Xiaoyu Liu
Digital Exhibition: The Path — Echoes of Technological Innovation is a digital exhibition exploring the relationship between art, technology and human experience. This idea developed during my thesis research. The project responds to contemporary anxieties around rapid technological development, particularly the fear of losing human value or being left behind by technological change.
Through a one-way narrative structure and spatial design, the exhibition guides the viewer through a conceptual journey about how technology has reshaped artistic creation, visual culture and our perception.
The aim of this project is to explore how technological innovation influences the development of art and the role of human creativity. This was a question that I always thinked about. Rather than presenting technology only as a threat, I want to investigates how each major technological shift opens new paths for artistic expression and conceptual thinking.
I love about create a narrative digital exhibition that communicates complex ideas through space, atmosphere and visual experience. Furthermore, this project gave me the opportunity to integrate knowledge from different fields.
Another objective is to test whether a digital exhibition can communicate a concept in the form of a story, using spatial progression, lighting, interaction and visual symbolism instead of a traditional written or linear presentation.
The final outcome is an immersive digital exhibition environment created in Blender and Unreal Engine 5. All 3D models were produced in Blender, where the initial lighting tests were also carried out, before being imported into UE5 for final lighting, visual effects and interactive development. The project is also available for VR preview in Unreal Engine 5.
The exhibition consists of several narrative sections, beginning with the camera obscura and the emergence of photography, then moving into the reproduction and consumption of images in the nineteenth century, and finally ending with a philosophical section inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and other thinkers.
I learned a lot about exhibitions, especially the arrangement of text, images, and lighting. I rarely used UE5 before, but I learned about UE5's Blueprint system because I wanted to create a small interactive element, and it's actually quite interesting.
During my research of the project I learned a lot about the ideas of philosophers and gained a deeper understanding of the evolution of art in each period of time. I found out that information is easily transmitted and received now, but also people are also easily guided by information. Our choices, ideas and creative interpretation become increasingly important.
This thesis takes game Black Myth: Wukong as a case study, and uses cultural studies and media theory to explore the construction, displacement and reconstruction of cultural meaning in interactive media. It analyzes the differences in experience paths, aesthetic expectations and emotional resonance among players from different cultural backgrounds, and proposes that cultural authenticity and global accessibility can complement and reinforce each other in interactive media. Media not only transmits culture, but also shapes the one that is experiencing it.
Hi, I am Xiaoyu. I am a digital artist who have a particular interest in culture studies and also enjoy exploring intercultural communication, comics, game, psychology, philosophy and other related fields. I love creating immersive art and incorporating knowledge from other disciplines into my designs. My designs also place particular emphasis on lighting.
