Category Archives: Uncategorized

Radii Happy Hour, October: Opposite House

If you’re around Beijing this Friday, October 27, join RADII for drinks and post-work-week chatter at The Opposite House in downtown Beijing. The Opposite House has long hosted a diverse cross-section of Beijing culture, from its gone but not forgotten basement club Punk to its more recently established artist residency program, initiated earlier this year to adorn the hotel’s high-ceilinged lobby with dynamic contemporary work by visiting artists.

We’ll gather at The Opposite House’s ground floor cocktail bar Mesh at 7pm and go til 10 or so. True to the season, Opposite House will be offering a signature cocktail for the evening: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with benchmark bourbon, vanilla syrup, pumpkin puree and spicy red wine. And of course all that pumpkin spiced booze will be enlivened by conversation about Radii, life in China, Vaporwave in China, hairy crab lore, breakthroughs in quantum cryptography, or whatever else you want to yak about.

Event details:

RADII Happy Hour, October 2017

Venue: The Opposite House

Add (EN): 11 Sanlitun Lu, Chaoyang District, near Taikooli Village North

Add (ZH): 朝阳区朝阳区三里屯路11号

Time: 7pm-10ish

Google Map

Baidu Map

First drink’s on us if you come in costume!

Photo of the day: Virtual Buddha

This week’s photo series comes from the students and alumni of NYU Shanghai. We’re looking at how people from China and around the world come to understand their new home via images.

Today’s photo comes from Kadallah Burrowes, who studied Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai and continues to work in the city, exploring a conceptual practice related to narrative technique and UI design in virtual reality. The photo is of Leshan Giant Buddha in Sichuan province, which became the largest Buddha in the world after the Taliban bombed the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan in 2001. Naturally, this being a tourist attraction in China, one can’t quite photograph the Leshan Giant Buddha without photographing someone else photographing the Leshan Giant Buddha.

Check back on Radii tomorrow for a profile of Burrowes and his most recent interactive media project in Shanghai. And check a previous photo of his — runner-up in our inaugural photo contest this past summer — here:

Radii Photo Contest Honorable Mention: Kadallah Burrowes
Article Aug 08, 2017

Photo of the day: Warhol in VR

This week’s photo series comes from the students and alumni of NYU Shanghai. We’re looking at how people from China and around the world come to understand their new home via images.

Today’s photo shows a recent piece by Marjorie Wang and Baaria Chaudhary, NYU Shanghai alumni and co-founders of the New York-based mixed reality studio intern019.

Marjorie says about this image:

Before we incorporated, Baaria and I collaborated on a number of projects at NYUSH, one being The Last Star System, a virtual reality game exploring a planetary amusement park at the corner of our galaxy. The user journeys to a number of surrealist planets, including a Warhol-inspired soup can planet and a cave full of gesturing, glittering hands.

Read more about Marjorie and Baaria’s work here:

How China Inspired My VR Career
Article Oct 17, 2017

Photo of the day: Virtual Worlds

This week’s photo series comes from the students and alumni of NYU Shanghai. We’re looking at how people from China and around the world come to understand their new home via images.

Marjorie Wang, co-founder with Baaria Chaudhary (pictured above) of the mixed reality studio intern019, says of this snap:

In May 2017, NYU Shanghai students Baaria Chaudhary and Marjorie Wang attended Unite Shanghai 2017, Unity‘s largest Asia conference. The demos ranged from the Omni Gaming Treadmill, to Vuforia, an augmented reality SDK, to Fingo (pictured here) a VR headset attachment that tracks hand position, turning your hands into the controllers.

Read more about VR, Shanghai, and intern019 in this piece by Marjorie for Radii:

How China Inspired My VR Career
Article Oct 17, 2017

Photo of the day: Obedience

This week’s photo series comes from the students and alumni of NYU Shanghai. We’re looking at how people from China and around the world come to understand their new home via images.

The first time I went to Qibao in Shanghai was my first glimpse into old China. There was a crowd gathered around an old man who had with him three monkeys. He sharpened knives and was about to cut the monkey’s head off…until the monkey comically dodged it. It was a street performance with three very well-trained monkeys. One of the monkeys approached me and flashed the “gimme-gimme” hand symbol. I actually told the monkey “I’m sorry, 没有钱。I don’t have money.” All of a sudden… WHAPOW! He used his palm to strike me in the forehead. I was just assaulted by a monkey, much to the enjoyment of the crowd. In that instance, I felt like I suddenly understood the origin of martial arts, coming from the movements of animals.

Watch: English vs Cantonese

The genre of “comparing different languages/dialects in a funny video” is a pretty hot one on the Chinese internet. Some people, like American comedian Jesse Appel, have built entire careers on the back of viral language-video fame. More recently, a German guy based in Shanghai became an overnight celebrity when a video of himself imitating several Chinese dialectics and personality types — overbearing mother-in-law, for one — garnered him a million-plus online following.

The latest language video to make the rounds on Chinese social media pivots a bit further south and pits Cantonese — a language totally distinct from Mandarin, with about 80 million speakers — against English.

The creator, who goes by Mr. Yang on YouTube, opens with a stated mission of dispelling some common misconceptions about the language (“It might sound like Cantonese people are yelling at each other all the time…”) and proceeds to give a handy series of side-by-side translations with a liberal dash of slapstick flair. Bonus points to Mr. Yang for including slow-mo double takes of the Cantonese phrases for us gweilo struggling to follow along at home.

Watch the full 2 minutes and 24 seconds of “extra Canto flavor” here: