Interactive art, immersive media, and practice-led research.
I create interactive installations using sound, moving image, VR, and physical interaction. My work explores how bodies encounter environments and other perspectives, translating movement into sensory feedback and attending to rhythms beyond the human.
My current research direction grows from a question within this practice: how do participants recognise their influence in a shared immersive environment? I am interested in how actions are transformed, combined with those of others, and retained as traces for later encounters.
I am completing an MA in Immersive Arts at the University of Bristol. In 2025, I graduated from the Digital Media Arts dual-degree programme between Xiamen University and the University for the Creative Arts, receiving First-Class Honours for the UCA degree.
An experimental video, a 360° VR scene and a chat interface unfold along a shared timeline. Inspired by online chat rooms, Existence stages imagined exchanges among places, animals and objects. Visitors move between watching a scene, entering it through a headset and encountering it through written dialogue. Set among everyday objects, these mediated perspectives place the familiar room in relation to other environments. The work asks how an encounter changes when the human viewpoint is no longer its only centre.
Moving-image channel from Existence · 11:37 · Sound on · Watch on YouTube ↗Existence — installation overviewExistence — fisheye view of the street sceneExistence — chat interface and VR headsetExistence — VR audience experienceExistence — moving image, chat interface and VR experienceExistence — audience encounter with the installationExistence — 360° panoramic still of the seaside scene
A shared timeline, several perspectivesThe moving image and VR footage were aligned to a shared timeline, while scripted messages appeared in the chat interface alongside an input for visitor messages. The video frames a view, the headset surrounds the viewer with a 360° environment, and the chat gives places, animals and objects an imagined textual presence.
The seaside and street scenes therefore reach the installation through different forms of attention. A visitor can watch a framed scene, turn within its panoramic space, or read the messages unfolding beside it. Entering a message adds another voice to this arrangement, while the scripted exchanges continue to give the scene its own temporal structure. I used the shared timeline to hold these perspectives together without making them identical.
Speaking for another beingExistence was my earliest attempt to build an experience through multiple perspectives. The everyday objects and familiar chat-room format give the imagined exchanges a recognisable setting. A place, animal or object can appear as a named speaker in the written channel, even though its voice has been composed by a human author.
Looking back, giving these entities names and dialogue also meant speaking for them. That tension remains part of the work: a shift in viewpoint can make another presence imaginable while retaining the limits of the person constructing it. The installation holds the moving image, panoramic scene and written voice beside one another, leaving their differences available to the visitor.
CreditsConcept, filming, moving-image editing, 360° footage, interaction and installation: Haoyuan Yang. Chat-room prototype developed in Python/Tkinter with ChatGPT assistance.