Context: film and installation exploring voguing and identity
Software: Unreal Engine 5, Blender, Substance Painter, AutoRig, Maverick, Premiere Pro
Collaborators: Voguing dancer Rinor Zymberi; 3D prosthetic by Jing Xu
This video installation investigates how the queer body carries memory, transforms, and resists disappearance through movement. Within an immersive environment, viewers encounter a film where gesture becomes both expression and archive. Through motion capture of voguing, I animate virtual queer bodies whose movements hold traces of collective memory and lived history.
The digital queer figures in the film carries metal prosthetics, altered skin, and visible scars to make queer vulnerability and survival materially present. These traces speak to histories marked by rupture while imagining new structures of support. Within this sanctified space, the figures vogue and transform—asserting presence not through perfection, but through the remembered body that refuses to disappear.
I collaborated with performers from the ballroom community and also recorded my own voguing through a full motion-capture setup. Using OptiTrack cameras and Manus gloves, I captured fine-grained movement nuances and retargeted them in Unreal Engine with the IK Retargeter system, allowing these gestures to inhabit my digital figure.
Voguing is about creating lines, shapes, and tension through the body—especially in new-way vogue, where precision and extension define the movement. This idea shaped the installation. The film is shown on two suspended monitors held by surgical arms, whose joints and angles echo the sharp, deliberate lines of voguing.