Digital Autonomy

Wedding Veil is a series of sculptural pieces that explores medium and materiality, representational aesthetics, cultural-social identities, and conceptual commitments to art.

When entered upon the insides of a glass container, one becomes amidst tea bag covers shapes as a torso. A sculpture of the artist is seen as well as a video installation of performative movement.   

A subtle and nuanced critique on the artist’s identifying roles being Chinese and American, being seen as a gender-queer woman, and labels we all wear. One is packaged into society, leaving sediments of our beings that are now being left in spaces away from one’s physical self. 

Not site-specific but rather site-adapted, the subjective exploration of the presented medium of teabags have been imitatively mass-produced digitally to critique the production of the object itself. Presenting a conceptually and sculpturally approach to what it means to look at tea bags in a representationally aesthetic way invites viewers to think about each piece that they see in the gallery space.  

Movement is shown as a process to not only think, but feel. A suit made out of the chosen medium elaborates the means as well as the historical and social importance of layers that we consume and disregard. Enter Wedding Veil: The Space Between to explore such spaces of thought and discussion. 

Yamaori and taniori can be translated into mountain fold and valley fold; they refer to how to fold when you do origami. The reason why I titled the project Yamaori Taniori is to give a hint of myself who is deeply influenced by Japanese culture. More than that, I discovered that we are living in a world like a bellow which is formed with the repetition of yamaori and taniori. When you see the paper as the whole world, the areas of yamaori are where you can see, and the ones of taniori are where you cannot see. We tend to consume the information on the area of yamaori because they are easily reachable. Because of that, we might be missing the greater hidden part of the reality of this world. 

Mountainose is a 3D scan of my nose that is edited on Blender and imported using GLTF. My work is about the colonialism mentality that is ingrained in the Filipino community of physically having a “flat nose”. With Western cultures being the number one influence, Filipinos are losing their sense of culture. I immigrated here in the United States at a young age from the Philippines, so my Filipino culture has slowly been diminishing. I am now accustomed to the “American lifestyle”, and since my Filipino culture has been left out, I do not appreciate it as much. 

With my “flat nose”, I want to glorify and acknowledge this insecurity that a lot of Filipinos go through in their day-to-day lives. I also want to open up the conversation to people who feel like their physical appearances aren’t enough and they do not appreciate it. Furthermore, I expanded on the colonial mentality in the commercial world of skin whitening industries. 

I made a physical soap brand called, “Totoo” to express also the colonial mentality that western culture put upon the Filipino culture. The soapbox and the soap itself is a 3D scan that was processed in TRNIO and imported, then edited on Blender. 

These skin whitening products are greatly destructive to physical and mental well-being. Filipinos have the tendency to break away from their native culture, being their appearance. The skin whitening industry targets mostly the lower-income groups using the soap to increase aesthetic appeal, economic and social status. Totoo means “real” in Filipino and a lot of soap brands have the word “original” on the front cover. Many Filipinos believe and trust in the English language more than their own Tagalog language. This brings up a conversation about authenticity and the manipulation that is in the advertising world.

Ever since Emily was a child, digital media has always been a large part of her life, especially in the case of video games. She grew up playing games such as Pokemon and The Legend of Zelda. Along with that, Emily also watched many animated shows on TV and online such as Sailor Moon or the Winx Club. This soon evolved into a love of Japanese culture as she began to obsess over a plethora of genres in anime and manga in her teens. It was those games and shows that inspired her to become an artist and she often found myself drawing the characters during her free time. Emily began learning how to draw when she was 13 years old, but her view of the art world expanded very quickly soon after.

A large part of her practice has to do with storytelling and communicating a story through her digital art. She often does this in video form with the aid of music and lyrics to give more context to the tale without the need to write out the story word for word.

Zen Garden is a place to meditate and is called "Karesan-sui" in Japanese. It is a garden that expresses mountains and water using sand and stones. It has been used as a place for Zen Buddhism training because of its tranquility and the expression of a religious worldview with the combination of stones and sand.


Please look around the garden from the Engawa(veranda) and put yourself in the tranquility. 

Growing up, my parents tried to give my brothers and I a childhood home—a place that we could reminisce about and return to as we grew older. That never happened. Instead, our one constant became a little brick stone house in Michoacán, Mexico. We visited this house once a year. It was the one place that changed as I changed. I saw its walls repainted again and again. I saw new trees planted and different flowers grow as others were snipped away. The greenery grew until it engulfed the brick walls and the sheet metal roof. It grew taller and wilder until all you could see was the dark entrance of the house and nothing else. 

This is my grandparent’s home. Everything there is familiar and almost feels eternal. My grandparents gave that house a life of its own.

With Paint Tool SAI and Adobe Photoshop, I was able to demonstrate that life. My 2d short animation shows how that house fared through the passage of time. It shows the sky changing, the walls repainted, the plants growing, and through it all tying the family together. 

