Wenhua Shi participated in an artist residency at the IEA over the week of June 22nd, 2015. Originally trained as a doctor in China, Shi departed from the medical field and began working in radio and TV in his hometown of Wuhan, China. He came to Colorado at the end of 2000, studying with the experimental film giants Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. He received his MFA from the University of California at Berkely and currently an assistant professor at Colgate University, exploring the definition of code and how it relates to events and cultural form, expanding the intersection and collapsing of expanded cinema, computational interactivity, and spatial and form variations. He is very engaged with sound projects, such as Chinese New Ear, directed by Dajuin Yao, and is also the curator of Flickercafe, a monthly experimental film screening in Boulder, CO, in the post-Stan Brakhage age.
Throughout his residency, Shi focused on a project, entitled Reload, an interactive sound and video installation consisting of users repositioning blocks whose order will create different sound and visual patterns within the piece. Code for the piece was worked out in Processing and ported to an Arduino while Shi also soldered together the circuit boards for eventual installation into his blocks. Shi also spent time in the sound studio, working with the Doupfer synthesizers, and experimented with etching this audio work onto card stock to be played as one would play a vinyl record.
Below are images of Wenhua at work: