Julia's Room

Overview

An exhibition by Dave Hannon engaging queer world-building through the avatar Julia — a character Dave developed to reconstruct a narrative about growing up queer in a heteronormative environment. Presented at Drexel University’s Pearlstein Gallery, the show brought together sculpture, projection, augmented reality, and interactive digital performance to fabricate alternative queer spaces and explore themes of queer failure and domestic intimacy.

I collaborated on the technical production alongside Nicolas Losada and Arefeh Ahmadi, both PhD students in Digital Media at Drexel.

AR Development

The Goop

A sculpture of wood strips and model magic resembling an ad hoc oil rig. I built the full AR application and authored all the activation visuals: bright pink liquid spewing from the rigs out of the ground, with a rotating motor element, all rendered in AR layered over the physical sculpture.

The QR onboarding cards for the AR experience are available below:

• Goop AR Onboarding

Sponge

A large foam piece fabricated to resemble a giant kitchen sponge. I developed the AR bubble animation that would appear through an iPad — bubbles rising from the sponge, potentially carrying embedded imagery from the performance or room.

• Sponge AR Onboarding

Just Julia

An eight-foot tall mirror piece using a Kinect and live video feed with hand tracking to project digitally authored facial features onto a viewer’s face in real time — a kind of digital puppet. I assisted Dave in developing the TouchDesigner pipeline for this system.

Miniature

A handbuilt scale model of Julia’s room that served as a source work for much of the larger installation. I helped with physical setup and projection calibration for this piece, and contributed to the broader logistics of mounting the show.