research's a game
Emily Zhang & Lucy Lu
medium: video
medium: video
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One pastime that countless people have picked up over the course of the pandemic is gaming. Whether it's Animal Crossing, Among Us, chess, poker, or (my personal poison) League of Legends, we have filled our listless days with new purpose in gathering materials for a pixelated house or figuring out when fellow players are bluffing. As I fell into the gaming world myself over the past year, I've noticed many parallels between my time spent gaming and my previous experiences with research, and decided to create a video exhibit to hint at these parallels (with enough abstraction to let viewers find their own parallels for themselves). Hunting for the right resources to build up your projects, carefully structuring and perfecting plots and pictures, unraveling mysteries and chasing down side quests, trying out new techniques and problem-solving when they don't work, collaborating with old friends and meeting new ones with similar goals as you, exploring and learning about a new world... there are truly endless intersections between gaming and research. Most of all, they are both very human processes, stories of growth and struggle and reward, driven by the constant search for something fulfilling and new.
After reviewing Lucy's paper published earlier this year, we noticed that one of her plots resembled a chessboard with its array of square boxes. Lucy animated the astronomical data in this plot, as well as a plot at the start of the video with all the data combined together. The data points reminded me of game pieces that could be brought together and apart, manipulated and combined in different ways to bring new meanings... which of course led me to Scrabble (psst: the pieces in the video are actually Bananagrams pieces). I overlaid the lettered tiles on Lucy's plots and spelled out words related to her research and to gaming, mixing the tiles around in various configurations, with interesting phrases and words being created unintentionally in the process. Watching the final video back, I was pleasantly surprised by all these new interactions between the tiles, the data, and the board, and enjoyed finding new revelations (for example: it seems obvious, but arts uses the same letters as star, and then O-star uses the same letters as astro... how lovely!) (or: when I was writing high alpha and low alpha, I also ended up writing high cards and low cards by accident... critical concepts to both astronomy and to poker). Such is the process of art, of games, and of research: discovery! Emily Zhang is a senior in Columbia College majoring in astrophysics. She is interested in media and is hoping to bring the wondrous, artistic, and human side of science to the public through science shows and videos. This semester, she has been working on various video projects, applying to dozens of jobs, and mentally preparing to graduate. She previously served as the president / senior advisor of BlueShift - her favorite club in the world. Naturally, Arts & Astro is one of her favorite events of the year and she is so excited it's continuing despite COVID-19 by going online for the second time!
Twitter: @emilylinzhang |
