#Congratulations! Director Hsin-Chien Huang's latest VR works, Samsara and The Starry Sand Beach, were nominated for the 78th Venice International Film Festival!
The 78th Venice International Film Festival (VIFF) announced the shortlisted nominees for the category of VR Film. Taiwanese new media artist, Distinguished Professor of NTNU, Hsin-Chien Huang, winner of the BEST VR Experience in 2017 with his work La Camera Insabbiata, will again contest for the Leone d’oro this year with two of his latest, sci-fi inspired works, Samsara and The Starry Sand Beach. While the Taiwanese athletes are striving for the Gold Medals at the Tokyo Olympics as we speak, director Hsin-Chien Huang dazzles the jury of VIFF with his visually-stunning and thought-provoking works — bringing cutting-edge Taiwanese VR films onto the international stage and letting world-wide audience sees Taiwan!
Before being selected for the 78th Venice International Film Festival, Samsara episode 1. has already grabbed the Jury Award at SXSW and Best VR Story at the Cannes XR Competition. This futuristic VR experience teleports the audience onto a journey that spans millions of years. Samsara is a Sanskrit word meaning “ the world ”. In Buddhism, it means what we perceive as the world is actually an endless cycle of karma (cause and effect), a cycle of life, death and rebirth in the six realms of existence. In this fascinating VR work, the audience is reincarnated into the bodies of different persons and creatures, experiencing the universe in their new bodies and in search for the ultimate spiritual transcendence.
Samsara depicts an apocalyptical story in the near future where human greed has depleted the earth’s resource. Catastrophic wars to fight for resource resulted in global destruction. Finally, the remaining humans had to leave the Earth and go on a search in space for a new place to live.
Nevertheless, their desperate, long quest for a new homeland… could it be just a loop in space and time? The cycle of greedy domination and total destruction that then necessitates the search for a new home…. may have hopelessly repeated itself over and over again? The constant evolutionary process and so-called progress, without transformation in consciousness and spiritual advancement, is nothing more than a Möbius strip that leads nowhere, perhaps…?
Samsara is an experiment based on the theory of Embodied Cognition. Through interactivity and VR, the audience gets to live inside the bodies of different persons and creatures, experiencing their feelings from within. Perhaps It is when we can perceive the world in different bodies that we may truly appreciate the thoughts of others and empathize with them. An experience that will also help us better comprehend our own existence and learn to live in harmony with all.
Samsara explores a complex of deeply interconnected issues of ecology, technology, natural resource and war, etc. It's a story about a journey humans are forced to take on, after having destroyed the earth with nuclear disasters. The survivors seek a new planet, in the boundless, interstellar space, to carry on their lives. Gradually they evolve into a new life form artificially. Yet, many years passed and they’ve come to realize that they would never make it to the new planet they’ve been dreaming of. In fact, they have simply been returning to the Earth, in different life forms, time after time.
Director Huang applies the concepts of embodied cognition, offering a unique way to contemplate about the nature of life. As the audience are transported into different bodies each time, they gain a brand new perspective to experience the world views presented in Samsara.
Samsara was produced under the guidance of Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) and Kaohsiung Film Archive VR(VR FILM LAB), it’s a sate-of-the-art VR production made 100% in Taiwan. In the VR experience, viewers are transformed into various kinds of animals to interact with the scenes, including species unique and indigenous to Taiwan, such as Taiwan Blue Magpie and Formosan Black Bear.
Samsara Ep.1 features the latest somatosensory technology, including 4D views shooting techniques by the Industrial Technology Research Institute and TAICCA. A digital shooting system comprised of a high-sensitivity 4 million-pixel, full-color CCD sensor and 48 4DV-EX-Z cameras made it possible for Samsara Ep.1 to be taken from an omnidirectional view and shot without any blind spots, creating the ultimate immersive experience.
THE STARRY SAND BEACH, directed by Hsin-Chien Huang and produced in cooperation with Lucid Reality (France) and Oready 瑞意創科 Oready Innovation Lab (Taiwan), is a scientific fairy tale about a unique ecological wonder in Taiwan and Japan, the shiny starry sand beaches. Foraminifera, from the Latin word “foramen” meaning hole, is a single-celled organism that builds a shell with multiple chambers which intercommunicate with one another through holes. On the Qimei Island, Taiwan and the Yaeyama Islands, Japan, beaches have been formed by a specific species of foraminifera with star-shaped shells made of calcium carbonate. Like the real stars in the legends, grains of the starry sand have also been preserving the earth’s memories for millions of years.
