Not an Island (Teaching Project with Tutorial Series)

Fall 2021 - Adjunct Professor - Virginia Commonwealth University - Foundation Art (Space Research)

I assigned 13 teams of 4-5 students to synthesize/grow/mutate a biome from a seed/spore.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1_6uktRWO-5gVDEnx4hAekwdNV8f-6TI

Invoking John Donne's 1624 meditative prose, this project aimed to reconnect students to each other through hybridized (embodied and digital) experiences of space and environment after emerging from isolation brought on by the 2020 pandemic. I devised an accessible workflow of translating physical and familiar elements into 3D space through image capture techniques of scanning and photography.

I produced a companion series of YouTube tutorials for my students to serve as reference and a foundation for visual and technical vocabulary.

I led students from conceptualization, to image capture, to processing and modelling pipelines in Blender. In addtion, I compiled their islands, and built a game application in Unreal Engine optimized to run on students’ Windows and Mac computers.