Music: "Cien Años" by Pedro Infante

This piece is a digital 3D representation of a fictional dream-like world I wish to escape to when I experience hardships and pain. The major life event that caused me to wish to escape to this type of world was the unexpected passing of my beloved grandmother in September of 2020. The most tragic event of my life influenced the creation of this 3D fantasy, forest-like environment, which contains symbolic elements connected to nature, life, prosperity and being free from struggles and pain. The main elements of this piece contain symbolic messages connected to my life experiences and are inspired by messages that are significant to my life. The mountains connect to adventure and the idea of going through obstacles in life and climbing your way to the top, which is success. The colorful flowers and trees all signify growth, prosperity and the start of a new beginning in a new world. By using my inner emotions and thinking deeper about my hardships, I am able to bring my dream world from my imagination to life.

The idea for Inorganic Organic began as a way to explore unique kinds of 3D printing materials. One of the unique things that I noticed when looking at the wide variety of plastics that can be used in 3D printing was that a few had natural properties. One of these materials included plastic that had a portion of saw dust mixed in to give it some of the properties of wood. Another of these materials added carbon fibers into the plastic to give the end result added rigidity. With both of these materials, natural additives are added to plastic in order to give it desirable properties. 
When I came across this it gave me the idea to take these materials and use them to print out organic shapes relating back to their base material. These models are photographed and displayed alongside digitally rendered counterparts of the printed models. With the gallery space being digital, viewers will be able to move around the 3D models and experience them with the photographed work. 
This work explores many themes such as the role of technology in our society and the ways in which it is helpful or harmful to us as a whole. With technological advances we could see man made plants, animals, and even humans. With these organic materials there would be an interesting distinction that needs to be made as to what makes something alive and what doesn’t. Augmentation and repair is going to be a realistic possibility for the medical field in the near future and we may need to decide at what point is a human no longer a human?

A 3D environment consisting of corresponding rooms that depict personal childhood traumas, seen through my inner child perspective. 

Since last year, the pandemic has changed our life in various ways. My house and my room become my only place for activity after everything moved online format. My schoolwork, entertainment, and self-practice in digital illustration have become my daily activities. The first few months, I think this style is what I am dreaming of in the past because I am a relatively introverted person, don't like going out and socializing. But I start to feel tired and annoying with this kind of style as it goes on for more than a year. I have become lazier and unmotivated than in the past.

Therefore, I turn this thought into a 3D environment with short animations to express the feeling through experience. I animated the 3D environment in Blender and two short animations in Photoshop and After Effect. It narrates the boundary between comfort and discomfort inside and outside the range of activities. It is also one of the few works that I illustrate about myself and express about myself.

The central focus for this project in particular are 3d modeled characters alongside 3d modeled companions. The central idea of this project is to portray these models together with their Pokémon pals, and give a sense of companionship and reminiscence of one's childhood. 

“Magnum Opus” is a stream of consciousness work about fictional painter Michael Miller. Clouded by his own pride and illusions of grandeur Michael struggles to put paint on canvas, and exposes his insecurities in a discussion with a figment of his own imagination. 
I got the idea to create this film after watching an incredibly egotistical video by artist Sean Landers. After watching said video I tried my hardest to place myself Into Sean Lander’s mind at the moment of posting, how could one be so self-centered? With this project I seek to deconstruct the artist's ego, and explore the innate self doubt many feel when we compare ourselves to the greatness that adorns the halls of time. Using the video principle of rotoscoping I animate a version of our painter which is distorted and abstract. This works as a visualization of the internal dialogue previously mentioned. 
The gallery component includes a painting series called “Bane” from fictional painter Michael Miller. Through these paintings Michael Miller seeks to encapsulate each of the deadly sins through abstract acrylic strokes and stylized words and letters. Within each of the paintings the painter strives to capture a personalized chaos that each sin embodies for him. 

I tend to orbit hyper specific events in my life. I obsess over the memories, and on each rethinking the memory is restructured and distorted. The distortion becomes solidified and definition is added to the new imagining of the event. It begs the question, am I orbiting these events because they’re inherently significant or are they significant to me because I orbit them? I am absolutely fascinated by the elaborate web of activity connecting and manipulating past, present, and future. This applies to both an individual and universal scale. In AMYGDALA, I explore and express these events and the impact they have on me. I want to share the stories I’ve held onto throughout my life, in a style that reflects the hazy, distorted, nonlinear, and precarious way that I remember them.

Curtain Call is a virtual reality experience that take a play on scenes of a theater. You will be transported to Mozilla Hubs in a separate tab.

“Aromatherapy” is a utopian-inspired world of animated work by Noor Bondogji. This world consists of a natural landscape that leads you to a modern gallery of different works of animation that deals with different types of positive energy. The gallery has different scenes of animation that plays with vibrant colors, movement, and feels. The project is about virtual senses that people feel when in the world. It is about taking in positive energy through different forms, such as scenery, colors, space and movement. When you enter the world, you will follow the path to the installation and explore the different animations on the walls.

In My Own Skin are 3D sculptures, simulations, and rendered portraits that convey the human figure and skin.

Imaginary Spaces is about exploring new and relaxing landscapes that exist in this imaginary planet. Click the planet or jump through the portal to enter the gallery space.

