Content
Soundwalking
Sound Analysis|Conceptual Interventions
World Building: The Hermit
Satirical Criticism|Pencil Sketches|Model Making
An Ever Changing Game
Design Playkit|Model Making
These projects are a personal attempt in inquirying different design methodolgies to explore the fundamental relationship between people and the built environment.
It encapsuates an ambition to remain adaptive to preceding architectural tenets and use them as a framework to design autonomous systems within spaces that supports social conditions in lieu of social exchange.
A New Type of Church: Walls Don't Talk
Material Study|Model Making
A Small Death
Series of Ceramics|Sketches|Excerpt
Soundwalking: Conceptual Interventions
Individual
Illustrator, Procreate, Rhino3D, Photoshop
July, 2024
This study is meant to explore the desensitized existence of the acoustic environment. Through conducting a soundwalk, the listener aims to transcend into the sonic environment through the use of their auditory apparatus - the ear as a way to analyze the landscape.
Practicing deep listening is a way to refresh one's bodily experience and its interaction with the surroundings. This act of hearing can potentially invoke new ways of design to implement measures that can effectively diffuse unnecessary sounds within the sonic environment.
12:30pm - am 11:30 :
12:30pm - am 11:30 :
Date: May 10, 2024
Time: 11:30am - 12:30pm
10,2024 Date: May
10,2024 Date: May
Route Map
Route Map
Soundwalking is an immersive practice where participants walk through an environment while paying close attention to its sounds. It involves consciously listening to the soundscape of a place, including natural, human-made, and mechanical sounds. The goal is to develop a deeper understanding of how sound shapes the experience of this area; and attempt to create conceptual interventions that will provide a more pleasant auditory experience on High Street. Measuring Method: Ear and Feet
Listening To High Street, Hong Kong
Sound Conditions
Mapping Conditions
Sensation Analysis Sensation Synthesis: Noise Reduction
Sound Conditions
Soundwalk Route on Topography
Though industrialized noises has a way of bringing us to life. The notion of not creating them at a mere imitative reproduction is a key to neutralize the becoming of sound as a byproduct of the built environment.
Considering the use of sound as a preliminary framework to offset the building parameters of an environment can create the possibility of a new type of urban soundscape.
One where buildings are acoustically conscious and can mitigate long lasting sound stressors.
World Building: The Hermit
Individual
Illustrator, Procreate August, 2024
The Hermit is an attempt in world building, simultaneously a satirical criticism; provoking reflections on environmental degradation.
It aims to question modern proposals on underground living. While this way of living may be innovative, once the deeper one digs into the earth, wouldn’t that mean we are one step closer to hitting the bottom of the barrel?
This project uses small excerpts as a way to unfold an entirely imaginative underground city. Utilizing conjunctions as its verbiage to form continous pockets of spaces and paths within the Sunken City; of which each layer in the underground ‘vertical city’ has a symbiotic relationship to one another.
In the Sunken City, the hermit found herself at the edge of a staircase. And there were no candles to light the way, all she could see were spirals of steps that circled down...down...down
Each step became harder to see. She steadied herself and followed the faint crackles of the furnace to guide the way.
Then, as she descended, she saw some reflective glows on the damp stone walls. When she arrived at the last step, she saw a table of tools and a blacksmith waiting for her! Excerpt 1
2
...the hermit's feet ached because the journey to the upper worlds was a long and treacherous one. Then she searched for the entrance that is just concealed behind a curtain of woolly vines. And it revealed a hidden path that led her down, down, and down...
So the hermit gripped each rung of the ladder, slowly making way into the depths. Then as her feet touched the ground, she trudged and dragged her body through the tunnel.
It was nice to come home to the quietness of the cave after a long day against the evil Palelies.Then, she dragged her weary body to the familiar sight of her cushy bean bag. Extending her short arms, she reached for a book from the shelves. But because of the day she had, it wasn't long until her eyelids grew heavier... Excerpt 3
The hermit made way to the upperlands, to take a moment away from all the noises.
