Virtual Language Lab
Qimeng An, Michael Gagliardi, Eravati Srivastava, Bao Nguyen

For our midterm we decided on our virtual language lab. The idea came about from the

realization that we were all from different cultures and had different national origins,

India , Italy, China, and Vietnam. We discussed different means of exploring that in a

virtual setting; a cooking class would’ve been too hard in a messy kitchen and too messy,

and dietary restrictions were prohibitive. Only a few of us had access to our cultural

clothing, but all of us knew our cultural languages. We decided on a collaborative

modality in which we presented part of the historical lineages that created our cultural

journeys; we each share a story as means of teaching our language lesson. We didn’t

come up with a shared way to do so; we wanted each of us to have creative control over

our sessions, thus we end up with four different classes teaching the viewer something

different about the ‘teacher’ and their subject. We wanted to capitalize on the feelings of

presence in a virtual space, we are all present in each other’s classes. By moving about

the virtual space to navigate the classes we simulate physical presence in a gallery, and

hope to actively utilize the virtual space.