Digital Media Integration
RIT MFA · 2026

A Future
Surface

Not where people go.
Where they do not choose to go.

Type
AI-Assisted Video
Tools
即梦AI · Runway · After Effects
Course
Digital Media Integration
Year
2026
A Future Surface — Draft v1
0:00 / 0:00
Concept

Urban space is never neutral. Every plaza, pathway, and facade accumulates behavior — including the behavior of avoidance. A Future Surface proposes a speculative visual system that reads this negative space: not the heat map of presence, but the map of collective absence.

The project imagines a civic diagnostic overlay — projected onto architectural surfaces — that classifies, labels, and makes visible the surfaces people systematically ignore.

Visual System
ENVIRONMENT
Desaturated urban and campus footage — color removed to flatten affect, foregrounding structure over atmosphere
OVERLAY LANGUAGE
High-contrast geometric blocks aligned to architectural surfaces — yellow, green, magenta on monochrome ground
DATA ANNOTATION
Text overlays in tracking font: DWELL TIME, PASS-THROUGH ONLY, SURFACE RECLASSIFIED, NOT A PLACE — civic bureaucracy as visual language
REFERENCE
Superstudio's grid projections, Forensic Architecture's spatial analysis aesthetic
Selected Frames
Pass-Through Only
Pass-Through Only
Surface Reclassified
Surface Reclassified
Not A Place
Not A Place
My Contribution
01
Concept & Direction
Defined the speculative premise — avoidance as readable data — and the visual logic of the overlay system
02
AI-Assisted Generation
Iterative prompting and generation using 即梦AI and Runway; curated outputs that served the system rather than illustrating it
03
Editing & Sequencing
Compositing geometric overlays and annotation text in After Effects; pacing and narrative structure for the final video
Process Note

This project uses AI-generated video as environmental source material. The generative process was directed through concept framing and iterative prompting — the creative decisions are in what was selected, how it was sequenced, and how the annotation and overlay system was designed and applied. The final video was composed and edited in After Effects.

A Future Surface · Digital Media Integration · 2026Ziyang Chen · tanchen.me