Meta Rose: Origin

First developed as The Meta Rose Project in 2024, Origin brings the rose into a sustained exploration of mixed and ambivalent emotion. The coexistence of petals and thorns provides its starting point: attraction and difficulty, pleasure and pain can remain inseparable within one experience. Pink and grey organise this tension across image and sound. For Park, pink is both a signature colour and a way of working with emotional atmosphere, intensity and energy.

Conceived as an interactive visual album, the project connects 3D-rendered still and moving images, original soundtracks, a music video, a multiplayer Unreal Engine game and a tactile audio-visual installation. The artist’s digital twin, Mintie, appears within this visual world, placing a constructed representation of the artist alongside the rose as a recurring figure.

In the installation, living roses are arranged in a row across a table, functioning like a tactile keyboard. Touching different flowers activates distinct audio-visual responses within a real-time system made with TouchDesigner. The flower is therefore encountered as both organic material and an interface: its physical presence connects a hand to sound and moving image.

The Meta Rose Game extends the project into a navigable virtual environment. Alongside the rendered works and the installation, it offers a different mode of encountering the same emotional vocabulary. The collection moves between watching, navigating and touching, allowing its recurring forms and contrasting sensibilities to be experienced through different kinds of participation.

The project took different forms across its 2024 exhibitions. At Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, on 29 May, Park presented the rose installation. On 7 June at RMIT University’s Blackbox, the exhibition brought the rose installation and interactive game together within the fuller project. The work was also presented at RMIT University in November 2024.

Origin established living roses, pink, contrasting audio-visual responses and touch as a connected artistic language. These elements provide the foundation for subsequent Meta Rose chapters, each developing a different question, interaction system and spatial form.