Flower.Mirror
ChucK/ChuGL Installation, December 2025Flower.Mirror is a pair of poetry-driven musical games. What will appear when you turn the mirror around?
This work has been shown at ICMC 2026.
Video Demonstration
What is it?
Flower.Mirror is a poetry-driven multimedia interactive game that explores the interplay of poetry, sound, and visual space. The program guides its player through dream-like landscapes, where the player puzzles through and trigger stages of the game by constructing texts into poetic phrases. Instead of a goal-oriented structure, the experience unfolds in a meditative and contemplative state, allowing each gesture, sound, and transition to take its time. The player is invited into a slower mode of exploration, one that emphasizes listening, patience, and reflection, and gradually enters the intercultural narrative embedded within the project.
“Mirror” and “Flower”
As its title suggests,Flower.Mirror unfolds across two chapters: “Mirror” and “Flower,” where each is a multi-staged miniature poetic game. “Mirror” reflects a period in the artist’s life marked by anemoia—the reconstruction of memory around an idealized hometown that never truly existed, formed during her first experience studying abroad. The player engages with language as a compositional material, modulating nouns with verbs and adjectives by aligning words horizontally, as if writing a poem in the space. Decisions regarding text placement directly shape the sound: the size of a selected text determines its associated sound’s volume, while the drop location of the text affects its stereo panning.
“Flower” represents a stage of reconciliation. In this chapter, the artist quietly looks back on her childhood self, recognizing the beauty of uncertainty and unknowing, and learning to embrace her past and present selves. These personal narratives are presented not as fixed stories, but as fragments—moments that surface, dissolve, and reappear through interaction. Across multiple stages, players align words to initiate musical development before transitioning into a navigational mode, where hidden words are discovered and collected within a darkened visual field. The interaction becomes increasingly embodied, shifting from writing to movement and presence.
Inspiration
The ideas of “Flower” and “Mirror” are deeply intertwined in traditional Chinese culture. The project draws inspiration from Dream of the Red Chamber, where the concept of 镜花水月 (“Mirror, Flower, Water, Moon”) is a recurring theme. Often translated as “flower in the mirror, moon on the water,” the phrase describes a beauty that is vivid yet transient. Through this lens, the project observes the worldly concerns tied to intercultural identity, how they evolve over time, rise and fall in cycles of yin and yang, and eventually soften into reconciliation. Our life, like the flower in the mirror, is filled at times with loneliness and sorrow, at others with joy and tenderness, yet remains a fleeting experience.@MorningClose