The ghost is a mascot for the documentary and indicates to the viewer that ghosts will be a topic within my video.

SUNNY is a mobile application prototype focused on the importance of one’s self-love and mental health. The application features SUNNY, a character inspired from the optimism and support that I have gotten from my loved ones during the pandemic. The character SUNNY acts as the bridge between the user and content, depicting a persona that would create a casual and genuine connection with the user. With the intentions of paying back the help I’ve received from people throughout the pandemic, I created this prototype to create awareness focused on the importance of mental health and the power that lies in knowing that there’s a community behind your back.

A dome amongst the tree top.

The generic alien is a mascot for the documentary and indicates to the viewer that the alien will be a topic within my video.

First of possibly many episodic documentaries.  Within this episode explore the world of present-day media and explains the phenomena of the paranormal.

*Click on Screen to see the link for the full video*

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yvWIOvtaNwPcosXdIdCTbGqPvGtZM4kj?usp=sharing

Door to Craving Creativity

When you walk through this door make a sandwich. 

Picture this: your childhood toy chest is now your refrigerator. Don’t lie, we’ve all put toys in our mouths anyways. Remember what it was like getting that bucket of legos and you had to figure out what to do with it? The goal of this piece is to be a sandbox where people are forced to use their imaginations, to make the viewer question what something would taste like just off of how it looks. 
This piece is influenced by personal experience. Being the last kid to be picked up from school, waiting hours for my parents and finding something fun to do while hungry.
My cousin and I often walk through the toy section at Target, look around the toy section and say “what the heck are kids doing now?”. Other than toys for toddlers, toys have really just grown up with us. Everything is a collectible now, something you wouldn’t dream of opening and giving to a child. Even lego sets are movie or game tie ins. You can’t put minecraft blocks in your mouth to separate them, the same way you needed to for legos. How are kids going to connect with the experience of the tactile toys of our time? This piece seeks to meet kids on their home playing field, the virtual space, in response to the decline of physical toys.  

This is the one and only model that I have uploaded onto NAC.  This is a Bigfoot Cast I have made out of blender and is a mascot of my documentary.  A Bigfoot Cast is a mold of a footprint that has been cast out in the wild. 

I tend to orbit hyper specific events in my life. I obsess over the memories, and on each rethinking the memory is restructured and distorted. The distortion becomes solidified and definition is added to the new imagining of the event. It begs the question, am I orbiting these events because they’re inherently significant or are they significant to me because I orbit them? I am absolutely fascinated by the elaborate web of activity connecting and manipulating past, present, and future. This applies to both an individual and universal scale. In AMYGDALA, I explore and express these events and the impact they have on me. I want to share the stories I’ve held onto throughout my life, in a style that reflects the hazy, distorted, nonlinear, and precarious way that I remember them.

This mask represents the consequences of living in a polluted world, where it'll feel like you're breathing trash.

Social media impact human self-consciousness, self-image and damage the self-esteem of generations. Despite gender, race, religion, and age, everyone is equally affected by these new trends of life watching. Unrealistic view of life, watching people live these fabulous glamorous lives instead of enjoying your own. This"Speculum Vanitas", Vanitas: A category of paintings (often, but not always still-lifes) alluding to the futility of life and the transience of earthly joys and possessions. The main vanitas symbol is the skull. Speculum means mirror in Latin. Vanity in our smart devices is the curse of the new century tech revolution.    Digital Media is the dreamland of freedom, do not get lost in this Wonderland; we need wages to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods.

Social media impact human self-consciousness, self-image and damage the self-esteem of generations. Despite gender, race, religion, and age, everyone is equally affected by these new trends of life watching. Unrealistic view of life, watching people live these fabulous glamorous lives instead of enjoying your own. This"Speculum Vanitas", Vanitas: A category of paintings (often, but not always still-lifes) alluding to the futility of life and the transience of earthly joys and possessions. The main vanitas symbol is the skull. Speculum means mirror in Latin. Vanity in our smart devices is the curse of the new century tech revolution.    Digital Media is the dreamland of freedom, do not get lost in this Wonderland; we need wages to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods.

Social media impact human self-consciousness, self-image and damage the self-esteem of generations. Despite gender, race, religion, and age, everyone is equally affected by these new trends of life watching. Unrealistic view of life, watching people live these fabulous glamorous lives instead of enjoying your own. This"Speculum Vanitas", Vanitas: A category of paintings (often, but not always still-lifes) alluding to the futility of life and the transience of earthly joys and possessions. The main vanitas symbol is the skull. Speculum means mirror in Latin. Vanity in our smart devices is the curse of the new century tech revolution. Digital Media is the dreamland of freedom, do not get lost in this Wonderland; we need wages to remind us explicitly of the vanity (in the sense of worthlessness) of worldly pleasures and goods.

For my object's image wrap

A portal to the work Mountainose. 

Tread carefully through the twists and turns as you witness firsthand the evolution of my worldview.

"Reflections: A Visual Experience" is a series of videos that are intended to create a reflective experience for the viewer.  Moreover its compilation of visuals and spoken word are meant to help us appreciate life's experiences and what they can teach us.