This Team Wanted to "Use Technology to Convey Emotion," So They Made Art Installations Their Day Job | 100 People With Ideas

As for how they stay alive, the answer is commercial partnerships.

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In late September, the sky above the footbridge linking the north and south towers of Jing'an Kerry Centre in Shanghai filled with glowing balloons, arranged into a rainbow that spelled out "How Are You Today."

Every balloon wore a different expression. Take a smile test on the iPad set up beneath them and it read your mood score, then lit the balloon in the matching color. Behind it sat a facial-recognition system: a different emotion on the face of the person interacting with it meant a different color on the balloons.

The team that built this installation with Kerry Centre is called Seeeklab. The Xiamen-based new-media installation studio was little more than a year old and had already finished several commercial projects like it. It had also made pieces people talked about: "The World's Longest Seesaw," "Heavy Rain, Sound and Luminous Bodies," and the "Sand Writing Table."

On Seeeklab's homepage you can find its own description of itself: "Seeeklab is a design collective. We specialize in the design and development of creative tech installations." Seeeklab was formally founded in April last year. The name comes from the English words "seek" and "lab," except that "seek" gets an extra "e" — for electronic, entertainment, and enlightenment. The question they hope to answer in the end: "To convey emotion through technology, what else can we do?"

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Tian Li, the founder and design director, has always believed that technology should bring people closer to one another, that it shouldn't just be a cold machine.

After finishing his master's in the computer science department at Tsinghua University in 2012, he went to teach at Xiamen University's Zhangzhou campus. The plan back then was still to "find a quiet place with a nice setting, get married, have kids, live a good life." The quiet didn't last long. At first he wanted to be a good teacher and pass his enthusiasm for developing and designing tech installations on to his students.

But he found that "college students today don't need teachers so much — they can go online and learn plenty on their own," Tian Li said in an interview with QDaily. So after a year on the job he quit and put his energy into developing new kinds of tech installations.

A new-media background as an undergraduate, computer science in graduate school, and creativity, which he thought no one could do without — those, in Tian Li's view, were his advantages in making new-media art installations.

After quitting, he joined a cross-media experience design firm in Xiamen, and in 2014 he mounted a new-media art exhibition called "Time Is an Illusion." He hoped it would prompt people to look at time again. It was also the first exhibition that inventive in Xiamen, and it quickly earned Tian Li a name while introducing him to several like-minded friends.

Seeeklab today has four core members. Besides Tian Li, there is Candy, the chief designer, who had put on exhibitions with him; Haibin, a middle-school classmate of Tian Li's and a former executive director at Beijing Television; and Eddie, Seeeklab's client director.

Eddie was one of the friends Tian Li met through the exhibition. He went on to co-found Seeeklab with Tian Li and runs the studio's business development and management.

Unlike Tian Li, Eddie has no technical background and no experience with new-media installations. He simply liked going to art festivals as an undergraduate in Melbourne, and along the way took a liking to new-media installation teams such as Germany's ART+COM. "Those installations were full of technology and the future," Eddie said. That was more or less his introduction to the field.

Seeeklab was not Eddie's first venture. Born in the 1990s and restless with it, he had once opened a juice shop while holding down a job. The shop was a side project, started without any market research, and it failed. The experience did give Eddie a clearer sense of himself. "My parents want me to have a stable job, but I like a challenge, I don't like a life that's too plain," Eddie said. "I feel like if I just worked an honest job and went on that way, it would be a bit of a waste."

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Seeeklab defines itself as "specializing in the creative concepts and development of new-media installations." The definition of "new-media installation" was itself the biggest obstacle of its early days. For the first three months after founding the studio, they set up their workspace and hunted for clients at the same time. They were sure they could use new-media installations to help brands with marketing.

"Nobody knew what these so-called tech installations were for. We couldn't explain it to clients," Tian Li said.

So they realized that to be convincing they had to make something first. In that stretch, to keep the bigger projects moving, they had to take on routine trade work — Seeeklab even did the graphic design for every issue of the China Computer Federation's publication. It looked like a betrayal of the reason Seeeklab was founded, but to Tian Li it was "something we had no choice about."

"The World's Longest Seesaw" was Seeeklab's first new-media installation after the studio opened.

It was an interactive installation spanning 1,180 kilometers, letting a father and son in two different places ride a seesaw as if face to face, through remote motion transmission and video on a television. What mattered most to Seeeklab, though, was that the video they shot of the seesaw, under four minutes long, drew huge numbers of clicks online and coverage from the major TV stations. In the video, besides the longest seesaw in the world, you could also see a Deppon Logistics delivery truck and a Xiaomi TV.

This was marketing, and deliberately so. In this campaign Seeeklab was "doing internet things with a hardware playbook."

By Tian Li's account, they had set up several "pools" at the time — a mind pool, a tech pool, a need pool. "Whatever turns up, you throw it in the matching pool, then look for matches." It started with Deppon Logistics wanting publicity: the company hoped people would see it as more than a delivery outfit, as a team that could move people. That need sat in Seeeklab's need pool. Later, Seeeklab co-founder Haibin drew the idea for a story from his own life, and with logistics plus family feeling, they used the world's longest seesaw to tell a pretty good one.

To Tian Li, the seesaw was marketing they initiated themselves. They put a Xiaomi TV in the video on purpose and told Xiaomi about it; Xiaomi's official account later reposted the video on Weibo.

