ANGEL x WORLD ^_^

Welcome to my world! This is a website full of experiments and trials, mostly with using text and images together.

I'm a senior at NYU with no coding experience whatsoever, but I have decided to try my hand with HTML compiled from various sources to create a repository of recent projects. (Shoutout to @repth for the basic template!) As I've realized this is my last year to really work with art before I have to focus solely on law, I wanted to take advantage and experiment, with as much loyalty to my personal sensibilities and idea of fun as possible.

Without further ado: here are a semester's projects, focused on worldbuilding and figuring out how to condense my ideas, feelings, and concepts into a way that is digestible and fun for viewers!

CLICK ON THE GLOBE BELOW TO PLAY HORIZONS.

Worldbuilding and plotlines for Horizons (Google Doc).

Character sheets and basic biographies (Google Drive folder).

The story is ultimately an exploration of man versus machine, but its much more about family and relationships and belonging. The game as it is now, however, is more of the stereotypical sci-fi story with witty, meta-narration. It does not run long enough to reach major 'plot reveal' points, as established in the Google documents. With more time, I'd really like to flesh this game out!

Contact Theory is a thought experiment based on the premise that , inhabitants randomly swap locations with each other every 24 hours, experiencing a form of teleportation. Skin-to-skin contact allows groups to teleport together, and objects under 20 pounds also teleport if touched during the swap. Only humans or humanoid beings are affected, and the swaps are purely geographical.

In other words: if property was impossible. What would a world without the concept of private property look like?

Attatched below is a psuedo-anthropological text from this world.

The presentation-form of information for this world can be accessed here.

Participants/viewers were invited to create their own maps of social groups based on the premise of only being able to hold up to two people at once, forming an abbreviated social web.

The worldbuilding for this universe entailed creating a new visual system of symbology, culture, and technology, based on collective communes and Indigenous early Democratic cultures and oral traditions.

The following magazine excerpt about the superhero group, The Defenders, produced by the hero management group Summit Global. (Best viewed in two page format). It's a satire of modern celebrity culture, and an exploration of what an inherently anti-egalitarian power structure (powers) would look like in practice.

You can find more information about the world building, characters, and plot-line of the world below.

Worldbuilding, plotlines, character sheets and more for Summit Global (Google Doc).

The world was planned to be a short comic, but the worldbuilding became immense. It was difficult to figure out how to distill the information into a way that was digestible: and still, it's quite dense. Chad Nguyen, in particular, is a caricature: Kevin Nguyen meets the Western Chad.

Since I am not interested in the ‘gallery world’ and it’s not my chosen career path, I struggled to think of what format my work would ultimately be best presented in. After some trial and error, I ended up settling on a website, particularly a pseudo old internet blog format, hosting several work-in-progress projects. Realistically, this is how my work would be published in a real world context: outside of professionalism, in these hobbyist, online spaces (therefore fitting that it’s hosted on neocities). I tried coding from scratch (badly), then ended up combining a lot of HTML scrubbed from websites and experimenting some more — it’s a bit of bricolage. While the site is still clearly a modified template and relatively bare-bones, it’s what I really picture for my art practice. A cobbled together, D.I.Y project for (mostly) nerds, though I’d hope to reach a broader audience eventually — when there’s finally enough time to really finish a story/game/comic to the level of detail and thoughtfulness I believe in.

It's colorful, bright, and evocative of older internet forums: I was thinking quite a bit of Everything is Going to be OK by Nathalie Lawhead, though I believe my works are a bit more concrete/conventional (conceptually and formally) than hers. Particularly, the aesthetics of cuteness: I recall an analysis of Yoshitomo Nara’s artworks, focused on the idea of kawaisou emphasizing cuteness’ root in pity/the pathetic/weakness. I’m very interested in what is considered feminine and what demarcates cuteness as a cultural and political force: what evokes pity, what ‘ softness’ looks like in a society that foregrounds grind and hustle culture/military might. That was not as present with the works for this class, but it has been something that has been on my mind — if you take a look at my studio, you’d see what I mean.

