｜Stacy Yuan

Goodnight is a video sculpture that expresses the feeling of longing and the remaining connection to my mom who passed away seven years ago by recreating the way I communicate with her every night through diary and dream. When you enter the installation, you can sit on the chair to trigger the beginning of the memories. This project contains two ways of communication, diary and dream. After my mom passed away, I started writing in a diary every night before bed to tell her about my day, and share my feelings with her. Since then, she sometimes visits my dream at night. I sit on the passenger side and we are chatting in the car while she is driving, just like we always did. Even though the detail of the conversation is misty, I know that I can tell her about my happiness, concern, and all the things that I want to share with her in life. She is still with me.

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Tools

Isadora, After Effect, Premiere, Procreate, Audition

Date

Feb 2021
(About 3 months)

Research

My primary research comes from my diary and memory of the dream. I’ve been writing a diary for seven years since my mom has passed away. It contains my feeling of longing and daily thoughts. Also, I keep a dream journal to remember my dream, especially the visitation dream, which is a type of dream that you truly feel as if you can communicate with a deceased loved one. For the project form, I was inspired by Andrea Wolf's Little Memories and Bill Viola's The Sleep of Reason. They both use projection mapping and sculpture to convey memories, dreams, and consciousness.

Process

Because I don’t have space in my apartment, I set up the environment in the empty room at ITP instead. And I connected two projector outputs in Isadora to do the projection mapping on the diary and the wall.

For the lamp, I chose the bank lamp since this is my mom’s bedside lamp. I used the Arduino to control the brightness of the light bulb. When the light turns on, it means I’m still awake, writing the diary. When the light turns off, it represents I’m going to sleep.

The diary content is about me talking to my mom and sharing my feeling about life with her. For the handwriting video, I did it on my iPad and screen recorded it. The floating text animation is made by AfterEffect and Isadora.

For the visitation dream, I used Procreate and after effect to make all the animation. You can hear me talking to my mom in the car but cannot hear her voice clearly.

User Test

I invited some of my ITP friends to do the user test and I got some feedback.

They had a reflecting feeling and felt emotional. I remember that one of my friends cry after experienced it, which makes me surprised and feel grateful.

What's Next?

This project will have seven diaries and dreams take turns playing, which represent the seven years since my mom passed away.

Goodnight is a memories documentary, what I think of is adding more chapters as time passed in the future. I’m glad and thankful that my mom helps me to finish this meaningful project and we will keep developing it in the future.

GOODNIGHT