Cut From The Same Cloth
Bukhara Biennale - 2025
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It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Cut From The Same Cloth
In Cut From The Same Cloth, Aziza and I reconstructed memories of her grand father, reinterpreted from his journal. Memories hence becoming intergenerational and shareable, through interactive methods such as machine vision input and speech input.
The 15 minutes interactive experience was shown as part of the Bukhara Biennial and received praises for its depth and emotional intensity.
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The Bukhara Biennial 2025 is the inaugural edition of a new large-scale contemporary art and culture event in Bukhara, Uzbekistan, staged across newly restored historic landmarks in the city.
5 September – 23 November 2025, its first edition is titled “Recipes for Broken Hearts” and blends contemporary artworks with craft traditions, performances, and culinary/cultural programming, using the city’s Silk Road–era architectural sites as the exhibition fabric.
Physical installation
The physical installation was created by artist Aziza Kadyri.
Alongside it, we co-directed the digital experience so that form, materiality and symbolism are coherent and recognisable both in the physical installation and the digital experience.
Digital Experience
I was entirely responsible for the digital side of the exhibition which is a fully interactive narrative experience built in Unreal Engine.
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
My technical role in concept and Unreal
Built a real-time Unreal Engine installation that stages an encounter with a digital being, designed for continuous public exhibition and stable long-run performance.
Integrated Kinect-based body tracking (position + movement) into Unreal, translating raw depth/skeleton data into a readable interaction language that drives the work’s behaviours and pacing.
Created a phone-as-microphone speech interface, streaming visitors’ voice input into Unreal (speech → interpretation → state change) so spoken presence becomes an active, embodied control layer.
Phone interaction
A rotary phone, custom made with arduino, is placed in the room with the screens. Two scenes features a grandfather, calling the participants, with a physical bell ringing inside the phone, people can pick up and talk with the grandfather.
The phone acts as physical interactive relic by which a ritual can be completed over and over.
While the experience presented on screen provides a symbolic context, it is the physical act of holding up the phone and listening in that truly involves the participant, transforming the experience from an exterior one to a personal one.
Machine vision for interaction
Most scenes can be interacted using body and hand movement.