Picture of My Studio Wall

The ideas between all three works resonated with the idea of class and identity, though that’s a bit broad (and cliched). Particularly, I found myself creating worlds with dense worldbuilding, characterized by their own industries and rules which served as parallels and critiques to real world structures. I found myself creating these intricate, detailed mechanisms and systems: technologies, visual languages, economic and political structures.

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Screenshots from Horizons Documents

In Horizons, it was a more typical sci-fi beat-for-beat story, with the idea of nanobots/grey goo consuming all ‘real’ organic material: of course, the major plot reveal of the ‘main’ story was that the player character was a robot, and therefore immune to the ‘zombie’ aspect of the nanobots. This was only a tiny sliver of what I had planned; I had several other storylines that were meant to slowly become clear as within the same world, at different time frames that eventually converged. The worldbuilding was class critique: the nanobots were both a result of the rich, but also a more intimate love story — a mad scientist who tries to resurrect his wife, emboldened by the wealth and backing of a military industrial complex that prioritizes technological advancement at the expense of everything else. The event that killed her (and initially killed the body of the main character and his wife) was a major structural collapse which mirrored the 2021 Surfside condominium collapse, a result of corruption during construction (among other poor building practices). The premise is that the world is mired in bureaucracy and white-collar crime, with the ‘monsters’ a manifestation of the costs of a world that prioritizes “progress” over humanity/safety. I had never worked with creating a digital game before, or any game for that matter, but I think because play is so integral to what I create, it was a really fruitful enterprise. I definitely want to explore more of this format and try to create works that are truly interactive, but the roadblock here is learning coding/the time constraint of learning these systems.

The conceptual thread of class critique is easy to see in Contact Theory, which was meant to be an exploration of a world where it is impossible to own property/hoard wealth. If owning capital is disallowed by the basic mechanisms of the world/existence, what societies could be formed? What ideologies, what idea of ‘progress’ would exist? What ideas of race, of geography, would develop? I’ve never world built around such an abstract concept/from ground zero, so it was interesting trying to develop visual symbols and cultures; it definitely tested the limits of my imagination, as I typically work within relatively modern contexts with established visual codes and settings. On a formal note, it was an attempt, also, to figure out how to deliver worldbuilding. Consistently within these projects, the constraint of time and scale was something I struggled with. In the past, when I was focused on creating singular artworks or sculptures, I did not have the same dilemma as they could easily be done in a handful of hours. I only had to get a notion of my idea and concepts across and communicate with some visual symbolism. However, with worldbuilding, there's countless variables to consider; with narratives and writing, there are even more so. Creating a cohesive story is a very different monster from creating ‘art’, in that there’s much more to consider and more to do. It’s certainly denser, but this is where my practice has been shifting as of late.

Screenshots of Worldbuilding for The Defenders

This was also a struggle with The Defenders/Summit Global universe. Again, the threads to my previous works in terms of concept feel clear. It’s a satire of celebrity culture, of what an inherently anti-egalitarian structure like superhero powers would look like in a late stage capitalist society. The characters are all meant to fit conventional tropes as a force within the narrative, constrained by what a company would decide is best for their image. I wanted to play with the liberalizing of institutions (or the institutionalizing of liberalism?) in creating a ‘diverse’ cast that was ultimately backed by a massive corporation and inherently violent. The clear militarization of the characters, who are marketed like pop idols, was the goal: though again, this was a sliver of the actual world-building.

I was thinking particularly of Gen V, the spinoff of The Boys following a young black woman at her superhero university. Specifically, I thought about the unapologetic “Tumblr”/’DEI’ aspect of the writing: Marie, the main character, ends up dating a bi-gender Asian (whose powers reflect their gender identity — they switch between male and female bodies as offensive and defensive attacks). I do think, because The Boys is a critique of a certain kind of white, patriarchal society, the casting of its integral figures makes sense. At the same time, I’m not really interested in making stories about white men, even if they are evil white men/even if it is satire. Growing up in a predominantly Asian and Latino/immigrant community, of course the people in power structurally were white (teachers, police officers, government officials), but the everyday evils were all people of color.

