bio
Liangjie Xia is a media artist and programmer presently based in New York City. His work explores alternative forms of communication through innovative applications of technology, his experiments vary from interactive data visualization, mobile applications to physical installations. He loves and contributes to open source projects, and hacks with whatever is handy. Liangjie recently received Master of Professional Studies degree from Interactive Telecommunications Program of NYU.
contact
E-mail: leejayxia [at] gmail [dot] com
Resume available upon request.
projects
Ongoing and class projects
Visit weblog to read more about ongoing and class projects.
Invisible Cities (Work In Progress) / 2010
A project by Christian Marc Schmidt & Liangjie Xia
By revealing the social networks present within the urban environment, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city - a city of the mind. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.
Invisible Cities maps information from one realm - online social networks - to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.
Built with: Processing
Im-personal: A Generative Art Approach Through Recreating The Thinking Process of Drawing / 2010
im-personal is an alternative approach to generative art, a complex system built with simple modules of drawing instructions, a dynamic decision making process, and an extensible training interface that allows it to evolve.
Instead of generating graphics from building visualizations of mathematical and physics models, im-personal generates drawings following a slow and painful self-supervised thinking process, drawing stroke after stroke onto the canvas, and always keeping an eye on its creation to decide when to call it done.
Built with: Processing, Codeigniter, MySql, Tumblr
Web Design and Development - On Dream (Redesign) / 2009
A redesign of On Dream community developed in summer 2009.
The new design featured latest advances in web interaction and emphasizes the serendipity in the experience of dreaming sharing.
Built with: PHP, jQuery and WordPress
Interactive Installation - Kalpa / 2009
Kalpa is an interactive installation that plays with human perception of time.
The project is a combination of two parts, a narrative text about the history of the mysterious creature kalpa, and an installation with kalpa captured in an old alarm clock.
The audience can feel the time goes slower while they looking into the clock, but the clock will always speed up to display the correct time while people turned away from it.
Kalpa is a project by Liangjie Xia and Li Li. It was exhibited in ITP Winter Show 2009 (Dec 20-21, 2009).
Built with: Arduino, Processing
Interactive Telephony and Social Network Application - Humon / 2009
"Humon" is a screen & mobile based social networking application developed out of Redial:Interactive Telephony and Nature of Code classes in ITP, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
It is a simple and interesting tool for community members to make announcements or interact with other community members by merely calling a phone number.
Humon is a project by Liangjie Xia and Li Li. It was exhibited in ITP Spring Show 2009 (May 10-11, 2009) and 3rd IMC Expo (Sept 10-14, 2009).
Built with: Asterisk + EAGI, Processing
Visualization - US Military Intervention 1798 - 2009 / 2009
"The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain, and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to 'protectorates' such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. All these interventions directly served corporate interests, and many resulted in massive losses of civilians, rebels, and soldiers." (via A Briefing on The History of U.S. Military Interventions, By Zoltán Grossman, October 2001)
People might be familiar with recent US military interventions in Middle East, or those in Asia in 1970s, however in the past 200 years' history, overseas interventions actually happened a lot more frequent than people usually think and played an important role to this country's development.
This visualization is not intended to create a narrative piece of intervention history, it's more created as a tool to go through the mass amount of history events and discover the correlations among those events in a certain period of time, or within a certain region.
Built with: Processing
US Military Intervention 1798 - 2009 was exhibited at ITP Spring Show 2009
( video via v3ronique@flickr).
Click here to read more about US Military Intervention 1798 - 2009
Interactive Telephony - Insomnia / 2009
"Insomnia" is the code name of a on-going project that creates an imaginative friend that you could trash-talk to when you cannot sleep at night. You could keep talking as much as you want and this virtual "friend" would just listen or not listen. However he does somehow know that you're there and would start complaining if you stop talking.
Insomnia is developed in the Redial: Interactive Telephony class.
Built with: Asterisk + AGI, php, Processing
Click here to read more about Insomnia: Interactive Telephony
Generative Art - Smoky / 2009
Smoky is a generative visual art work created in the Nature of Code class.
A Perlin Noise based flow field was behind the scene and evolving through time to pull the particle system and trace along. A very subtle movement of the tiny particles in the space create the smoky pattern.
