As a Storyteller, I always think: What is Future Storytelling? How do we define it? Spatial time reversal, conscious and subconscious, collage and reconstruction, atmospheric presentation, contradiction and absurdity, illusion and reality, these are the ways around which I perceive and define Storytelling. Unlike traditional new media. It has become a new form of mass communication that processes, transmits, and manages information in text, graphics, images, and sound through digital means. storytelling is a reliance on the future evolution of current events, such as the unfolding of details and choices originating in time, but it does not change automatically and regularly, although these things make a certain pattern in the present, but whatever the approach, data based on the present and the past are not necessarily accurate predictors of future events. We often mistake storytelling as being based on the development of a script leading to an ending, when in fact it is not. future storytelling is more about change over the course of a project, and perhaps the unknown ending is more in line with future storytelling. When digital media workers release their work to the public, there will be a process of information transfer. The age of digital media for communication purposes has arrived and I am playing the role of storyteller for this age.
Jiawei Li
Jiawei Li is a new media artist based in London, Beijing, and Tianjin. Studying at the Royal College of Art, Digital Direction, Jafri's practice covers a range of related themes: from marginalized groups, synaesthetic art, and digital identity definition to sustainable art for ecological preservation and digital archaeology design. Her work is oriented toward future design, combining interdisciplinary, Digital Storytelling with sound, video, and installation.
As a new media artist, Jiawei's work has stood out in several competitions: winner of the Global Youth Programme in 2020, winner of the China Visap Art Visualisation Competition in 2021, among others. She has participated in and presented papers on digital archaeology and future design at the Future Design International Conference and HCI International.
'Growing Wild' is my final project for MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art. The project is part of Future Art and Design and is centered on a design that calls attention to marine microplastics. I called the project 'Future Storytelling Trilogy' and the tone was set in the style of a future marine water purification laboratory. In designing the methodological framework for the project, I wanted to make the project as interconnected as possible between the different actors (plastics, microbes, organisms, people). I have therefore built on the dynamics of the self-organizing behavioral framework to create a future framework that allows for the cultivation of relational structures to remain stable, but also reflects irregular, passive fluctuations of change. Embodying the dependence of marine life forms on their current environment and forced choices for survival as well as anticipating future evolution due to marine pollution.
This section uses C4D animation to create an ecological habitat for a coral reef that has been eroded by microplastics; the reef was chosen as the backdrop for the story because it is a typical ecological habitat for microorganisms and organisms and is part of a highly complex ecosystem, important because although it covers less than 1% of the seafloor, it provides a habitat for more than 25% of marine life. At the same time, it is also a community target to which plastics can easily attach. I have abandoned the original dreamy and beautiful forms of coral reefs and made them eerie and plastic at the same time.
Sound visualization by extracting and collecting genetic data about corals; many organisms living in coral reefs find their way into the reef by sensing sound. Presence of genes related to sound reception and/or emission in coral cysts. The presence of genes - TRPV and FolH-1 - in coral DNA was identified by PCR amplification for sound emission or reception in sea anemones and freshwater polyps, respectively. Sound samples are discrete measurements of a single point of the audio waveform at a given time point. A sample is a single value. The value can be stored or passed on to another device. However, a single sample is not sufficient to reproduce a vivid sound. To store enough information related to the original audio waveform, a large number of samples are required. I have therefore collected about 4000 samples of coral reef DNA data. In the conversion from digital to audio, a signal is generated that corresponds to the values contained in the digital information. Each bit represents an acoustic value. The highest valid bit is converted to the largest sound value; the next highest valid bit is converted to half the sound value, and so on, up to the lowest valid bit. By summing all the sound level steps and holding each summed value until the next sample, a continuous signal is generated. This signal is smoothed by applying a low-pass filter. Again, to reflect the sustainability concept, I customized the sound like a clear plastic record.
Firstly, I conducted 3-4 site visits to London's beaches in the early stages of the research, collecting a large number of beach pollutants and making drip gel specimens of them. Secondly, the fluctuating frequencies in the sound were analyzed and Arduino technology was used to connect the left and right frequencies of the sound and control the relationship between the bubbles. An air pump was used because I believe that sound visualization needs to have a substantial correspondence, not a virtual one. (e.g. conversion to biomass, liquid, or particle) This type of conversion can touch the viewer in a very concrete way, it creates a very direct aesthetic connection and I wanted it to express the irregular breakdown of plastics in the ocean in an irregular form. I therefore replaced the form of microplastics in the water with baby oil mixed with blue color powder, both insoluble in nature and with the same concept of infinite decomposition. Through the air pump kinetic device, the air pump vibrates with the frequency of sound to create bubbles that break up the oil and break down into a myriad of microscopic forms, thus metaphorically representing the constant decomposition of microplastic pollution that cannot disappear.