read the final thesis submitted here.

Here’s the process


I began the process by mapping out what exhibitions meant and what did going through art exhibitions was like, forming various case studies and research. I looked at the exhibition Time Passes, curated by Samantha Yap

The process includes looking at existing forms of digitisation especially during the Covid–19 pandemic.


The above is a sampling of my analysis between the work of Google Arts & Culture and the analysis of the Matterport site.


The full interim presentation for more information can be found here.

Part of process, I also interviewed 3 artists: Meng Joo, Divaagar, Chong Lii, and the curator herself, Samantha Yap.

From here, I broke the exhibition down into 4 components:
  1. Sound (Atmospheric)
  2. Colour (Atmospheric)
  3. Content (the artworks)
  4. Direction

On sound, this was the experience of walking through the exhibition space. I’ve recorded the exhibition’s atmosphere and looked at the sound waves. From there, you get to notice the different sound patterns during a visit to the exhibition.

Colour involved the lighting, artwork colour, and basically how do you see the exhibition visually. 



Content referred to the artworks, wall text, and even the interviews with the curator and artists. 



Direction and the User Experience Journey was interesting. I basically tried to map out the encounter points of the exhibition and artworks and tried to find ways to emulate it. There are some “special events” that are my case study artworks which I’ve placed as part of the overall User Experience Journey. This also include the distance between artworks to artworks and how it allows the user to ruminate on the work, which was a key factor in Samantha’s curation.

This was pertinent to the final build of the site to host the experiential catalogue. Although not before there being some mishaps that happened.

Firstly, I art directed the entire project and research but did not have sufficient coding capabilities. I had initially commissioned someoneone to build a website but it did not materialise and I was left to do it on my own. 


In the end, the web mock-up was done in react.js and hosted locally. It is not the best final product as anticipated, but there is video mock-up involved though!

Next, Chong Lii and Christian Kingo had decided they did not want to be part of case study and it was fine, but Chong Lii’s interview was heartening and it was great to learn why artists were adverse to digitising their artworks.



This was the result of the booth for the presentation of my work. It consists of the sound study, the process and design journey, the colour mapping, the user flow that is mapped on the table, and the iMac hosting the site.



You can read the final thesis submitted and interviews here.