THE STARRY SAND BEACH is a real-time 3D interactive VR adventure into the natural and mythological landscape of the starry sand beaches on Qimei Island in Penghu Archipelago, Xing Sha Wan in Kenting National Park and Taketomi Island in the far south of Japan. The experience is full of aesthetically-amazing elements and enriched with cultural and religious significance like Shintoism in Japan. A beautiful, haunting legend tells the story of the starry sand…
The final winners will be presented at the award ceremony held on Sep11. With great anticipation and hopes, Hsin-Chien Huang is expected to bring home again the grand prize for Taiwan!
https://www.labiennale.org/en/news/selection-complete-works-venice-vr-expanded-0
#黃心健 #HsinChienHuang
#samsara #chalkroom
#LaCameraInsabbiata
#VeniceInternationalFilmFestival #VIFF
#Thestarrysandbeach
#LucidReality
#OreadyInnovationLab
life stage theory 在 李怡 Facebook 的最佳貼文
No Forbidden Zones in Reading (Lee Yee)
German philosopher Hegel said, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
In April 1979, the post-Cultural Revolution era of China, the first article of the first issue of Beijing-based literary magazine, Dushu [meaning “Reading” in Chinese]," shook up the Chinese literary world. The article, titled “No Forbidden Zones in Reading”, was penned by Li Honglin. At the time, the CCP had not yet emerged from the darkness of the Cultural Revolution. What was it like in the Cultural Revolution? Except for masterpieces by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and a small fraction of practical books, all books were banned, and all libraries were closed. The Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, and 2 years later in 1978, the National Publishing Bureau decided to allow 35 books to be “unbanned”. An interlude: When the ban was first lifted, there was no paper on which to print the books because the person with authority over paper was Wang Dongxing, a long-term personal security of Mao’s, who would only give authorization to print Mao. The access to use paper to print books other than Mao was a procedural issue. The Cultural Revolution was already on its way to be overturned. The door to printing these books was opened only after several hang-ups.
“No Forbidden Zones in Reading” in the first issue of Dushu raised a question of common sense: Do citizens have the freedom to read? “We have not enacted laws that restrict people’s freedom of reading. Instead, our Constitution stipulates that people have the freedom of speech and publication, as well as the freedom to engage in cultural activities. Reading ought to be a cultural activity,” argued Li. It was not even about the freedom of speech, but simply reading. Yet this common sense would appear as a subversion of the paralyzing rigid ideas formulated during the Cultural Revolution, like a tossed stone that raises a thousand ripples. Dushu’s editorial department received a large number of objections: first, that there would be no gatekeeper and mentally immature minors would be influenced by trashy literature; second, that with the opening of the Pandora box, feudalism, capitalism and revisionism would now occupy our cultural stage. The article also aroused waves of debates within the CCP. Hu Yaobang, then Minister of Central Propaganda, transferred and appointed Li Honglin as the Deputy Director of the Theory Bureau in his department. A colleague asked him directly, “Can primary school students read Jin Pin Mei [also known in English as The Plum in the Golden Vase, a Chinese novel of manners composed in late Ming dynasty with explicit depiction of sexuality]?”
“All Four Doors of the Library Should be Open” was published in the second issue of Dushu, as an extension to “No Forbidden Zones in Reading”. The author was Fan Yuming, but was really Zeng Yansiu, president of the People’s Publishing House.
In the old days, there was a shorthand for the three Chinese characters for “library”: “book” within a “mouth”. The four sides of the book are all wide open, meaning that all the shackles of the banned books are released. “No Forbidden Zones in Reading” explains this on a theoretical level: the people have the freedom to read; “All Four Doors of the Library Should be Open” states that other than special collection books, all other books should be available for the public to loan.
The controversy caused by “No Forbidden Zones in Reading” lasted 2 years, and in April 1981, at the second anniversary of Dushu, Director of the Publishing Bureau, Chen Hanbo, penned an article that reiterated that there are “No Forbidden Zones in Reading”, and that was targeting an “unprecedented ban on books that did happen”.
Books are records of human wisdom, including strange, boring, vulgar thoughts, which are all valuable as long as they remain. After Emperor Qin Shihuang burned the books, he buried the scholars. In history, the ban on books and literary crimes have never ceased.
