About
Sara (Siyun) Sun is a visual effects artist and creative technologist in film and immersive media. Her work combines animation, virtual environments, and captured bodily data in live-action film, VFX, and games.
Her characters live in recursive loops of causality, or narratives that reconfigure symbolic reality through metaphor. Using 3D software like Houdini and Unreal Engine alongside reality capture, she merges procedural simulation with data to imagine novel perspectives on human relationships within their histories, current dilemmas, and the liberating potentials of dispersed cyborgian futures beyond the default anthropocentric subject.
Animation and virtual reality are perceptual prosthetics that reorganize bodily experience. Placing human presence in temporalities from accelerated planetary erosion to motion-blurred industrial destruction turns a body into one fated timescale among many, preceded and exceeded by ecological, technological, and psychic systems. She reconstructs meanings with characters and earthly matter to narrate subjects in dislocated ontological drifts. Impossible worlds built from mathematics and curated physics materialize nightmares and morph symbiotic skin and flora in accelerating social precarity and ecological collapse. Her work imagines futures in an estranged shared framework of inter- and intra-subjective relations between people and the worlds they inhabit.
Her characters range from imagined futures gazing at the present to a collective body grieving a loss of subjectivity. They all develop a vision from the melancholic conflict between fear of social inscription and the inevitable minuteness of the self if without. Her digital translation of bodily data through animation and audience interaction beyond screen-based storytelling reconfigures memory. She projects our symbolic selves at a temporality and scale she is also unequipped to process, to speculate on new relations and desires beyond technologies' dominant commercial applications.
Creative authorship and statistical aggregation have become intertwined. Algorithmic systems redistribute archives as apparent voice. Her goal is to use these tools to explore their perception of and influence on desire. The anthropomorphization of AI renders legible the need to rethink our relationship with technologies through privacy extraction, data bias, reordered values of labor, as well as the stakes of open-sourcing and transparency for more equitable knowledge accessibility.
Her worlds analyze deconstructively human dilemmas, attending to our unstable relationship with technologies and simulacral post-truths. Her narratives imagine with technologies while remaining attentive to fantasies of unlimited power and immortality, using digital media to reflect and celebrate human finitude in a complex world we depend on for our creativity and survival.
She is expanding her animation into more character-driven narratives focused on transformation and sarcastic tragedy. She is developing open-source pipelines that explore identity and boundaries, working with film productions that employ creative technologies to serve storytelling, to reconsider narrative as a co-produced process between human and machine. She is also integrating game environment building with film production, to make narrative space interactive for an expanded, navigable cinema.
Contact
Open to collaborations, commissions, or simply connect. Feel free to reach out!
IG @sunsiyun_
Email sunsiyunssy@icloud.com
MakerWorld Yoda
LA / London / China