" We all live in the same real world, which is a single, continuous material and sexual existence; but the creator can create a fantasy world with his own spiritual level."
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Yetong Xin
Poespin-Wherever your body reach, there is a poetry
Collaboration Artists (Full List):
Yihua Li
Yiqing Li
Yetong Xin
Hongyue Cheng
Jiayi Li
Keyi Zhang: Hi Yetong, Congratulations on your recent MUSE Design Awards!! Would you like to share with us your thoughts about winning (is there anything interesting during the creation and cooperation of this project) and share about your award-winning work with us? Additionally, could you explain why and how AI was used as an element in the creation process of this work?
Yetong Xin: Okay, then I might briefly talk about this project. In fact, this project won this award quite by chance. A friend of mine at NYU initiated such a project, and I was invited by him to complete the visual design and overall concept construction of this project, because this direction is also a direction that I am good at personally - this project happens to be a dance-related theme. Because pole dancing has always been a controversial performance form, they chose the theme of pole dancing at the time because they wanted to show that many women now do this not for some kind of profit purpose, but to show their bodies generously, or to have a purpose of exercise. So when they chose this theme to do such a design, the basic direction was that the starting point was also to speak for women, which was a place that I was very interested in at the time. I have also done a lot of work on dance, so I joined this project at the time, and used some of the designs I had done for dance to create the visual elements of this part.
I think it was a pleasant surprise to win the gold award of the Muse Design Awards, because our creative process was very rushed. We applied for this award on the last day of the deadline, which was equivalent to doing it at the last second. This was a big challenge at the time, because our time was very limited. Another very interesting point is that this project is to teach dance, to use motion capture technique to capture the dancer's movements, and then use AI algorithms to convert this movement into text and poetry. In other words, capture the coordinate points of the dancer's body in space, and then match these coordinate points with the poems of a female poet, Yeats. This process is also like a conversion between two languages. This is a dynamic conversion from space to poetry, such as a conversion between two languages.
This is also a common or relatively new idea of ​​dynamic AI models at present. We can see many models like Google or Studio Diffusion, which will convert text and pictures into animation and sound, which is a conversion between different media. This is also one of the reasons why we use AI for this project. I personally pay more attention to the application of AI in images and digital media, so I learned a lot and was very happy to participate in this project.
Nomad
Collaboration Artists (Full List):
Yetong Xin/Director
Muwen Li/Director
Yicheng Zhu/Music
Zuochu Liu/Music
JoNine Liu/Sound Design
Gabriela Bila Advincula/Voice
Keyi Zhang: We know that you collaborated and won the A&D Award together. Would you like to share with us more information about this project? Did you first meet at GSD? What led you to collaborate for the first time, and what has kept your collaboration going since then?
Yetong Xin: Okay, I think we can answer this question in two steps. I can briefly introduce the A&D Museum award, and then we can introduce how we started to collaborate on this project. Then I can first say that the A&D Design Award is an award held by the A&D Museum, which is used to recognize a relatively successful or innovative work in digital media art, architectural design and AI applications. The short film Nomad, which we collaborated on, won the Design Award on the Screen Track. We attended the award ceremony in Los Angeles and later held a two-month exhibition. We were very honored and surprised to win this award. It is a relatively influential project. As for the collaboration, we actually went through a lot of stories. Wenwen can introduce them.
Muwen Li: At the beginning, this was actually a course in MIT Media Lab called City Sci-Fi, which encourages students to use time-based media to convey a worldview. This year's theme is to explore various ecological issues in the Amazon domain, or some humanities issues, or to do some speculative design in a large context. This course was actually recommended by a senior, and he only taught this course twice, and ours was the second time. The second time, I actually took the course first, and then I thought it was interesting, so I discussed it with Yetong, and then we worked together on this project.
Yetong Xin: Muwen has an architectural background, but he is very interested in modeling, including modeling with blender, and 3D animation. I myself have been working in this industry for a long time, and I prefer rendering and overall concept control. Our technical skills are quite compatible, and our directions are relatively consistent, so we are very happy to cooperate in this Nomad. We spent two months to build a concept, and then spent a month to produce the whole article and the final publicity. At present, this work is still being exposed. For example, we recently participated in a new media exhibition held by Prompt magazine in Budapest, and our work was also published in the magazine. This should be the first time we cooperate.
