Sijia Li
Impersonator
Environment Art, Real-time Interact, Emotional, Aesthetics, Surrealism, Dream, Digital Game
As the technical capabilities of real-time computer graphics and the immersive qualities of game engine design continue to evolve, game spaces are increasingly becoming prominent environments for reflecting on the complex entanglements of politics, ecology, technology, and identity. This thesis aims to curate a customizable emotional experience through the manipulation of multiple architectural spaces inside an interactive game environment. Illusory architectures are a powerful and invaluable medium for imagining, prototyping, and giving language and agency to a dizzying array of possible futures. Mainly by using Real-time technology and its potential for creating flexible and adaptable environments, this thesis engages with ever-evolving spatial sequences in real-time, as opposed to static images. Gaming technology is used to dynamically transform space to create continually changing emotional experiences and reactions as you move throughout the thesis. Real-time technology can enable users to create interactive spaces that change in response to their user's actions or emotions.
For many artists, video games are ideal for addressing the complex entanglements of current discursive world-building practices, exploring the rich intersection of architecture, technology, and ecology. The architectural world is designed through a hierarchy of representations, rules, and events that resonate most with the generation of play. The increasing accessibility of game engines such as Unity and Unreal, and their ever-increasing rendering quality, facilitates the production of holistic environments, or illusory architectures, for prototyping and critiquing the many possible futures as they unfold in real-time. The future unfolds in real-time as it is prototyped and critiqued. Video games present fantastical environments because they are entertainment media designed to draw players into imagined novel systems. In doing so, however, they re-establish the importance of utopian, integrated world-building practices. As a medium, they also provide architects with a platform to extend such practices into the future. This project uses Unreal Engine 5 as a platform to explore how Blueprint affects people's exploration and interaction experience in the virtual world in the form of digital.
Impersonator continuously combines both unrelated and distinct objects, such as a computer monitor with trees in an urban environment. By making these juxtapositions, the raw material of contemporary architecture is transformed into an organic entity with the appearance of earth and moss taking on alternate readings and challenging the objects' previously known cultural and emotional meanings. The gameplay and simulations built into this thesis allow the viewer to explore the potential of spatial construction in this particular environment, including the desire to stimulate different views of space and create a more attractive and dynamic environment. Games are not limited to one previous medium but rather combine multiple media. On the surface, they can present the world through architectural drawings or optical camera protocols (the ubiquitous isometric or first-person perspective). This thesis is experienced in motion and in continuously moving perspective views, challenging the static tropes of standard architectural representation. The game space becomes a closed, utopian system - a separate space when the user runs the program.
In the world of Impersonator, players may combine these objects with natural elements such as building materials or plants, creating a new and exciting space, even if the components are familiar. This will also connect and resonate with them. People often have preconceived notions of what they represent and how they work. By unexpectedly reassembling these objects, they can challenge these preconceptions and create a sense of curiosity and attraction. Objects' unique and unexpected placement will engage the user, creating a deeper emotional connection to the space. Through these steps, the environment of this project goes beyond imitating a particular style of building and enters the conceptual realm, redefining the world as we know it. It combines reproduction, utopian world-building, and experiments in counter-cultural thinking based on the game's setting of the operating system to foster the player's experience of the "interiority" of the virtual space.
Impersonator Story 1
Impersonator Story 2
Impersonator Story 3
Impersonator Story 4
Impersonator Story 5