Counting Cultural Stars
A communal volumetric cultural text galaxy: participants transform handwritten cultural words, in the languages and scripts they call their own, into animated 3D star-like constellations that drift, gather, and spread in shared space.
About the Workshop
Counting Cultural Stars is a beginner-friendly creative workshop where participants transform meaningful cultural words into animated 3D star-like constellations using TouchDesigner. Inspired by Yoon Dong-ju's 1941 poem Counting the Stars at Night, in which naming stars became a way of preserving suppressed identities, the workshop explores how names, memories, and cultural language can become moving particles that drift, gather, and spread in space.
The workshop opens with the poem's historical context and its connection to the ISEA 2026 theme, ELYAH. Participants then write cultural words, names, places, untranslatable concepts, on paper in their own languages, following a radial writing structure. Participants photograph their own handwritten text and upload it into the system. Participants then use TouchDesigner's ready-made tools to transform their cultural words into dynamic point-cloud constellations.
Through a step-by-step guided interface, participants experiment with core behaviors such as turbulence, attraction, and clustering, working through both the technical mechanics and the creative interpretation behind them.
Conceptual Foundation
Naming as Cultural Resistance
This workshop takes its inspiration from Yoon Dong-ju's 1941 poem Counting the Stars at Night (별 헤는 밤), written during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, when Korean identity was systematically suppressed. Under the sōshi-kaimei (創氏改名) policy, Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names, an erasure of lineage, language, and belonging. In this context, Dong-ju's poem becomes an act of resistance: he counts stars by naming them after schoolchildren, neighbors, and distant family members. Each name is a declaration of existence.
Names are like stars. They can be connected with others in cultural constellations.
Participants are not limited to writing their own name. Dong-ju's poem counts memory, love, loneliness, longing, poetry, and his mother, before it ever gets to naming people and places. Anything from that same list is fair to write here: a name, a place, a word for someone, a feeling that means home, in your own language. The handwritten text becomes image. The image becomes particles. The particles become a navigational constellation. This is both a technical process, understanding an image-to-particle workflow, and a conceptual one: how cultural text can flow, drift, and reconstellate as visual poetry.
Write
A name, a place, a word, written by hand in your own script.
Capture
The handwriting is photographed and isolated from its paper background.
Constellate
The isolated text joins a shared vortex, orbiting alongside everyone else's.
Alignment with ISEA 2026: ELYAH
Charting Constellations
"Explores concepts of place and identity in the digital age and how we reshape our understanding of geography, identity, and community in a multidimensional world."
This workshop responds by transforming handwritten cultural text, embodied markers of place and belonging, into three-dimensional particle systems. Participants learn how computational behaviors such as turbulence, attraction, and clustering can represent the experience of cultural displacement and reconnection, discovering how to chart constellations of identity through hands-on, real-time generative practice.
Celestial Dialogues
"Examines how artistic and technological practices can foster intercultural dialogue and shared cross-cultural experiences."
In Dubai, a city where Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog, Malayalam, Farsi, Korean, and dozens of other scripts coexist, the workshop produces a poly-scriptural cosmos. Each writing system carries its own visual density and rhythm. The workshop does not flatten these differences but lets them coexist in the same volumetric space. The final collective visualization, where every participant's text orbits together, is intercultural dialogue made visible in shared computational space.
Organizers
Bin Youn
Bin Youn is a Korean multimedia artist and Associate Lecturer at RMIT University Vietnam. Her work explores cultural narratives, diasporic memory, and technological intimacy through spatial video installations and computational media. She draws inspiration from Korean cultural philosophy such as Pungryu and I-Ching, translating these ideas into contemporary digital forms. Her teaching integrates accessible creative coding methods to help students connect culture, identity, and technology.
Ng Yi Kee
Ng Yi Kee is a sound artist and educator at Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, where she teaches TouchDesigner and visual programming. Her research and artistic practice investigate human-nonhuman relations through field recording, sound installation, and experimental sonic methods, focusing on landscapes reshaped by urbanisation, development, and environmental change. Through site observation and contextual research, she explores how these changing environments reshape the relationships between humans, nonhuman entities, and the spaces they share.
Join the Galaxy
Bring your text. Leave a star.
At the workshop table, scan the QR code or open the link below on your phone. Photograph your handwritten text, choose its color, transparency, and glow, and send it in. It will spiral into the shared vortex on the venue screen, alongside everyone else's.