Atlantis
2020 Work in Progress
3D Interactive Net Art, Sound Design, Narration, Blender, Unity, Adobe Photoshop
The Station
2020
Interactive Net Art, Digital Art, Animation, Sound Design, Narration, GIF, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Animate, HTML
The Station Selected Narration
Escape
2019
Interactive Net Art, Digital Art, Animation, Sound Design, Narration, GIF, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Animate, HTML
1% for the 1%
2018
Photographs on Paper
28.5″ x 40″
1% for the 1%:
Photograph, 2018
28.5″ x 40″
1% for the 1%: Soldiers are the Tools of Glory
Photograph, 2018
28.5″ x 40″
1% for the 1%: The Mothership Has Come to Claim the Things That We Want
Photograph, 2018
28.5″ x 40″
1% for the 1%
Installation, 2019
28.5″ x 40″
Vi Trinh makes pieces about post-apocalyptic futures. She works in new and traditional media to deconstruct relationships of power in large systems. She synthesizes data to confront ideas of colonialism and white supremacy within our current social context. Her work explores ideas of rich aesthetics in ecological emergencies and the temporal reality created by large-scale phenomena.
Her recent work involves ‘The Bunker Series’, an ongoing series of interactive netart pieces about futuristic post-apocalyptic bunkers. The series focuses on deconstructing relationships of power in large interconnected systems through world-building visual design accompanied by narration spoken by A.I. that convey the will of their creators. The narrative for the series derives from a focus on objects and spaces surrounding humanity without actually showing humans, instead speaking of ideology through architecture, design, aesthetics, technology, and A.I. It is about what is left behind and what that says about us and a society’s archeological legacy.
The first piece in the series, Escape(2019) is an existential-horror, absurdist-satire and it takes place in an underground bunker built by disaster capitalists. The piece was inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. Escape deconstructs rich exclusionary aesthetics as a tool of power and the veneer of geniality presented by A.I. that carry the hostility of their creators. Escape confronts technology and the internet as it appears; democratic, and free, and the reality of exclusionary design by the very few and the profits they gain from it. It has become the new ground of a very old problem, between the environment and people, the disenfranchised and society, the user and the internet.
The Station(2020) is the second installation of “The Bunker Series”. The Station takes place in a space station and is based on the Myth of Sisyphus and deconstructs aesthetics of nostalgia as a weapon of ideology, especially nostalgia as a threat against traditionally marginalized people. The Station deconstructs commercialism and pop culture with narration inspired from Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism and Consumer Society and Stanislaw Lem’s One Human Minute. The Station cautions against pleasing aesthetics as a vehicle of vile ideas.
Atlantis is the third piece in the “The Bunker Series” it’s a 3D modeled interactive with more clickable elements. Atlantis takes place in the future under the sea in a post-apocalyptic refugee shelter. Inspired by Plato’s Atlantis, the work of Michel Foucault and Sartre, Atlantis is an optimistic outlook on a post-apocalyptic future. Atlantis is a response to American capitalism and hyper-individualism, capitalism assumes that people’s primary motivation is greed and at the same time promotes greed in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, Atlantis tries to form an economic-socio political system built on the assumption of compassion starting with visual design and extending to the A.I. and robots. The first two pieces in the series were dour, critical, and satirical; in the current Covid-19 epidemic it would be irresponsible of this series to not offer a solution, if not a solution then hope, and if not hope then comfort.