Nomad
Title: The Fossile of Motion
Collaboration Artists (Full List):
Chenghao He
Muwen Li
Yetong Xin
Keyi Zhang: I’m very interested in your project, The Fossile of Motion. How does the use of inorganic data and technology, such as motion trajectory and algorithmic modeling, challenge or redefine our understanding of organic life and the authenticity of natural forms?
Yetong Xin: No problem, for this project, I was mainly responsible for the visual part. And Wenwen was mainly responsible for the technical part. We can talk about the direction we are responsible for respectively. Then the concept of this project was a very small point at that time, because both of us are working on time-based media, such as movies and animations, and we both like this kind of media based on time changes. Time is a very fascinating dimension. For people in the real world, it is actually an untraceable state. No matter how we imagine that we can travel through space, or travel in time, it is still an untraceable state for us in reality. However, we are always looking forward to being able to fix precious moments, or time in a certain fragment, or fix it in a certain way, and then look forward to such an eternal state.
So we thought at that time, if we can use motion capture technology to capture the changes in a person's movements in the time dimension, and visualize and solidify the changes in this movement, is it a fossil of the past time in a sense? So this was our original intention at that time. The main part I was responsible for was to visualize and render it, and then finally build it in a museum. In fact, we were inspired by the Harvard Museum at that time, because we found that fossils are usually displayed in museums for people to see and trace past memories and history, so we finally used such a virtual exhibition method to display such a time fossil.
Muwen Li: At the beginning, we used wave motion capture to capture a series of actions. Then we selected the curve that we thought was more beautiful in this series of actions. In fact, this is an intro to computation project. The teacher suggested that we use C sharp to build some modules. In fact, all these skeletons have a basic part, and then the basic part is written into coding with C sharp, and then it is mapped to the curve of motion capture. Basically, these are some technical problems. There are many different forms displayed in the museum, which are actually various tests we have done with different modules and different forms of motion capture.
Keyi Zhang: You are an interdisciplinary artist. We wonder why you choose film and animation to be your main media of creating artworks recently?
Muwen Li: I majored in architecture in my undergraduate studies, and I have a certain interest in modeling and narrative. When I was a junior, a teacher recommended us to read some surrealism novels or some magical realism genres, and let us draw some inspiration from them and do some speculative architecture. That’s when I started to use blender and learned how to build a world view and narrative in the scene. From junior to senior year, I was always learning how to explain a space or tell a story. When I was a graduate student, I had a partner like Professor Xin who could help me to make some ideas more mature.
Symbiotic Reverie
Collaboration Artists (Full List):
Crystal (Yingbo) li
Rainee(Yunyi) Wang
Yetong Xin
Keyi Zhang: The next question is about Yetong’s project Symbiotic Reverie. How does the fusion and transformation of women and plants in this reimagined landscape challenge conventional boundaries between the human and natural worlds, and what role does the erotic play in shaping this utopian vision?
Yetong Xin: This is also a project I completed at MIT last semester. At that time, we wanted to see how it interacted with real dancers based on projection, so the final presentation form was that we projected it on the screen, and then created an immersive environment, and then the dancers danced between the screens and interacted with the plants. At the very end, the dancer lay on the ground, and we used a ground projection to map the projection onto the dancer's body. Our work is an interaction between nature and humans. I designed a series of graphics that intersect with plants: for example, organs like the heart, kidneys, intestines, etc., on which grow the image of a plant that is a mixture of beauty and weirdness. The narrative of our story is that people are gradually eroded by nature in the process of intersecting with nature, and finally become homogenized with nature. In fact, this is also my exploration of how reality and virtuality intersect and merge with each other. However, this time, the medium will be the dancer himself, who will be used as a projection medium to project the virtual world onto the dancer, and then combine it with him. So the ending of this story is that plants grow on the dancer, and he completely integrates into the natural environment in the projected world. This is also our exploration of this theme concept.
Keyi Zhang: I want to ask Yetong, because we talked about finding a job before, do you have a clearer idea now than you did at that time, that is, after the summer vacation.