As she stood by the tunnel's opening, she questioned:
To what extent do we need to innovate to sustain ourselves?
If only we'd come to understand the earth can be abundant when we limit the production of matter, we wouldn't have to endure mesasurable consequences and live amongst material and noise excess.
It is time to recognize - enough is enough
An Ever Changing Game
Individual Photoshop, Rhino3D, Illustrator, Procreate October, 2024
This project leverages the idea of gamification to transform twenty maze solutions found on everyday cereal boxes into a design play-kit. The aim of this project serves as a metaphor for ongoing personal explorations and a visualizer to take into account the placement of buildings and its relational programs.
Metaphorically, the connections created between the kit of parts represent the early years of life, illustrating the pivotal and ever changing moments within complexities and challenges.
A New Type of Church: Walls Don't Talk
Individual
Rhino3D, Illustrator, Procreate, Photoshop
December, 2024
Silence exists as a passive yet potent state of absence.
This project challenges the conventional practice of creating vast acoustics within churches by proposing a radical religious monument that mitigates visual embellishments and echoes; flattening the importance of reverberant acoustics within secular spaces.
This provokes the question whether we can evoke feelings of reaching the divine through achieving quietness and clarity. In the structure's attempt to diffuse sound, this generates an immediate conviction of sound and of reality. Harnessing clarity with everyday materials to fill the new prototype with the spirit of truthfulness and godliness.
For centuries, secular spaces have been the houses of gods and deities. Beyond their visual grandeur, the reverberant sonic environment produced by these monumental spaces has amplified their godly aura.
This, however, raises a modern question...
Reverbrant Religious Monuments into Non-Reverbrant Religious Monuments:
By strategically analyzing and selecting key precedential elements of churches, the prototype aims to preserve the sanctity and spiritual essence of the space while creating closeness and openness by manipulating acoustic foam panels as walls.
The innate ability for acoustic panels to absorb sound provides a leverage to create a new type of church by instilling truthfulness and clarity.
While it challenges the longstanding tradition of amplified secular speeches, the spirit of this new church remains grounded in its values. So, the question is: does the overwhelming reverberations, often perceived as divine, truly bring us closer to God? Or does it obscure clarity, distancing us from an intimate and personal connection with the divine?
A Small Death
Individual Photoshop, Procreate December, 2024
A series of ceramic pieces done based on a study of flowers.
The form of each piece references the transient nature of life-wilting flowers. This is in relation to the frailty of life, swiftness of time, and the inescapable demise of morality.
Using clay - an enduring medium and creating these pieces repetitively allowed personal exploration of permanence in impermanence through the material and conversations with the instructor.
The most devastating example of impermanence is - death.
To find permanence within impermeance is to identify the ephemeral states and come to terms with the idea that fleeting moments are the ones that make lasting impression, not death.
A Conversation on What Comes Next, 2024
(Whirrling sounds of the pottery wheel)
J: So how did you end up here, with this shop?
R: Well, I used to be a programmer, the c kind...BLECK!
R: But, It wasn't giving me any purpose...
R: So, I packed up everything and moved.
J: To Canada?
R: Yeah.
J: Were you at all terrified? How did you adjust?
R: Nope, I just did.
J: You make it sound so easy.
J: There is so much to consider, I have so many doubts on what to do next...what if tomorrow is my last day on earth?!
R: WHAT ! ! !
R: Honestly, just mix me back into clay when I passed. In the process of living, sure lots of cracks and messiness but they make you human, no?
R: Sometimes, its in the breaking, the reshaping that you find permanence
Time can be fleeting but it is ok to not take things so seriously all the time!! Not worrying too much about the outcome gives you more power to, well, do things, experience more.
J: (starts centering and coning)
R: You don't have much left! Be SWIFTY this time!
(R gets up and left the room)
janisetwk@gmail.com