MDPJ: Project Microdistance

Aug 03, 2023

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MDPJ is a student-led art exhibition and lightshow created for a liberal arts summer camp in China. Over 200 students painted 13 murals, one for each letter of “MICRODISTANCE,” each reflecting their themed group. I directed the ideation, logistics, sourcing, and choreography of a musical finale featuring live performance, a musically-synced logo projection, and rainbow backlighting.

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Preface

You can’t understand MDPJ without understanding Microdistance.

It’s the space between two people when they really see each other. Not in the polite nod, not in the icebreakers or trust falls, but in the moment someone says something that makes everyone in the circle go quiet. That’s microdistance. And that’s what the camp was built to create.

In a country where liberal arts education still feels like a foreign language, this five-day adventure was a crash course in curiosity. We had experts in architecture debating philosophy with 16-year-olds. We had dance-offs followed by late-night discussions on mortality. And somehow, I ended up directing the final project that tried to hold all of that in one glowing, chaotic, 13-letter-long display.

MDPJ was never just about the murals or the lightshow (though managing 200 teenagers with paintbrushes, wrangling last-minute LED shipments, and making sure the logo projection actually moved to the beat was a feat of its own). It was about building a monument to what happens when people from wildly different worlds build something together. Something transparent, layered, imperfect—and all the more beautiful because of it.

Microdistance is hard to explain. MDPJ tried to make it visible.