Yetong Xin: I can talk about how my career path started and what kind of expectations I have. You mentioned earlier that I have been in this industry for a certain period of time, and basically all my recent works have been carried out in a relatively clear direction, that is, in the field of dynamic graphic design. The dynamic graphics here may refer to all media based on time changes, such as the movies and animations you mentioned, which are the most universal and common categories among these media. I like these media creations very much. First, I was influenced by watching images when I was a child, because I felt that it could bring a possibility to the real world. We all live in the same real world, which is a single, continuous material and sexual existence; but the creator can create a fantasy world with his own spiritual level. This world is usually expressed in the fields of literature, art, film and television, animation, etc., and every time I see such works, I have a feeling that I can temporarily break away from my identity in reality in such a short time of a few minutes or hours. I can just watch such a story in another world, and then after it ends, I can even stand in another virtual world to look back at my reality, so as to gain more knowledge of reality. I think this process is very attractive to me, so a very basic original intention of my creation is that I hope to integrate virtuality and reality, which is why I choose this medium.
So far, I have created many time-based short films and digital media art works. They will not only be exhibited on the screen, but also in the form of architectural projection, sedimentary exhibitions and VR in various cities around the world. It is not only in the art gallery, but also as a city landmark to show people in a very large space environment. I think this is very interesting. Because after we create a video work, it can not only be viewed on a specific medium, but it can also enter people's lives in a strong way, participate in people's real life, and become a part of people's real life. This is something I am very interested in, that is, whether such a creative form can create a window for people to glimpse the virtual world, and then break the intersection between the virtual and the real, let the virtual intervene in the real, and then let the real carry a virtual world. This is the core concept I want to express that I have summarized so far, and then about my future creations, I think it will go in this direction. I really hope to bring what I feel, or what I see in the world, into reality, and let more people see what I feel.
INTERVIEWER: KE ZHANG
CURATOR: KE ZHANG, WANTONG YAO
EDITOR: KE ZHANG
GRAPHIC DESIGNER: VIVI SHEN
Yetong Xin is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in dynamic graphics, 3D and XR technologies, projection, and interactive media. Her work spans animation, film, gaming, advertising, immersive exhibitions, and architectural projections. Through digital media, Yetong explores the intersection of the virtual and real, creating immersive experiences that challenge perceptions of identity, space, and reality.
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As a collaborating artist with Refik Anadol Studio and Harvard CAM Lab, she has contributed to several large-scale immersive exhibition projects. Her personal works have been exhibited in international cities such as New York, Melbourne, Beijing, Shanghai, and Budapest, featured in exhibitions including the Utopia NYC Art Exhibition, METAXIS + PROMPT Festival, D ARCH, and the Brooklyn Film Festival. She has received the MUSE Design Award and the A+D Museum Design Award, and her work has been selected for academic conferences such as NeuralPS and Chinese CHI.
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Yetong earned her bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University and is currently pursuing her graduate studies at Harvard University. She has spoken at TED×Youth and the BDA Dance Forum, sharing her profound insights on digital art and virtual reality. Her works have gained significant attention at international exhibitions, continually pushing the boundaries of art and technology and inspiring audiences to rethink the relationship between the virtual and the real.
Muwen Li is currently an MDes candidate in the Mediums program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), holding a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Syracuse University. Her multidisciplinary projects bridge architecture, 3D modeling, construction, CG animation, and interactive media. Muwen's work emphasizes speculative storytelling, leveraging a range of CAD technologies and computational tools to address spatial challenges and propose future-focused insights that merge with digital media art and animation.
Throughout her career, Muwen has contributed to research and design initiatives at institutions such as the Syracuse University SOURCE, and the Boghosian Fellowship, and has honed her practical expertise through internships at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the Chicago office, and the Institute of Architectural Algorithms & Applications at Southeast University. Her personal work has received international recognition, including the PLATINUM MUSE Creative Award, and has been featured in exhibitions and screenings worldwide—such as the METAXIS + PROMPT Festival (Budapest, Hungary), the D ARCH Film Festival (ETH Zürich, Switzerland), A+D Museum (Los Angeles, USA), and the 20th Brooklyn Film Festival (Brooklyn, USA), MIT Media Lab screening (Cambridge, USA), MIT AI Film Festival, ArchTwist, and the 20th Asia Design Exhibition, showcasing her contributions to the evolving intersections of architecture, animation, and immersive media.