Built with: Processing
Visualization - Interactive Bus Schedule for NYU Campus Transportation / 2009
The NYU buses are really convenient for on campus transportation and I feel more than happy about their services. However the timetable for the bus schedule is published in plain text format scattered in different PDF files under different categories of routes.
The interactive "remake" of the schedule converted all the data into a relational database and enabled much more flexible queries on the data set. A website has been built with simple query interface that tells you just the next bus you should take. Nothing more, nothing less.
The website was created during the 4-in-4 event at ITP in January 2009. We were committed to create four projects in four days in a row.
This is an ongoing project and I am working on an audio interface through asterisk with which the users could accomplish the query by just making a phone call.
Built with: Ruby on Rails, mysql, php, asterisk
Visualization - Face Blind / 2008
Prosopagnosia (sometimes known as face blindness) is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. Few successful therapies have so far been developed for affected people, although individuals often learn to use "piecemeal" or "feature by feature" recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, hair color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others (via).
The difficulty of face-blind people could hardly be explained and understood by people around because we are taking face recognition so for granted and seldom think of how faces are specifically optimized in our memory system. The analogy of the stones were used by Cecilia Burman on her website on prosopagnosia and I found it a relatively effective approach of making this explanation short.
The clouds are generated by several different features on peoples faces and are overlaying on their faces to obscure them The optimized mechanism for face-recognition in our brain would not be activated since most of the facial features are turned off by the noises (clouds). However since the clouds are generated from an abstraction of facial features so ideally I could still create a unique cloud mask for each person. In this way, we could probably experience the difficulty of face blindness and, however, could also experience the "piecemeal" or "feature by feature" recognition strategy by observing the shape, texture and other features of the clouds.
Stop Motion Animation - Pandemonium / 2008
Pandemonium is a short cutout stop motion animation produced together with Emily Ryan in the Communications Lab class. It tells a story of an alien panda who accidentally landed on the earth and started to eat whatever he can get to evolve. Eventually he made his way back home.
Produced with: iStopMotion, Final Cut Pro and Panasonic DVX100b
Game Development - G-Missile / 2008
G-Missile is a location-aware online missile-shooting game developed in collaboration with Jiaxin Feng and Jaeyoon Kang. The game figures out the player's geo-location through Loki, a firefox extension, and places the players on the map where they are in the real world. Hence the players could play the shooting game with real geo-location in mind and develop corresponding strategies.
Different missiles of different features are available for players to choose under different circumstances. Random interferences like winds are also brought into the game to enhance game play experience. A mobile version of the game would be the ultimate goal of this project.
G-missile was exhibited in ITP Winter Show 2008 and a beta version could be accessed at http://gmissile.com.
Built with: php, Flex and actionscript, Google Map API
Web Development - Arthub / 2008
Arthub is a non-for-profit foundation supporting art creation, knowledge-production and diversity among dedicated artists, art professionals and arts organizations in China and rest of Asia. Inspired by the opportunities generated by collective efforts and intelligence of the thinkers in the region, Arthub serves as a collaborative production and research platform for new art and ideas, cutting-edge projects and dialogue within the visual arts and new media. (via)
This project involves heavy customization of wordpress and specific plugin development.
Built with: php, mysql, ajax, (x)html, css, and open source CMS wordpress
Cofounder, Web Design & Development - On Dream / 2007
"On Dream" is an experimental site launched in February 2007. It's a simple community for visitors to share their dreams under moderation.
When a dream is shared, the submitter may also navigate to other dreams with similar elements like flying, drowning or meeting a relative who has already passed away. People are encouraged to illustrate their own dreams, or upload a short audio clip to tell the dreams. However, the interpretation of the dreams is not encouraged.
Built with: php, mysql, ajax, (x)html, css, and open source CMS wordpress
Click here to visit "On Dream" (in Chinese)
Cofounder, Web Design & Development - '06 World Cup Brick Site / 2006
The '06 World Cup Brick Site was online for one month during the World Cup '06, yet it acquired attention of over 100,000 unique visitors. This site was designed to let people criticize (curse) a football team/player, a disappointing game, or a nasty news event during the game. The supporters of a team/player could defend on the very same spot. A list of top ten unwelcome team/player was published after the game ended.
The site went offline several weeks after the '06 World Cup Games.
Built as an affiliate site to Netease(http://www.163.com)
Built with: ASP.NET, MS SQL Server, (x)html, css, javascript, GDI+