The character Chad Nguyen is specifically meant to be a reflection of the kind of toxic masculinity inherent to a lot of Asian American men and male spaces. R/AsianMasculinity is a stark example of this, and the ‘controversy’ of WMAF (White Male Asian Female) couples/"Oxford Study": Randall Park’s Shortcomings is about the prevalence of Asian men dating/idolizing white women as a status symbol while opposing Asian women for dating white men. Chad Nguyen’s name; the portmanteau of Kevin Nguyen and the Chad archetype, are emblematic of what he was meant to be, for me: the worst guy I could think of. But I also wanted to play with what masculinity means to me and how to reconcile it: within the universe, he’s bisexual, and has a long, winding redemption arc. I did consider that it may be possible to misconstrue his character as an alt-right figure/paragon of masculinity a la Patrick Bateman, so I did what American Psycho didn’t. I made him in love with a man (painfully so): which I think would dissuade any other, more conservative readings of the story. Also — I punished him narratively, a lot.

The overall worldbuilding was a satire of Cold War relations: the propagandizing of the East. I was thinking about something an international Chinese student had said to me: that “Americans treat China like it’s North Korea.” I was also thinking about the very deliberate language choices on coverage of socialist countries and countries that don’t align with the Western political structure/hegemony — here’s a quote from one of my essays, part of a broader research project on American journalism and a critical discourse analysis of said journalism:

“Competition on a global scale for dominance in economic hegemony as well as mutually exclusive cultural myths and political ideologies strengthened by post-2008 economic crisis cultural rejuvenation efforts have created a diametrically opposed model of Self and Other…. Particularly, AlAfnan finds topics that are foregrounded by the American outlet are backgrounded by the Chinese newspaper and vice versa, suggesting the proper reading of media texts requires CDA — the study states, “the meaning of media texts is communicated between the lines. ”

And also, this a well-penned Chinese criticism of the American government in the white paper, China: Democracy That Works:

“If the people are awakened only to cast a vote but become dormant afterwards, that is no true democracy. If the people are offered great hopes during electoral campaigning but have no say afterwards, that is no true democracy. If the people are offered fulsome promises during electoral canvassing but are left empty-handed afterwards, that is no true democracy."

China, of course, is capitalist with state-owned enterprises. It is much more similar to America than the cultural narrative around it reflects. I was also thinking about the treatment of Ukraine versus that of Palestine; of the moralizing of aid, the refractions of the same conflicts by American media outlets. The magazine was meant to reflect these in a way that feels believable: my biggest gripe of The Boys  universe was my difficulty in believing the world and the heavy handedness of the satire. I think that for a world to make sense, the characters must operate within a level of believable malice: people must believe they are righteous, and that must be grounded in their material realities.

But again, all this plot and considerations were not fully present in the finished brochure/magazine I established. I started the format with a pseudo-script, but was challenged to make the final product look more ‘complete.’ For me, worlds that don’t work for me unless they have their own internal logic and believability; I care about verisimilitude and detail. The problem then is the level of detail I need in a world: it's therefore difficult to create something that delivers all of it, or does everything I want to do. You can see this very easily with all of what I’ve done so far, but I think this experimentation is necessary. My only other narrative piece before the works for this class was a several thousands page long webcomic that still exists solely on Google Docs. Before sophomore year of college, I’d never written fiction, working exclusively with non-fiction. This does reflect in my world building, which tends towards the academic and theory.

However, I’ve found fiction a very fertile ground for ideation and an interesting vehicle for a lot of the political ideas I have, with the added element of intimacy/feeling provided by the empathy felt for a fictional character and narrative. Part of politics is the narratives told: successful politicians have a narrative they operate on. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about what narratives say, what stories we tell ourselves. I also largely wanted to play with creating artwork I actually want to create: not creating a beautiful object, as I have tried before, nor working with something that is meant to be a standalone piece in a gallery. I think of webcomics in particular, with a certain level of campiness and play to engage viewers. This does not mean creating something mediocre/without standards, but it does mean a space of experimentation for me, and trial and error. Ultimately, that is what I think this past semester has been about for me: learning, and figuring out how to do what I really want to do. How to deliver my ideas in a way that is fun. At the end of the day, I'm really grateful for the opportunity to try these things out!