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INTERACTIVE ART
COURSE EXHIBITION

Feb 19-26, 2021

Galleries V1 and V2
Experimental Studio (Room G203)

Väre Building
Aalto University
Otaniementie 14
Espoo, Finland

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the exhibition is open only to students and staff of Aalto during the opening hours of the building.

Cross Waves is a sea state that occurs when two or more nonparallel wave systems meet. The waves generated by this phenomenon are dangerous to swimmers, boats, and ships caught between the crossing waves.

Cross Waves is also the name of the Spring exhibition of Aalto Media Lab students. It is an exhibition that presents interactive artworks that have been created in the meeting point of art and technology.

Ristiaallokko | Cross Waves exhibition is the outcome of the Interactive Art course at the Aalto Media Lab at Aalto University. The aim of the course is to explore the notion of interaction within the context of new media art.


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Miss(ed) Chimera

JASMINE XIE





Miss(ed) Chimera occupies the intersection of exceptional identities, circumventing the ordinary human and thereby slipping by the conditionals of humanity to create a super, non-human being. Paying homage to the ‘magical girl’ genre, Miss(ed) Chimera possesses in her transformed state a hyper-girly, hyper-cutesy appearance with heart motifs throughout her outfit. Simultaneously, she hints at a distancing from humanity, with occasional unsettling shadows under her skirt, hidden eyes, and a void where her ‘heart’ should be, triggered by recognition from the human (inter)actor. While she may pass for a ‘magical girl’, endowed with special powers to save others, others who know what they are looking for can detect the other aspect of her identity.

Miss(ed) Chimera is a project centered on the concept of ‘passing’ and ‘flagging’ - ‘passing’ for one set of identities, while ‘flagging’ as one’s true set of identities. She passes as an ‘acceptable’ ‘abnormality’ - the magical girl of Japanese media, the hero protagonist distinguished by her magical powers - but can signal her more interior identity, that of a monstrous, non-human chimera, by triggering the light effects that make aspects of the monstrosity visible, thereby ‘flagging’ to others who know what to look for that she too is Other, as they may also be. The ordinary viewer may never be treated to the glimpse of the Other, and may be satisfied by her passing for special, but not monstrous, but should a similarly Othered being approach, she can alert and create the connection of mutual understanding between the Othered interactor and herself.

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