I am Disty
aspiring art historian
using digital media

Black Arts Movement: The Living Room

Poetry, songs, and musicians of the Black Arts Movement that incoporated Islamic aesthetics and references into their works. I explored the different mediums and how they were consumed by drawing and creating a 1960s-70s living room environment. The interactable objects include books for the poetry, radio for music, and a television that displayed famous Jazz player, John Coltrane during two of his live performances.

Created for the course, Islamic Media, taught by Professor Ellen McLarney at Duke University, Fall 2024.

• Unity
• Immersive Environment
• Poetry
• Jazz
• Black Liberation Movement
• Islam

Huzn حزن

I explored the idea of huzn, how its concept is found in Qur'an and recitation, and the impacts it has on the listeners. I pulled literature from various Muslim thinkers and scholars of Islamic studies to better understand the impacts that huzn has on the Islamic community to collate into a website.

Image is Sépulcre Arc-en-Barrois by Vassil from Wikimedia

• Website
• Islamic Studies
• Essay

Data Networks of Asian American Literature

In the summer of 2025, I participated in a research project under Duke's Rhodes Information Initiative that looks into Asian American Literature. Based on computational methods and the digital humanities, we sought to find linguistic trends and styles over a 50 year time span from 1974-2024. My work done over the summer includes archival research, text clean-up, data transformation and visualization.

Website

During the summer, we teamed up with a team from the Code+ summer program to create a website. The purpose was to make our database publicly available for scholars, students, and researchers. This is especially important given that computational literature studies on Asian American texts are limited. The website is still in progress.To view, click here.

• Computational/Digital Humanities
• Literature Studies
• Asian Americans

Journey of Hue Palace's Maiden

I was a game designer for Heritagear, a project under Duke Kunshan's Innovation Incubator. It aimed to create an immersive historical fiction storyline for visitors at the Imperial City of Huế in Vietnam.

Main Mission

The main mission features the user tasked with making Phan Nu, a traditional cosmetic. I created the initial flow of the game based on videos of how real life phan nu was made. I utilized simple tap and timing mechanics throughout the main mission to help fit the theme of the creation of phan nu and make the game system not too difficult. It was important to make the game as accessible for a wide variety of audiences that come to the Imperial City.

Extra Mission #1: Making Tea

Extra mission one focuses on creating traditional tea. It features more dialogue for the users to get to know other characters and get to know the world better. The game mechanics are drag, tap, timing, and progress bar.

Extra Mission #2: Old Buddhism Tales

Extra mission two has the players investigate through a collection of stories and choose the correct one for the Queen Mother based on hints given to them.

Extra Mission #3: Making a New Friend

Extra Mission 3 is a companion focused quest for the players to get to know a supporting NPC by cleaning the halls. The game mechanic featured is a visual novel style dialogue in which players will have different responses to choose from that influences the NPC's responses.

User Testing

December 2023, the team based in Vietnam took the prototype to the Forbidden City in Huế. Utilizing QR codes for the different missions, participants walked through the site whilst playing the prototype.

• Historical-fiction
• Vietnamese History
• Story
• Game

Children of Enlil

Created for the course, 3D Modeling and Animation. As a 3-student group project, we built a mini 3D fantasy world environment scene. The city, Enlil, is inspired by Sumerian mythology and architecture. The city was once a flourishing land, blessed by the God, Enlil. However, tragedy struck and the city now remains a desolate wasteland, with a dragon watching over the land on top of the city's Ziggurat.

The modeling was done in Blender, with the exception of the city's statues and dragon done on ZBrush. Inspiration came loosely from Sumerian art and culture. Texture was obtained through Polyhaven, Polligon, and BlenderKit (a Blender plug-in).

• 3D Modeling
• Blender
• Mesopotamian
• Mythology
• Fantasy
• Art

Impasse: Zhangjiagang

For the final project in my course, Practices in the Digital Humanities, I explored the trail behind DKU alongside the Zhangjiagang Canal, intending to investigate how Kunshan’s development is reflected through these trails and how people live and adapt to it. I visited the site and filmed over the course of 3 weeks, and collated the videos and relevant text on to ArcGIS StoryMaps. The project also focuses on differences. From skyscraper apartments to the vegetable gardens rooted in the ground. Speeding cars on the highway, while an idle playground below it sits. The students DKU coming into the space of Kunshan. Our wonderment, confusion, and often limited knowledge of the city are a stark difference in the everyday lives of people who live here differently than we do. This contrast is nowhere as apparent as when cities build.

The Local and the National

One aspect that stood out during the project was the Buddhist temple’s speaker system. It was surprising to learn that even a Chinese person struggled to understand the speaker due to speaker's accent. The fact that the temple broadcasts these speeches 24/7 to locals also interested me. It left a suggestion that whoever put the device intended it only for those who were deeply tied to the area. A deep connection to identity rooted in the locality. It reminded me that cities are tied closer to a form of local identity than the national. Things were communicated via the speaker box that only a local who speaks the Kunshan kouyu or dialect is privy to.

Filming Methodology

I tried to emulate James Benning’s style from Los. I used both tripod and handheld shots and stabilized the handheld footage afterward. The clips are of similar lengths with each other, with each clip being around 1 minute and 30 seconds.

• Digital Humanities
• Urban Studies
• Videography
• ArcGIS StoryMaps