Yu-Chia Pai · New Media MFA
Exploring Memory Through the Materiality of Digital and Traditional Art
The Clash is a practice-based new media installation that re-engages personal and cultural memory through painting, projection mapping, real-time interaction, and generative AI. Beginning from acrylic paintings of remembered places in Taiwan, the project transforms memory into an immersive digital environment where viewers use their gestures to reveal, distort, and rediscover layered images.
The Clash investigates how personal and cultural memory can be re-engaged through the material tension between traditional painting, generative AI, and real-time interactive projection. By transforming acrylic paintings into AI-generated hallucinations and gesture-controlled immersive environments, the project asks how artists can remain in control of digital systems while using technology to expand, rather than replace, human memory and creative intention.
Memory is not treated as a fixed archive, but as a tension between the transient and the permanent. Personal remembering is fleeting, embodied, and unstable — shaped by place, distance, and emotion. Cultural memory leaves traces that feel enduring, yet shift each time they are translated across media. This project begins from my experience between Taiwan and Canada, asking how memory changes when it moves between touch, image, interaction, and projection.
Personal memory lives in the transient — it fades, shifts, and is reimagined each time it is recalled.
Memory, place, and time collide — personal reinterpretation becomes an ongoing experience, not a single remembered moment.
The project does not choose transient or permanent — it negotiates between them through a layered media system.
This project is shaped by the personal reinterpretation of a clash between memories, locations, and time. Living between Taiwan and Canada, I do not treat memory as something settled. It is an ongoing experience — a collision between what was familiar, what feels foreign, and what keeps shifting as it is translated across media. Four approaches present that collision in different ways and essences.
The work is a triptych exploring the fragmented nature of memory, inviting the viewer to delve into personal memories through the idea of dynamic memories being interpreted over time — becoming blurry or clear again depending on how people engage with it.
A triptych exploring the tactile qualities of traditional media as a method of documenting personal memory, using acrylic paintings as the foundation. Paintings from left to right — Changhua City, Chiayi City, and Lethbridge City — capture imagery from different stages of my life, with videos of each place projected onto the canvas.
The work encapsulates the insecurity and unease of an artist who practiced mainly in traditional media, then gradually transitioned to digital and mixed media — exploring how remembered places expand into virtual, dream-like environments.
Interactive works that treat remembering as active discovery. Through gesture, the viewer re-engages countryside memory, symbolic dream space, and everyday family sites — memory becomes something to uncover rather than passively recall.
The FamilyMart scene condenses this clash into one symbolic site — everyday Taiwanese architecture, childhood familiarity, and cultural identity encountered across distance. The painted image holds a personal, transient trace; the digital reconstruction offers a reinterpreted form of permanence. Both shift each time they are encountered.
Painted memory based on a familiar Taiwanese street corner.
Digitally reconstructed memory space used for projection and interaction.
These videos trace how a culturally loaded architectural motif moves from experiment to applied memory space — the floral window becomes both symbol and interactive surface within the larger clash of location, time, and personal reinterpretation.
The project is informed by Walter Benjamin's discussion of aura, Lev Manovich's theory of new media, Nam June Paik's relationship between technology and presence, and Rinehart and Ippolito's discussion of media preservation and social memory.
Acrylic painting carries touch, texture, brushwork, and subjective memory. It becomes the foundation layer of the project.
Projection, animation, and interaction allow memory to become unstable, moving, and responsive.
Generative AI is used not as an author replacing the artist, but as a tool for expanding remembered images into dream-like variations.
The audience's gesture becomes part of the remembering process. Memory is revealed, erased, distorted, and reconstructed through movement.
The work begins from hand-painted images based on remembered Taiwanese spaces. These paintings hold the tactile and emotional origin of the project.
This video artwork reflects on the concept of memory hallucination by exploring how humans and machines differ in creating imagery. The sequences are generated from my original acrylic paintings, transformed into dream-like videos that maintain their structure while shifting their emotional tone — mirroring how memory is often fragmented and reconstructed.
The visuals transition from bustling streets to quiet countryside, as if dreaming. Layered particle effects reveal the full scene only from a distance — symbolizing how memories often become clearer with time and perspective.
The generated image layers, particle effects, gesture input, and projection output are woven together into one responsive environment — where memory shifts in real time as the viewer moves through the space.
The viewer's hand position controls reveal, clear, particle size, and image blending. The body becomes the interface for negotiating between original memory and AI-transformed memory.
The circular projection space transforms memory from an image into an environment. Viewers are surrounded by fragmented visual layers, allowing memory to be experienced spatially.
In the installation, the viewer does not passively look at an image. Their body becomes part of the memory system. Through hand gestures, they reveal hidden layers, clear visual noise, and activate particles that behave like drifting fragments of memory.
The viewer uncovers hidden AI-generated or painted image layers.
Gesture movement removes or distorts visual particles, suggesting the instability of remembering.
The original painting and AI-generated layer merge, showing memory as a negotiation between human intention and machine interpretation.
Hand gestures and projection in the installation — the body activates memory layers in real time.
Behind-the-scenes documentation of the interactive installation in development.
The viewer enters the space and sees a fragmented projected memory.
As the viewer moves closer, the image begins to reveal itself.
Hand movement activates shifting visual layers and drifting memory fragments.
The viewer experiences memory as something unstable, shared, and reconstructed.
The goal is not to let AI decide what memory means, but to use AI as one layer in a larger human-centered system of remembering, translating, and re-experiencing.
In this project, AI is not treated as a final decision-maker. Instead, it is used as a generative collaborator within an artist-led system. The AI expands visual possibilities, but the artist defines the source material, selects the meaningful outputs, controls the interaction, and designs the audience experience.
Rather than being limited by the AI's generative choices, the artist must remain on top of the system: choosing what memories enter the model, how generated images are interpreted, how they are spatialized, and how viewers encounter them. AI becomes useful only when it is framed by human intention, cultural context, and visual communication.
The artist remains on top of the system. AI expands the image, but human intention gives it meaning.
The circular projection space transforms the viewer's relationship to the image. Instead of looking at memory from a distance, the audience is surrounded by it. The projected images, particle systems, and AI-generated textures create an environment where memory becomes spatial, fragmented, and immersive.
Texture, particles, and AI-generated fragments mapped onto the space.
The viewer encounters memory as an immersive and responsive environment.
The work combines multiple projected layers into one circular visual field.
Documentation of the thesis exhibition — the physical space, installation views, and audience encounter with projected memory works in situ.
Spatial layout for the MFA thesis exhibition at the Penny Gallery, University of Lethbridge — mapping video projections, canvas mapping stations, progress plates, and the interactive circular projection room.
Click either plan to view full screen. For a guided tour of the installed exhibition, use on the hero.
Experimental clips, thesis documentation, and behind-the-scenes footage from the development of the project.
The Clash explores how traditional and digital media carry different emotional values. Painting provides a tactile and personal foundation, while digital interaction allows memory to become unstable, responsive, and spatial. AI expands the visual language of the work, but the meaning remains human-centered.
This project argues that artists and visual communicators should not be controlled by algorithmic decisions. Instead, we can design systems where AI supports human intention, cultural memory, and embodied experience. In this way, technology becomes not a replacement for memory, but a medium for rediscovering it.
Rather than allowing AI to control the direction of visual culture, artists and visual communicators can use AI as a controlled layer within a larger creative system. The goal is not to let the machine decide what memory means, but to design an experience where technology helps memory become visible, spatial, and emotionally convincing.