dieciocho

 What really stood out to me about Jiayi Young’s work is how she takes digital things that usually just live on our phones or online and turns them into something physical. At first, that might not sound like a big deal, especially in an art show where everything is physical anyway. But with Jiayi’s work, it feels different. She’s not just putting tech-related themes into art, she’s literally building objects and installations that make you experience the digital world in a totally new way. One piece that I thought was really cool involved Twitter hashtags. Instead of showing the data on a screen like most people would, she built this thing with liquid and clicking sounds that represented how often the hashtags were used. It sounds weird, but it actually made something kind of abstract feel real and alive. I never really thought about how often we interact with invisible systems online until I saw it turned into something you can see and hear. She also had this piece where she pr...

This is a close to last minute pivot due to issues with my original project ( the short film) however, this photo book still connected and draw inspiration deeply from Roland Barthes’ Image-Music-Text , especially his concept of the “punctum”, that small, striking detail in an image that pierces through surface meaning and evokes something deeply personal. By capturing human emotions in black and white, the work moves beyond straightforward representation and instead invites a more intimate, introspective response from the viewer. Each portrait refuses a single interpretation, reflecting Barthes’ idea of the “text” as something open, layered, and re-readable. Without the distraction of color, the images lean into light, shadow, and gesture to create a kind of visual music, a quiet language that speaks directly to feeling. The project also echoes the lyric “the darkness keeps you shining” from The Weeknd’s I Can't Wait To Get There . In this context, darkness is not emptiness but th...