Yiwei Sang
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Let’s Create Something Together
sangqiqi1001@gmail.com
What role did I play?
Translating narrative logic into an experience flow the body can perform
The script text was written by playwright Pak Li; my work focused on the experience structure, the signal-to-sense mapping, and the flow design.
What the performer's body does and feels
What the audience hears and sees
How do they connect?
I owned the experience flow — the connective logic between "what the performer's body does and feels" and "what the audience hears and sees" — and worked alongside the technical build so that logic could be performed reliably on stage: a full run of shows, without a technician manually cueing each moment.
Two bodily signals, two output channels
The central design decision was a deliberate split: motion → sound, cognition → image. The audience reads gestures as cause-and-effect through their ears, and reads "what's happening inside the character's head" through the destabilizing picture. Two senses, two different kinds of surveillance.
01
Movement · Path · Gesture Force
Captures the performer's movement, trajectory, triggering dialogue tracks and ambient sound in real time.
Wrist
Live Sound Trigger
Sensor: WitMotion BWT901BLE — 9-axis IMU, wireless Bluetooth
Narrative meaning · The body's actions — falling, struggling, dancing — become audible consequences.
02
Brainwave State · the "Mind"
Reads mental state to drive live distortion of the projection: blur, noise, liquid warping.
Head· Emotion
Real-time Video FX
Sensor: Muse EEG headband · Max/MSP visual engine
Narrative meaning · The mind's inner state becomes a visible warping of the image — landing on the projected moon and the environment.
03
The Recurring "Water Drip"
The dripping motif that keeps returning in the script is built as a real mechanical dripping device.
Physical Water Rig
Arduino + solenoid valve — releases real water drops (not audio playback)
Narrative meaning · The character's auditory hallucination is made physical — a sound that truly happens on stage, not a foley effect.
To The Moon & Back
Designing a biosensor-driven experience system for a solo stage performance
Immersive Theatre · Interactive Installation
The Challenge
How to turn a living human body into a reliable yet expressive stage input device — without the technology ever showing on stage, and without it failing?
Role:
Experience Flow & Concept Design
Premiere:
Oct 2024, Berlin
Format
Solo performance · Live sensor-driven
How do you make an audience feel surveilled, rather than just watch someone perform it?
The script follows 2328 — a man held in a fictional "Orientation Transit Center," his body and his mind under constant monitoring.
The creative team wanted the audience to physically experience that surveillance, not observe it being acted out. That meant the performer's real, uncontrolled body movement and mental state had to become the show's live sound and image in the moment — not a pre-programmed cue sheet.
How did it develop?
Starting from an existing motion-capture / visual-FX library (early Max/MSP patches: particle systems, computer-vision tracking, noise shaders), I filtered down to a set that matched the play's tone — closer to noise, blur and liquid distortion than the more decorative early visuals.
Prototyped first with a generic MPU6050 module for validation, then settled on the WitMotion BWT901BLE — in rehearsal it gave more reliable wireless range and cleaner orientation data.
Used the Muse offline analysis toolchain to calibrate what mental state actually counts as "worth triggering" before writing thresholds into the live patch.
Converging the visual language
Selecting the wrist tracking
Calibrating the brainwave threshold
BlueMuse for the Bluetooth connection
muse-osc to bridge into Max/MSP
Muse-Analysis-Tools to plot recorded EEG sessions
Emotionally agitated（Shaking+Colour overlay）
Emotionally calm and subdued（Noise+Blur）
The hardest design problem wasn't technical. It was deciding which bodily signal should mean what, so that an audience member with zero technical background could feel the logic without a single word of explanation: motion is consequence, mind is distortion.