Beyond the Loop: “Strata” Simulates the Infinite
Adrian Yu, Strata, 2024 (installation view). Painted steel, stainless steel, LED panels, generative software. 40’ x 8.5’ x 10’. Image courtesy of the artist.
New media artist Adrian Yu is pushing boundaries with spatial cinema—film deconstructed and integrated into physical spaces. At a festival, he met and immediately connected with Omer Yosef, creative director of the design studio Digital Ambiance, who shares a multidisciplinary interest in bridging public art, architectural language, parametric tools, and speculative design research. The pair soon started thinking about applying to public RFQs and RFPs as a team. Their first collaboration, Strata, emerged out of an early joint application. In front of Mesa City Hall, the monumental art installation—daring and somewhat challenging in a civic, symbolic space—undergoes a constant process of transformation, responding to atmospheric and climate parameters. In an interview with IMPULSE, Yu and Yosef discuss the project’s conception and significance.
Xuezhu Jenny Wang: Can you share more about how Strata came about?
Adrian Yu: The project was nearly a two-year process. The overarching concept was to integrate the natural surroundings and site-specific context with ideas of deep time and humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Lots of my past work has explored identity, as well as digital and physical spaces. With this project, we took a deep dive into Mesa’s environmental context.
Being in the Sonoran Desert presents unique challenges, but like any city, there's always this tension between the natural and built environments. We took the motif of the surrounding mountain ranges and deconstructed these forms into three basic forms. We then integrated LED panels to simulate wind and water as representations of erosion as a creative force.
The installation incorporates live climate data provided by the city, along with additional third-party APIs. We’d put this data into Unreal Engine to simulate two different scenes from day to night. During the daytime, it’s a watery scene that resembles a riverbed. At night, the scene transitions to a wind and dust simulation. It adapts to real-time changes in wind speed, temperature, and other environmental factors. The city also has a Climate Action Plan that involves planting trees, so every time they plant a tree, a new tree spawns inside the installation. It’s almost a microcosm of the world as a whole. The result is a continuous dialogue between the natural and built worlds.
Adrian Yu, Strata, 2024 (installation view). Painted steel, stainless steel, LED panels, generative software. 40’ x 8.5’ x 10’. Image courtesy of the artist.
Omer Yosef: What stood out to me in the process was starting with inspiration—driving around Mesa, talking to residents and specialists about what the desert holds and what it means for the city. From there, we explored speculative design, looking at how geologies form and tying that into Adrian’s interest in erosion—essentially, understanding landscapes as shaped by time.
What emerged was the idea of the geological deep-time spiral, a scientific concept but also a visual motif deeply rooted in Indigenous and Mesoamerican traditions, like Mayan calendars. It’s a bridge between Western science and Indigenous worldviews, both seeing time as continuous and layered—just like the landscape itself, where strata stack over millennia.
The sculpture itself took from this idea and is basically a spiral buried on the side. When you look at the three archways from the side, they feel like a continuous form. Your brain fills in the gaps. The archway is both a landmark of the desert and, in the context of City Hall, this symbol of passage and civilization. As simple as the form looks conceptually, to have video walls bend both in both directions was challenging.
Beyond aesthetics, the piece serves as both a celebration and a form of accountability for the city’s Climate Action Plan. Positioned at City Hall, it reflects environmental changes—if the city stops planting trees, that neglect will become visible. It turns dry, gatekept data into something immersive and engaging—a civic interface, one might say.
XJW: Could you share with us the details of how the environmental data was visualized?
AY: There are 12 different environmental parameters affecting the simulation, with variations between day and night, making it effectively 24. Some are more obvious, like the day-and-night cycle. In the simulation, the light sources changes directions at different times of the day. Unreal Engine basically creates sunsets and sunrises.
Temperature shifts the water color between blue and green during the day. Wind speed alters particle velocity, and rain introduces precipitation into the scene. Many of these changes are subtle—like a few degrees in temperature, which isn’t immediately perceptible; it’s more about how macro-movements and holistic changes develop over time.
Some elements tie directly into climate concerns. Air quality, water consumption, and energy use shape the movement of a vortex. For instance, if the air quality is bad, the vortex may be more chaotic, while better weather conditions create a more fluid, balanced shape.
Adrian Yu, Strata, 2024 (installation view). Painted steel, stainless steel, LED panels, generative software. 40’ x 8.5’ x 10’. Image courtesy of the artist.
XJW: Earlier you mentioned that the project was also about managing expectations of the city, architects, etc. Where do you draw a line between design and commissioned artwork?
AY: This is wholeheartedly an art project, but we strategically approached it as a design project to navigate city politics and align with their goals. The key difference is that design is functional art, and through that function, we pushed forward a statement—not an agenda, but a perspective that felt important to us as artists.
