Jiayi Young
Associate Professor of Design
Research Interests: Public-engaged data-driven large-scale installations and social interventions
Jiayi Young is an Assistant Professor of Design at the
University of California, Davis. Her inquiries lie within the
emergent and experimental field of digital media with an emphasis
on the cross-disciplinary areas of design that integrates the
arts, the sciences with cutting-edge technology. Her current
research and creative work are focused on constructing
data-driven sensor-enabled interfaces, installations, real-time
projection graphics, participatory performances, and immersive
environments in cultural and public places with a goal of
creating generative energy to engage the public in social
dialogue. Using multidisciplinary approaches, her work examines
contemporary society including the culture of consumption, the
programming and exploitation of the feminine, cultural
assimilation, and personal identity. Leveraging social media,
crowd-sourced media, and user-created content, she sets up
scenarios and creates conditions to make a visible empathetic
relationship between people in the presence of contemporary
culture. Her work invites the public to participate to come in
close contact with an experience that engages the rethinking of
the human condition.
Young has published and exhibited nationally and internationally,
including Ars Electronica, the International Symposium of
Electronic Art (ISEA); the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA);
Hall of Science, New York; the United Nation’s Fourth Conference
on Women, Beijing, China; the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg,
Russia; and Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne, Germany.
Current Projects
Website: https://www.jiayiyoung.info
>>What
does the bot say to the human?
Data Mapping of 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Twitter
Activity, 2016-ongoing
This project, with its multiple phases, transforms the 2016 United States Presidential Election Twitter data into a large-scale installation to probe the question of how artificial intelligence via the ways of social media assumes form and transforms the shaping of the future of a nation.
>>Encountering danse macabre:
Negotiating Mortality through Viscosity of Time
Jackson Hall, Mondavi Performance Center, UC Davis, 2016
I am interested in the role public participatory environments play in contemporary culture as social acts or popular practices that shape cultural beliefs. In this interdisciplinary project, I seek to make connections across the humanities, from historical literature to contemporary art and dance, to design and craft a large-scale environment that is a hybrid of an interactive art installation and a stage performance to understand the significance of public participatory social act in the medieval aesthetic past, in turn, to examine the socio-historical and cultural framework of past cultural traditions in relationship to the present. This project enlists an exemplary medieval performance tradition of the danse macabre (“the dance of the death”), as a case study, to probe the relationship between performance-oriented social participatory act and the inaccessible. Medievalists have long lamented the limits of historicist methods to reconstruct a far distant aesthetic past. This project reenacts a contemporary interpretation of this medieval tradition.
>>Dance of a Tiger
Multi-dimensional Mapping of Migration Tracks of Pelagic
Species
Phase I: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia, 2012
Phase II: Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne Germany, 2013
Phase III: University of Florida, 2017
This project is a multi-dimensional soundscape that maps migration tracks of pelagic (open-ocean) species over time and across geographic locations. Phase I and II mapped one predator and three prey over the course of a two-year period, in the environment of their corresponding sea surface temperature (SST) changes. In the presence of the pressing concern of overfishing, phase III of the project maps migration tracks of Bluefin tunas in the context of fishing vessel routes in the Pacific Ocean. The goal of the immersive installation is to engage the public to experience a visual and audible environment that reflects marine lives in the oceans.
Awards and Grants
- 2018 Principal Investigator, Global Affairs Seed Grant, UC Davis, $45,000
- 2018 Principal Investigator, UC Davis Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellow
- 2018 Principal Investigator, University of California Humanities Research Institute Metadata 2.0 Grant
- 2016 Collaborator, 2016 CounterPulse COMBUSTIBLE ART AND TECH RESIDENCY, CounterPulse, San Francisco, CA
- 2016 Co-Principal Investigator, Crocker Art Museum Commission, Sacramento, CA, $15,900
- 2016 Principal Investigator, Small Research Grant, UC Davis, CA, $2,000
- 2016 Principal Investigator, Dean’s Academic Enrichment Fund, UC Davis, CA, $5,000 Travel Grant, UC Davis, CA, $1,600
- 2016 2nd place, START Technarte World-Wide Competition: Art in Astronomical Observatories, La Palma Observatory, Spain
- 2016 Finalist, Golden 1 Center, Public Art Commission, Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission, Sacramento, CA, $5,000
