Counting Cultural Stars

Counting Cultural Stars is a beginner-friendly workshop where participants transform a meaningful cultural word into an animated 3D constellation using TouchDesigner. Each person writes a name, a place or an untranslatable word in their own language and script, photographs it, and watches their handwriting become a field of moving particles that drift, gather and spread in space.

The workshop takes its ground from Yoon Dong-ju's 1941 poem Counting the Stars at Night, written under Japanese colonial rule when Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names. In the poem, naming stars after schoolfriends, neighbours and family becomes a way of keeping a suppressed identity alive. Names are like stars: they can be connected with others into cultural constellations.

How it works

The session opens with the poem and its history, then moves to writing. Participants follow a radial writing guide, one meaningful piece of text per ray around an empty centre, and photograph the page. In TouchDesigner, guided by Ng Yi Kee, the handwriting is traced into 3D point clouds and shaped with turbulence, attraction and clustering. No programming or TouchDesigner experience is needed.

Every word sent during the session also gathers in a shared web galaxy, built so that scripts such as Hangul, Arabic, Devanagari and Latin orbit together without being flattened into one. Each participant leaves with their own TouchDesigner file and an exported video of their constellation. The session is recorded by ISEA for its archive.

Programme