Xiaowen Kou
SA 3662
Online portfolio
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1. Gesture
2. Terrestrial
3. Time+Space
Research notes/sketches
Research notes/sketches
Research notes/sketches
There are two parts to my video. The first part is about the natural environment. The second one shows the lifetime of myself. The first video shows the changing of the environment. I used the Time-lapse photography shot a lot of videos from my balcony at different times. I combined the change of the sky, the weather, and the trees in different seasons. Time has endowed nature with changes, through these days of filming, I felt the time passed quickly. When I shot the changing of the cloud and sunset, the change of the sky would be invisible. However, after I used the Time-lapse, it made me shocked about the magic of nature.

The second video is about myself. It combines some of the fragments in my life. At the beginning of this video, I made a stop-motion animation with about 100 pictures because when people watch a coherent video, the audience can't capture the details and expressions in the video, so I took some photos and then made a video from them. I used the sound of gear as the background audio, and the speed of the picture is adjusted according to the rhythm of the sound. In the next part, I overlapped the videos and audios together and gave the audience a feeling of chaos.
In the video, it is a process of artificial intelligence, born with virtual body and transfer their mind from virtual to real world. The first part I performed as an Artificial intelligence, and I was made by other people, I used the forest and code background to overlay together. With the changing of the sound, the code background sometime appears sometime disappear, people cannot distinguish which is virtual or real.

We have already let AI surpass human beings in a variety of ways, and we are trying to make AI be innovative and emotional. Therefore, the current state of human being is close to the future AI. When we develop AI in the future we would create a virtual world so that we could prevent the advanced AI from dominating our real world. Similarly, we may be created by another universe. Thus, have you ever thought about the world that we live was created by another universe. That might explain why we cannot see the boundary of the universe, and we also cannot explain how the universe was formed.
This video shows two same persons who made different gestures in the same space. In the same area, these two persons choose different roles; one is chaser another one is hider. The first idea I want to show is I believe the parallel universe exists, when people make any decision, a new parallel universe will be divided. Thus, the video shows how the two same persons, who from the different parallel universes, played their roles in the same space. They looked like they are playing hide and seek, but they are in different spaces, so it’s hard to say whether they can see each other. I want to leave the audience with more suspense in this video. Second, when I was young the animation “Tom and Jerry” gave me deep impression about they use they body gesture to perform the predator chain between a cat and a mouse. From their body language, the audience can clearly understand who is the hunter and who is prey. I used background music from Charles Chaplin’s silent film because I want to let audience only concentrate on the body gesture, and making them guess the relationship between these two-person, why one person wants to find another one and whether they can see each other. Furthermore, in the progress of when they are hiding and chasing, they seem to be able to move through different scenes. The perspective that I want to show is the door in my video like a lot of choices in people’s life when people open it, they never know what will happen next. Each option leads to different results.