The Aliens that Flew into My Home and Stayed There

Research experience statement phd

Yuling Chen

Striving to be content, she moved her hand in circles holding a window frame. That’s the video performance for my thesis research at OCAD University. It captures humans at a fragile and vulnerable existence in their domestic dwelling at a contentious time between 2018 and 2019 facing a new global threat, impeding financial bubbles and the Trump administration. The Aliens that Flew into My Home and Stayed There is a visual research about how immigrants move in the world. It is an exhibition exploring interior space and the hybridizing potential of exterior space represented by the insects, an external element. My research started in 2018 fall at OCAD University taking the thesis class. It is about how communist China oppressed people through surveillance and elimination of four harms. The exhibitions consisted of two videos: one is a performance of looking out of the windows and wiping the windows in a series of movement and motion holding up a wooden canvas frame representing windows, another one is an edited footage of found videos of flies on the web, on youtube. The research question for this project was how Chinese immigrants gather resources and move up into the world; it is an installation exploring the authoritarian governments and their surveillance states from a perspective often ignored in the urban environment, gendered gazes, and sexualized interpretations from various groups, people and organizations. I approached this research project through active original and archival research, locating and looking for photographs of old homes in Toronto Archive in the areas of Rosedale close to where I lived, creating screenshots of other artists with similar interests’ works, for example, Niki De Saint Phalle, her tarot garden, action paintings and large human scale sculpture Nana, building a research narratives through texts and writings on my website about how urban environments have changed due to these archival instincts and feverish documentation by surveillance cameras. 

The outcomes of my research was an exhibition at the OCAD University in GradEx 104 in 2019 in the spring with the same name. I took my thesis professors and instructors, Richard Fung, Judith Doyle, and Johanna Householder’s advice to develop further of my research works I have initiated in my professors, Bentley Jarvis, Simone Jones, and Kathy Kiloh’s classes, of a humanity focused project, exploring how technology help people change their behaviors, to make it more personal, and poetic through video performances. The focus on performances and technology has allowed me to learn new research skills through archives and using the data obtained to clean up my acts, making the exhibited works and writings more concise focusing on how technology become a central part of the Chinese immigrants’ lives and works. I have recorded an interview between myself and my mother talking about how we moved to different houses, apartments, dwellings in my childhood having, taking care of and encountering various external elements, such as pets, wild animals, squirrels and birds at the threshold of domestic bliss. I have learned through this thesis research how to interview people based on their backgrounds, interests and activities, how to find important images and conclusions in my original research and how the research could flourish and proliferate through my integration of technology in the research, such as AI searches, cameras and projectors. I have learnt to be patient, creative and adept during my research experiences changing, learning and transforming my research, methods and methodologies along the way encountering various questions posed by my professors and obstacles in terms of finding right materials to display the projected videos (e.g. I settled on window meshes in the end for its related domesticity, material malleability and inherent meanings of changing homes, cleaning up and blocking external elements). 

The research has also provided me with a future research question and methodology in my proposed current PhD studies: what will people do if they accelerate their interaction with technologies, AI, art and visual research? My research experience started when I encountered a protest called Black Lives Matter in 2018 in Toronto near the metropolitan police headquarter and right in front of the Native Child and Family Services Toronto. I did some interviews of the protesters. Then I proceeded to take pictures of them with my point and shoot camera. I put those photos on my website as a part of my thesis research already starting in the summer of 2018. Since then, as I read on the news and literature, the protests movement Black Lives Matter has not only changed their approach making their movement and protests camera ready and with slogans for example No Justice, No Peace easier to fit into my research and writings, but also intercepted and developed further with later protests of the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Hong Kong’s retracting of extradition bill protests in 2019 and 2020 rebranding themselves as pro-democracy protests from earlier iteration of occupy central in 2011. 

My own research has also changed and shifted to anticipate and encompass these news, movements and social economic marches and protests: in the fall of 2018 after I entered thesis officially, I had proposed my research as a more design-based initiative to use and make constructed triangle roof-like hat structure and post for photography with them on my head in front of institutions like churches. I have had received criticism and critique from the professors Judith Doyle, about how the structures I made hasn’t reflected my research question, how Chinese immigrants make ends meet and move in the labor movements. I promptly changed my research materials and methods making it more archival, documenting various images, ideas and texts on my website after the fall 2018, creating a questionnaire in order to interview my mother. We explored the complex issues of poverty, wealth inequality and artificial intelligence through asking questions about home, pets and Chinese governmental policies on regulating human populations.