This project required a lot of leveraging of critical thinking and political sidestepping to make it happen. There were multiple iterations along the way. Still, the artistic statement remained intact; only its physical form evolved.
OY: Public art has increasingly been integrated with architecture, which has its pros and cons. On the one hand, it fosters site-specific works. On the other, architecture often prioritizes client needs over artistic or speculative ambitions. For me, the fun part of the collaborate was that I was able to shield some of the exciting concepts that Adrian was putting forth while navigating the conversations with the architects and the city.
Another interesting aspect of the project was forming connections with fabricators and other creators. We collaborated with FabLab Mexico. The piece basically migrated from Mexico City to Arizona—given where the city is located, there’s almost a symbolic celebration of the historically conservative city’s progressive turn in recent years. So some concepts—like the one about the environment and humanity’s presence in it—are more explicit, while others are more subtle. Also, the piece was brought into the country a few days before the inauguration and the 25% tariff, which would have made the project impossible. Especially now, this project highlights how collaboration, openness, and historical thinking can drive meaningful creation.
Fabrication photo of Strata.
XJW: Recently there’s been a lot of debate around technology’s role in climate issues. Generative AI, for instance, has been under fire for its energy and water use. Where do you see technology-informed art fitting within these conflicting narratives?
AY: Speaking specifically about this project, we didn’t use generative AI—everything runs locally through Unreal, so we’re not pulling power from external farms. But in the broader conversation about technology, art, and climate, the challenge is that technology is advancing faster than our ethical frameworks can keep up. AI, for example, is a useful tool, but its implications for humanity and the environment are still unfolding.
I see parallels between AI discourse and the reaction to synthesizers when they first emerged—musicians feared they’d replace real instruments, but instead, they led to new genres like acid house. Similarly, AI can push creative boundaries rather than just replace human effort. With quantum chips on the horizon, energy use may decrease, but the ethical questions remain. As a species, we haven't fully reckoned with how to use this technology responsibly.
OY: Yes, I think it’s important to say we didn’t use AI because it wasn’t necessary, and it would have been contradictory. AI runs on massive data farms, whereas we wanted to work with highly specific, localized data sets—more like site-specific art rather than generalized AI-driven work. It’s about making a point, not just creating flashy media art.
Art often carries contradictions, especially when tied to political or conceptual messages. Climate action, despite being considered a relatively “safe” progressive topic, still faces censorship. We tried to promote our project on Instagram, but “climate action” was flagged as too political. Public art can sometimes be co-opted by institutions or used as an alibi for progressiveness, but we structured this piece to retain agency. It dynamically responds to the city's climate action—if commitments aren’t upheld, the sculpture reflects that degradation in real time.
Adrian Yu, Strata, 2024 (installation view). Painted steel, stainless steel, LED panels, generative software. 40’ x 8.5’ x 10’. Image courtesy of the artist.
XJW: Adrian, can you tell me more about spatial cinema and how the concept fits in your larger body of work?
AY: Since I started my art practice, I’ve been exploring the relationship between audience, space, and narrative. The first work I did was a steel basin filled with water with projection on top of that. As viewers moved around, their movements created ripples in the water, which allowed the audience to have agency in the experience.
My background in film theory influenced this approach. Traditional cinema is sight and sound confined to a frame. I wanted to break that, expanding content beyond a single projection by incorporating spatialized audio, sensory elements, and interactive experiences. Over time, I introduced participatory elements. In Dreamrave, an audiovisual interactive installation in Hong Kong that explored notions of sleep, I built a mirrored hallway leading to an LED wall. We created a terminal online that people around the world can speak to, and I also shot a lot of 16 mm footage of dream-like, ambient vignettes of people’s lives. There’s a lot of interactivity to this kind of deconstructed narrative, dialoguing with non-linearity.
A lot of my work in spatial cinema has revolved around identity—not so much my personal identity but more like a macro-identity, e.g. the Asian American experience or political identities at large. I did a piece in Hong Kong in 2022 titled Tumultuous Dreams of Modern Living. I was given a 30-foot wall, and I created this five-scene video work with a miniature of an upside-down apartment. In it, there’s a dream sequence, and there was a nightmare-like scene when a hand went through the window trying to grab something. With spatial cinema, this constant dialogue of agency, interpretation, and meaning is crucial to my thinking.
XJW: Is there anything else about the project that you'd like to share?
OY: One thing I didn’t mention is how we oriented the piece so that the spiral’s opening aligns with the sunrise and sunset at a 250-degree west-facing angle. The virtual sun within the video simulation syncs with the real sun, which I think is really beautiful.
Before Adrian introduced me to the term “spatial cinema,” I thought of it as long-form architectural video—something that unfolds over months and years rather than minutes or hours. City Hall employees might see it every day for decades, and residents in the area will encounter it regularly throughout their lives. It’s about transcending the loop—something that begins and ends—both conceptually and physically, creating something that feels infinite.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
