Counting Cultural Stars
Transforming Cultural Texts into Volumetric Constellations
Monday 9 November 2026, 11:45 to 15:45 GST
14:45 to 18:45 Vietnam · 15:45 to 19:45 Malaysia
Recording and consent: ISEA records the session for its archive. If you send your photo, your handwriting and anything you share in the chat may appear in the shared galaxy, the recording and our documentation. You can take part without sending your photo, or ask us in the chat to remove your star.
In the ISEA programme
Part of the Code, AI and Cultural Experience Workshops in the ISEA 2026 Online Academic Programme, streamed on Online Stream 4.
Your path through the workshop
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Before we begin
Install TouchDesigner (the free licence) and open it once. Have paper, a dark pen, a phone or camera, and a mouse ready.
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Write your word
A word, a name or a place, in your own language and script. Write it on the rays of the template and leave the centre empty.
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Send your star
Photograph your page from straight above, choose a colour and send it. Your word is given a star in the shared sky.
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Build your constellation
Open the starter file in TouchDesigner and bring in the same photo. Your handwriting is traced into 3D space, then you shape how it moves. If the paper or shadows show up, lift your ink first: it removes the paper and saves just your writing as a PNG.
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Watch the shared sky
Every word sent today gathers in one galaxy, live.
Your facilitators
Bin Youn
Bin Youn is a Korean interdisciplinary artist, educator and researcher based in Ho Chi Minh City. She creates participatory augmented reality and sensing works that people complete through gesture, stillness and touch, including the Gelora series and Uncanny Garden (ACM SIGGRAPH 2026). In this workshop she leads the writing and the shared galaxy.
Ng Yi Kee
Ng Yi Kee is a sound artist and educator at Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, where she teaches TouchDesigner and visual programming. Through field recording and sound installation, she explores how changing landscapes reshape the relations between humans, nonhuman beings and the spaces they share. In this workshop she leads the TouchDesigner sessions.
About the workshop
Counting Cultural Stars is a beginner-friendly creative workshop where participants transform meaningful cultural words into animated 3D star-like constellations using TouchDesigner. Inspired by Yoon Dong-ju's 1941 poem Counting the Stars at Night, where naming stars was a way of preserving suppressed identities, the workshop explores how names, memories, and cultural language can become moving particles that drift, gather, and spread in space.
The workshop begins with an introduction to the poem's historical context and its connection to the ISEA 2026 theme ELYAH. Participants then write cultural words, names, places, untranslatable concepts, on paper in their own languages, following a radial writing structure provided in a step-by-step guide. Participants photograph their own handwritten text and upload it into the system. Participants then learn to use TouchDesigner's ready-made tools to transform their cultural words into dynamic point-cloud constellations.
Through a step-by-step guided interface, participants experiment with core behaviors such as turbulence, attraction, and clustering, focusing on both technical understanding and creative interpretation. This workflow comes directly from the organizers' ongoing research on reconfiguring images as behavioral systems, and the entire workshop process will be documented as a video.
No programming or TouchDesigner background is required. The workshop is designed to be welcoming, guided, and accessible for all levels.
| ISEA 2026 Thematic Pillars | Charting Constellations (primary), Celestial Dialogues (secondary) |
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| Project Repository | github.com/binyoun/cultural-text-galaxy |