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

Indonesian Art during the New Order Era

I created an Omeka site and two exhibits, one focusing on Chinese-Indonesian Artists and their works as a method of resistance, and the other on the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (GSRB) or the New Art Movement.

Archival Theories

My reasoning for creation of the exhibits on the GSRB and Chinese-Indonesian artists were based on the archival theory proposed by Cameroonian historian, Achille Mbembe. In “The Power and Limits of Archives” he writes, “…the archives becomes something that does away with doubt…It is proof that a life truly existed, that something actually happened” (20-21). I was informed by this theory of the archive being a symbol of power and threat to state narratives by being able to tell a part of a story.

I was also informed by the idea of “records” written by Micheal Caswell. In his work, "The Archive" is not an Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies, he referenced Archivist Brian Brothman’s argument that, “records and evidence are cleaved by a sense of temporality that cannot be fixed... In this light, evidence is always contextual, always of something for someone...”. This was especially true for the artworks from the Chinese-Indonesian artists who did not overtly go against government restrictions. However, by looking at the scholarship and literature, their works were still able to be analyzed in subtle ways in resistance and how it informs the broader conversation of ethnic relationships both back then and now.

• Omeka
• Indonesian History
• Art History
• New Order Era

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

For the course, 3D Modeling and AnimationAs 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

Charting the Contours of Power

For my group final in my course, Data Visualizations and Information Aesthetic, my partner and I created 6 different types of visualizations to showcase a dataset on the demographics of the US congress over time. Each visualization includes at least two user interactions. We utlized both Python packages and online visualization software to clean and create these visualizations. The end result was a poster showcase and a website to serve as a visualization dashboard.

Why Congress?

We focused on the evolutions of the demographics of the US Congress to visualize if and in what ways has the seats of Congress changed in regards to race, gender, and age. As factors such as these are historically used for discrimination, we wondered if the changing political landscape and powers reflected that of the US population. Our main research question was: How has the demographics and representation of Congress representatives evolved over time?

The Dataset

The dataset was gathered from Harvard's Dataverse. It can be found here .

The dataset was cleaned using Python Pandas to omit irrelevant data, handle missing values, and create calculated fields needed for some visualizations. The final dataset consists of 9411 instances and 46 attributes. A statistical analysis was also done to ensure validity in our research questions, such as t-tests using Python SciPy Stats.

• Branding
• Data visualization
• Information aesthetics
• Tableau
• Python
• QGIS
• Florish