Walking Along the Border
Walking Along the Border is an immersive experience that invites each viewer to consider what it’s like to live as some of the most vulnerable people—and to ponder what we owe to one another as human beings.
Agency
Yan Yan, Student Project
Practice Area
Client
Art Center College of Design
Industry
The Challenge
One of the challenges that I faced during the creation of Walking Along the Border was likely how to use digital technology to create an emotional and immersive experience for viewers. The project’s core features revolve around the goal of allowing viewers to explore the refugee crisis in a personal and empathetic way, which can be a difficult task to achieve with digital installations. Another challenge was working within a tight timeframe of just one month, which required efficient planning to bring the concept to completion.
Project Vision
Walking Along the Border witnesses its subjects and their desperate search for safety, shelter, and justice: from numbers to facts; from teeming refugee camps to barbed-wire borders; and from dislocation and disillusionment to courage, endurance, and adaptation. It presents an immersive experience that invites a most personal exploration: one that lets each viewer consider what it’s like to live as some of the most vulnerable people—and to ponder what we owe to one another as human beings.
The final layer of Walking Along the Border lies with the audience, in the outgoing rush of their unique, cumulative responses to what they saw and felt, to take it all in and connect to it through their own experiences. The installation gives audiences the space to explore the refugee crisis in a way they may have not felt it before. The experience becomes a reminder that only the good fortune of being born in a peaceful country stands between the audience and the refugees. Their peril results not from their actions but from arbitrary accidents of geography.
The refugee crisis is the biggest subject of our times. More people are on the move and dying on the way to safety. This is not a topic we can turn away from. Even if you try, it will still be there, and we will still have to deal with it. You can’t stop it by building border walls; people will keep coming when their survival is at stake. We have an obligation to think empathetically and try to solve the issues at the root of it all, to think about how we will live together.
Yan Yan
Yan Yan
Design + Execution
The installation features a proximity sensor that tracks people within a Cartesian coordinate system and communicates with a projector to interact with video content and data, Encouraging the audience to use back shadow to decode information about refugees.
The project’s core features include its immersive experience that invites personal exploration, merging multiple sources of information into one exhibition, and giving audiences the space to explore the refugee crisis in a new way. My inspiration for the project comes from the urgency of the refugee crisis and the need to think empathetically and solve the issues at the root of it all.
Yan Yan
Yan Yan
Yan Yan
Yan Yan
Yan Yan
Project Details
The jurors really enjoyed how this student tackled an important topic in a really simple yet effective way. The use of overlapping projections in black is both beautiful and clear. The human body as a way to conceal and reveal information is really unique and makes the viewer an active participant in the piece.
A skillful solution characterized by the excellent interplay of graphics and digital design to highlight a socially significant topic. The black and white graphics and interpretation underline the designer's professionalism and unique perspective.
Design Team
Yan Yan (designer)
Collaborators
Brad Bartlett (instructor), Miles Mazzie (instructor), Julian Stein (instructor)
Photo Credits
Yan Yan
Open Date
March 2022