Good day and welcome to our blog. Here you will find updates on our progress.
Splitting into groups
After meetings with Jules and Andrew on 2nd February, the entire Performance group decided to split up into two smaller groups of 4 and 5.
Our group includes me (Owen), Shruti, Vibha, Maggie and Yi.
We have a solid mixture of technical backgrounds: 3 students from Design and Digital Media, and 2 students from Sound Design.
We are leaving open the possibility of consolidating the two groups later on, but for now, we will operate separately.
Initial ideas
Shruti, Vibha and I (Owen) met on 31st January for some initial brainstorming. This was a very casual and open-minded brainstorming session—we just shared whatever came to mind. Here is what we came up with:
Theme of homesickness
Since all three of us (and now, indeed, all 5 of us) are foreign students, something we can all relate to on an emotional level is the feeling of being homesick. Since, in my experience, it is easier to work creatively about topics to which one has an emotional connection, I considered this theme to be a great potential starting point.
In terms of what the art might actually look like, we had a few ideas.
1 – Prompt the public to send us photos of a room or section of their home that they particularly miss. We could then project a sequence of these photos onto a wall and, for each photo, play a soundtrack that immerses the viewer into that room (e.g. sounds of cooking for a kitchen photo.)
2 – Using a digital drawing surface (e.g. iPad), prompt attendees to walk up and draw a single material possession from home that they particularly miss. Crude drawings would be welcomed – it’s not only skilled visual artists that could join. These drawings would then be projected onto a wall and form a collage. Perhaps the drawings could then be manipulated/transformed in some way live.
Tribute to Leonardo Da Vinci
Da Vinci’s inventions aren’t as well known as his paintings. The idea was to sonify his paintings which would be moving and projected. These would also include his product designs. Adding an AR element to the experience would be to scan the product and see it in motion outside the painting. An example of one of his product designs is this drawing of a glider:
Alice in Wonderland
Vibha brought up the idea of re-creating one or more scenes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This is a story rife with visual depth: hallucinations, transformations, distortions, etc. So we viewed it as a great source of inspiration. The story also has plenty of opportunities for psychedelic sound design and/or music.
Narrowing Things Down
The five of us met on 4th February to continue brainstorming.
By this point, the Alice in Wonderland (AIW) idea was becoming our favorite. However, we agreed that, while it would probably be fruitful to re-create part of the story of AIW in the form of an immersive installation, that has been done before many times ( example ) , so it wouldn’t be very original. Instead, we wanted to decide on a broader theme that we could tackle while using the AIW aesthetic and storyline as a (major) point of reference.
Since Maggie had already wanted to do a project on climate change/environmental collapse, we decided to use that. This is both an urgent and complex topic that all members of the group care about.
We then came up with the idea of Alice in Wasteland – an immersive installation in which the attendees experience a version of what is predicted to happen to our planet over the course of x years due to the effects of climate change. So the attendees would progress from a vibrant and colorful world to one that has decayed into a bleak and desolate wasteland.
I’m going to end by including some of Xu’s ideas.
I’m more inclined to do live installations, not animation, I didn’t express it clearly before. On-site installations will have more visual tension than virtual ones. If we want to do virtual reality, we can do some plant animations that die due to the influence of the environment, in the form of AR.
The following are ideas based on on-site(live) installations, not virtual ones:
1.Thoughts on the Alice theme:
A scene like this can be made to represent the space of Alice’s dream. There is a kind of illusory feeling, which makes people unable to grasp and have no sense of reality. There is a similar expression technique in “Interstellar”, to express a three-dimensional space.
- The end of Alice’s story (expression in the positive version):
Finally, the sun shines into that scene, helping things to gain new life, and freeing people or animals and plants that have been affected by the environment. The broken glass, which could be a rabbit or something else, breaks free from that environment, and there is a visual tension of a two-dimensional breakthrough to three-dimensional. The part of Sunshine brings passive relief, Things cannot escape the influence of the environment, they can only wait to be changed. The part of breaking, this expression is to actively change (but in fact, those things have not changed the original environment, and jumped to another dimension for relief)
- Thoughts about being influenced by the environment:
We can use some plastic wrap and cloth to wrap things in the main environment to express the emotions, suffocation, and struggle that may be caused by the influence of the environment.
