The Height Effect
Skyscrapers are more than functional buildings—they are fantasies cast in steel and glass. Through height and spectacle, towers stage gestures of ambition. Behind mirrored facades, they quietly sort who is seen and who must look up. The Height Effect is a project about vertical space and power, exploring how "ascent" became a social belief.
Colonising the Sky
2025
Interactive installation
290 x 75 x 85 cm
UV-printed stainless steel, aluminium profiles, motors, sensors, crystal
This installation is both an automonument and a double-sided mirror. On its front, a towering illusion rises into the sky—a reflective surface that situates the viewer into its fiction. One sees oneself “standing in the tower,” momentarily aligned with the height and authority of power.
When the viewer puts on the ring and swings their arm downward, the illusion fractures in motion, revealing its reverse. A fragment of sky, tightly enclosed by surrounding towers, the image shifts from dominance to diminishment. The viewer, once elevated, now stands small beneath a structure too vast to scale, pinned to the ground by the very height they once occupied.
It is not the tower that turns, but your position within it. The tower reflects you, but you cannot enter its sky.
Ascending
2025
Interactive Installation
103 x 39 x 15 cm
Stainless steel, LCD displays, sensor, nylon, crystal
If a spatial order is built on the logic that ascent equals privilege, what does it ultimately produce?
This installation is a parable of power — a speculative anatomy of a spatial hierarchy that stages the illusion of ascent. Viewers engage with the system physically: inserting a finger into a ring, they must raise their arm and push upward to unlock higher floors on the screen.
The ascent unfolds across six levels, each represented through collage—a method of spatial recomposition that reclaims and reassembles fragments of the built world. These layers do not depict real architecture, but function as spatial allegories. Each elevation offers the appearance of progress—seductive in form, symbolic in promise—yet with every rise, one’s sense of position begins to dissolve. The higher floor is not only a place of privilege but also a void where perception of reality vanishes.
Photography: Yihan Pan
Video: Jose Cardenas