Photography, 2024
Some of my fondest childhood memories from visiting museums with my family are of twisting knobs on a wall full of lights to change their color, or pressing buttons to make
a kaleidoscope spin. After all, working with my hands and different textures has always been integral to my art process, beginning when I’d collect my classmates’ juice
pouches to make wallets with them using duct tape in grade school.
As my crafting hobby grew more serious and juice pouch wallets turned to canvas, my methods continued to be heavily influenced by touch, interaction between different media, and recycling material.
As I honed my skills, my art practice began to be driven by feeling, which
resulted in passionate manifestations of personal memories. I’d sit for hours cutting hearts from magazines and painting paper towels to add texture to my pieces.
By using digital media art, I take these inspirations and experiences I gained from working within physical media, to share them on a broader scale with new facets. A major component of what entices me about digital media art is its ability to be interactive.
Interactive art has a unique opportunity to make a lasting impression on viewers because it invites an active, collaborative experience rather than a passive process.
By creating interactive art, I can take the viewer through an emotional journey that I curate completely, much like the wall of lights and kaleidoscope did for me as a child.
Now, I use art as a manner of expressing my personal experiences in unique ways and as a bridge to deepen emotional connections with others. I have found that interactive art allows viewers to connect with my pieces using their own perspective — and moving forward, I want to grow my toolkit of digital art skills, particularly those involving creative coding to a point where I can apply it to my collage-based art style and make interactive iterations of it using hand-drawn elements that reflect my personality. I’d also like to collaborate with other creatives who specialize in other forms of art like spatial or pictorial art in the future as a means to further push the ever-changing boundaries of how I view mixed media.