The campaign proved that Seeeklab's approach could work. It also gave the studio's business a lift — at the very least, the next time they had to explain to a client what they actually did, the seesaw was their strongest case.

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In November 2015, the first new-media art exhibition mounted under Seeeklab's own name, "Heavy Rain, Sound and Luminous Bodies," opened at Xiamen's JFC Mall.

The exhibition was made for children with autism. It began when Tian Li and his team happened to meet a group of autistic children. "These kids seem very lonely, but they resist contact with people. We didn't know how to reach them," Tian Li said.

It ran in a half-enclosed space, with glowing raindrop-shaped inflatable molds hung from the ceiling. Tap any one raindrop and all of them changed color while a pleasant sound rose through the hall. The space also held light-sensing stools: when the people sitting on them touched each other's skin, that too set off changes in light and sound across the room. In this environment everything changed because of "contact." Seeeklab hoped the experience would let the children feel an understanding that needed no words.

The "Heavy Rain" show drew tens of thousands of visitors and came to be known outside Xiamen, catching the attention of Huiling, China's first community-based service organization for people with intellectual disabilities. From May 2016, Huiling worked with Seeeklab on a national touring exhibition. On May 15, the 26th National Day for Helping the Disabled, "Heavy Rain" went to the science and technology museum in Hangzhou, where people with autism and intellectual disabilities, accompanied by non-disabled companions, went through an experience of "contact" and "transmission."

By Tian Li's account, three things keep Seeeklab alive. Through three special projects — the seesaw, the "Heavy Rain" exhibition, and the Sand Writing Table — they proved out three workable ways to survive.

The seesaw was a piece of marketing built out of hardware to manufacture an online talking point. The "Heavy Rain" exhibition was a public-service tour around the country; it brought in no profit, but it widened Seeeklab's reach. The Sand Writing Table came in two versions: an exhibition version for display, and a more finished end product that could go into production. Paired with an app, it turned your handwriting into the strokes of a piece of smart hardware, which then wrote them out in sand. It went up for crowdfunding on the platform Kaishi Zhongchou last December, along with a video on the emotional side of the Sand Writing Table, and reached mass production this March at a retail price of 499 yuan.

As a video-marketing model, Tian Li thinks, Seeeklab has something in common with Thinkmood, the studio behind the viral "ghost doll" video. Both build an installation, then shoot a video around it and spread it. But Thinkmood is not a model Seeeklab can copy. "Their stuff leans too far toward publicity," Tian Li said.

In how they build interactive installations, Seeeklab and the Japanese interactive-installation team teamLab both stress using tech installations to create an emotional connection. But the two run on entirely different models. teamLab only does exhibitions and makes its money from the exhibitions themselves. Seeeklab stresses more than exhibitions: it also has the videos, and the finished products derived from its installations, several revenue streams combined.

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This team that wants to tell stories with technology and art is getting better known, and says it turned a profit a year after it was founded.

Seeeklab really can make things that stand out, and its "hardware plus software" approach sets it apart from the traditional marketing and advertising firms. Even so, the problem has shifted from "it's hard to find clients" to "it's hard to find the right clients." They spent a while struggling with how to convey correctly what they are.

"The cost of communication is too high." That is the difficulty Eddie, who handles Seeeklab's business development, ran into once the studio had a bit of a name.

They want their partners to work alongside them to get something done. Most clients don't want to spend the time. In the traditional model, a client planning a marketing campaign doesn't need to work in close step with the agency the whole way. Seeeklab believes that kind of close collaboration is required to finish anything, whether a specific installation or a video for marketing. There is also the cost: because building an installation eats up so much money, a design fee appears at the very start of a collaboration, as soon as the requirements are stated. Clients often won't pay for that.

"A lot of brands come to us just because they find us interesting. They've never thought about how they would work with us," Eddie said. "Sometimes we actually have to weed out clients like that."

Eddie says this young team has never asked what "the traditional model" ought to look like — not in a video-marketing event like the seesaw, not in an activation like the one at Kerry Centre. They would rather do things their own way; the traditional client-agency relationship looks to them more like a "partnership."

While they keep trying new projects, they have also begun to attract more attention: potential clients who want to hire them, and the media. On iQiyi's eight-minute micro-documentary series Wild Ones 《狂徒》, Eddie was the subject of the episode that ran on July 29 this year. Wild Ones says it "records a young attitude," and Eddie's episode was titled "The Warmest Tech Inventor in History". It drew 5.59 million views.

And in The Unreasonable, a project launched by the ad agency Anomaly, Tian Li was the subject of one episode. That collaboration with Anomaly led directly to Seeeklab's later work with Kerry Centre.

Over the past year they have been busy with commercial jobs large and small. Developing a new tech installation is usually not easy: it takes a great deal of time and effort and a lot of trying things out. They create whenever work slows down, and still the time left for it is far too little.

As at every creative company, how to keep creativity flowing is now what worries Eddie. Too much commercial work keeps pulling their energy away from developing installations, and without creativity and independence, "Seeeklab will have less and less soul, and that would be bad."

In the plans Seeeklab is drawing up for next year, commercial work and creative work will be split into two groups, with a group devoted to creation alone, making more work that can "move people."

Images courtesy of: seeeklab