AKASHA

Design & Animation: Desmond Du
Created: 23 May 2019

Special Thanks to My Teachers: Dominique Elliott, Michael Betancourt, Austin Shaw, Minho Shin, John Colette, Kelly Carlton
Special Thanks to My Friends:

GENESIS 

We, from the moment of birth, continue to take. Life is to constantly sin, life is suffering.

As we progress with life, we adopt more and more egos from the world. We become more selfish and more obsessed with how we project ourselves into the world. We all want to be the best, the famous, the rich, and so, for society and media have goosestepped us into buying things and concepts that we do not need for a good life. We may have made a lot of technological advancement over the past decade but our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. In order to create a saner and more compassionate world, we first begin with a thorough examination of our lives and strip it to its essence.

CONCEPT

It is a dome / ghost pepper projection mapping that demonstrates a reflection of humanity’s ego and attachment to the material world. Utilizing symbolic depiction of greed, aggression that characterize the worlds of sufferring and dissatisfaction known as samsara in Buddhism, a parade of materiality is formed.

This will be an immersive visual experience that borrows iconography from rituals, tribes, religions, and cults. A return to our raw human spirit through an inter-dimensional tunnel populated with sacred geometry, arabesque, the sublime, fragmentation, permutation, abstraction, and things that make you go WTF.

Specifically, I’m looking at Buddhism and the Four Noble Truth in the Buddhism, in which life is suffering, suffering has an origin, suffering can cease, and there is a path in which we can change ourselves to escape the suffering. In the final analysis, the project pertains to the aversion of the admiration of the worldly, journeying towards impermanence and enlightenment.

LOGLINE

A super hyper inter-consciousness dimensional immersive enlightening experience.

PROCESS

— Constructing the Pepper’s Ghost box

Having taken one single industrial design class, I decided to explore the integration of digital media into a construction of some sort. Having practically zero experience with woodworking, I had to macguyver this Pepper’s Ghost box. I began with a giant cardboard box with a sheet of glass as a prototype to see how the concept work. My first experience with this hologram effect was sublime; and thus I began 

 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLEGINCE

— Powering designs through Artificial Intelligence

We are ushering a new age when artificial intelligence is become an inherent tool of the world. It is not something to demonize about but rather it indicates a shift in how technology becomes even more integrated into digital production. Below are designs of my lPepper’s Ghost box.’s oculus in its original vector design, lasercut form, deep-dream translated visuals.