Amie Tian

Media Arts & Sciences and Music major

Improvisation is at the core of my creative practice. I treat every project as an open-ended exploration shaped by both intuition and structure. To me, improvisation is not about spontaneity for its own sake, but about experimentation within boundaries, to stretch familiar forms into new expressions.

As an artist and musician, I move fluidly across disciplines, responding to each moment, medium, and material. My work blends music, visual art, and digital media into layered, sensory experiences. I am especially drawn to the hidden rhythms and visual patterns embedded in everyday life, using each medium as a way to tell stories and trace emotion.

With a background in Media Arts & Sciences and Music, my practice bridges the technical and the expressive. I create digital instruments, produce genre-crossing music, and design interactive installations that respond to space and audience. At the heart of it all is a simple intention: to find meaning in the ordinary and invite others into that sense of attentiveness and discovery. To let a picture speak a thousand words, and a note, a thousand sentences.

Feel in the Blank: Synesthesia Through a Sensory Dialogue

video and website

Jewett Hallway Galleries

iMac computer on a white pedestal; person at right wearing headphones and using mouse; screen shows a keyboard viewed from above, text 'Counterpoint (n.) is the relationship of movement between two or more simultaneous lines that are harmonically dependent yet independent in rhythm and mel-'

screenshot of a gray screen with 4 windows; top left: labeled PLAYR, showing a yellow rectangle and buttons for stop, pause, pay; a speed meter, and a couple sliders; top right labeled GRABBR, showing a camera view of a woman with shoulder length dark hair in a gallery; middle left lableled 2SWITCHR with toggles for Video1 and Video2, marked ON, with two speed meters labeled Selector and Breakpoint; bottom left labeled ANALYZER, marked ON, with bars marked Red, Green, Blue, three drop down menus all labeled 'average'

This project explores synesthesia as a framework for sensory storytelling, inviting non-synesthetes to experience the world through a fused lens of sound, color, and emotion. Through a series of video compositions and interactive media built in MAX/MSP, the work creates cross-sensory experiences that blur the lines between hearing, seeing, and feeling. Drawing from personal observations and patterns found in everyday life, each piece invites the audience into a heightened state of attentiveness: where a color can carry rhythm, a sound can hold feelings, and meaning emerges from feeling in the blank.

gray screen with digital keyboard image at top left; light gray lines connect it to a color picker gradient at middle right and a rectangle of purple at lower right, with small blocks of text with numbers or things like 'jit.lcd' and 'prepend bgfillcolor' in them

white split screen; at left black text What over drop-down menu with word --Select-- and text Was that over dropdown menu with word --Select--, text ? and a submit button; at right a slightly 3D shaded neon yellow squiggle with 'click to view' arrow and blank field below it

a balding man with white hair leans over a low stool to touch the keyboard of a piano on a stage in front of a black wall; overlaid is white handwritten-looking musical notation, equal sign, text 'frequency of 523.25 hz'

to see more work by Amie: amietian.com and @amietian.jpg

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