Engraved on the entrance to Dachau concentration camp in Germany, a famous poem cautions: When a regime begins to burn books, if it is not stopped, they will turn to burn people; when a regime begins to silent words, if it is not stopped, they will turn to silent the person. At the exit, a famous admonishment: When the world forgets these things, they will continue to happen.
Heine, a German poet of the 19th century, came up with “burning books and burning people”. There was a line before this: This is just foreplay.
Yes, all burning and banning of books are just foreplay. Next comes the literary crimes, and then “burning people”.
I started working at a publishing house with a high school degree at 18, and lived my entire life in a pile of books. 42 years ago, when I read “No Forbidden Zones in Reading” in Dushu, I thought that banned books were a thing of the past. Half a century since and here we are, encountering the exact same thing in the freest zone for reading in the past century in the place which enlightened Sun Yat-sen and the rest of modern intellectuals, a place called Hong Kong.
Oh, Hegel’s words are the most genuine.
life stage theory 在 AppWorks Facebook 的最佳貼文
[How Does a Customer's Need for Progress Create Demand?]
Have you ever wondered what is going on inside someone else's head?
Why do customers who have learned about your product fail to try it?
How can you use marketing to create demand in potential customers who have not taken that risky first step like the early adopters?
The answers lie in figuring out whether your product can actually help someone feel progress. Progress enabling is a core demand-side catalyst in early stage product marketing.
A core piece of the marketing process is understanding how an emotional or mental demand for progress tunes a potential customer's strategy for choosing your product. You may have heard of "Jobs to Be Done" theory. There's a piece of this theory that I have used when talking with founders about how they shape marketing messages and strategies for early stage product.
Take a look at the image. These "levers" of progress making forces are good ways to interpret what a customer might be experiencing when they choose your product. How can you exploit this? There's a conceptual approach and then actual steps.
Conceptually: It's important to approach this by undrstanding that a customer wants to assign a job to your product. In other words, they don't choose your product because it's cheaper than the competitions or because it's blue or red, or big or small. They aren't worried about features. What they are concerned with is, "How does this help me do the thing that I want to get done?"
As the founder, who is also managing marketing, you need to interpret that inner drive, and then translate that back to the customer as a phrase, a story, or a design concept that helps them see that journey in your product.
Okay right, so how do I do that? Good question.
Tactics
1. Find early adopters of your product. You have obviously had early success, that's why you are contributing time, thoughts and money to this marketing project. You need to talk to those early adopters.
2. Ask them to sit down for an interview with you after telling them you would like to interview them about their personal journey in choosing this product. This can be on the phone or through online video, but it's ideally in person. You want to be able to see body language, facial expressions, and feel the tone of the person when you ask them questions about their journey.
3. Work through a series of questions with them that focus on their emotional state and their approach to the product. There might be several types of questions here, but what you are trying to dig for is: "What were you thinking when you chose this product? What were you feeling?"
4. At this point, you want to really get super detailed about exactly what they wanted, how they obtained it and what was the result of that success. Ask them to play a movie in their head, and they are the star of that movie, and ask them to describe, step by step, as if they are in that movie, exactly what happened when they chose your product.
5. Take copious notes about this. Try to interview a series of people in this same manner. Make it a logical process and standardize it.
At the end of this process, you should have a trend. Each of these customers should show you something that is similar to each other customer about the WHY of their choosing.
It should resemble something close to this image. There should be encounters with each of these progress-making forces.
Your marketing story then needs to take the shape of offering the product as a catalyst or an enabler of this progress. No one product will look the same in terms of its storytelling characteristics.
If you want an example of what a progress-making story looks like in marketing, you should watch the video about Snickers that I have put at the end of this post. You should be able to see exactly what I am talking about. The marketing for this product is a story, not about the features of the candy, but about the progress that the customer feels, exactly as he feels it. And the product is simply the prop in that customer journey. It's about experience.
I hope this helps early stage founders understand the forces of progress that are in a customer's life. If you would like to talk about your marketing strategy, please ping me by leaving a comment or sending me a message. At AppWorks, we love spending time with founders and figuring out these hard problems.
Video: https://youtu.be/vW6ZXHWvaGc
If you are a founder who would like help getting better at building, marketing, or driving revenue growth, come join us at AppWorks Accelerator for the 2020 session beginning in March, applications close on December 16: http://bit.ly/32YvBYh
Doug Crets
English Communications Master, AppWorks
life stage theory 在 Erik Erikson's 8 Stage Psychosocial Theory: Helps explain how 的推薦與評價
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