By Yiming Li
For me, I’m more than happy with the finished product of this project. Although I initially thought that the final presentation of the project was full of coincidences, looking back after the end of the project, this was not really the case. Everything in its final form was justifiable, and maybe that’s the amazing thing about design for me.
At first, I searched the internet for works related to projection art and received some inspiration from artists. Regarding some diffuse forms and deep gradient shapes, I started to try to find something that contains the above characteristics in daily life. I realised that the dome at the top of the church seemed to be a good reference, the perspective effect it creates seems to make the whole room look more profound. From then on I started to work on their form and the reasons for this effect.
At this point, the second-hand research part of my short research is considered complete. While I was doing some first-hand research, I tried to move some of the project forward, such as starting to think about the final presentation of the project. But I soon realised that my thinking seemed to be constrained by the theme of the “roof”. When I talk about domes and roofs, I subconsciously feel that they should be on top of my head. So I thought it might be a good idea to project on the ceiling. But it turns out I was wrong. Firstly, it was not practical to use a projector to project vertically, and secondly, the effect and technical difficulties were very different from what I had in mind. Last but not least, I looked everywhere and there was no such flat and clean ceiling on which I could project.
I’ve taken some hits for these reasons, but fortunately I have at least a few well-finished ideas that are worth continuing in this direction. I started going back to the original idea about deep gradient shapes. I chose to create this project in Touch designer since I’m better at this than AE. I have created many graphics that fit the mentioned form.
The graphic production section at the beginning is as above. Simply put, I used the Circle component as a paintbrush and let it draw in the same way as the Feed back component, resulting in a graphic like this. But I soon realised that I wanted to create a loop that would keep on generating, but there was no way to achieve what I wanted this way. The resulting figure was just a centrally symmetrical, lifeless pattern. This was the second major problem I encountered, and I thought about it for a long time.
Just as I was struggling, I suddenly realised that the interaction of a device can be felt not only visually, but also aurally. So I tried to add some data to the generated graphics to control their shape, which came from the Audio device in component, which is actually my microphone. Now my graphics jitter and brighten in response to outside sound, as well as border vignetting. The result is very nice, the graphics seem to come to life, just in the same way as I was trying to do at the beginning, but in a different way.
The whole process of making the project looks like this. I used the Math component to do some collation of the data collected by the microphone and then connected them to the different shapes I made. Finally they were connected into the Kantan Mapper and projected onto the wall. I made the objects very compact to give the whole piece a more holistic look. This way people can observe the changes in the shapes and feel the impact of their voice. I think that the graphics in this project, although they look deep, are not deep at their core. I don’t want to teach anyone anything through it, nor do I want to provoke any kind of directional thinking through it. I just want people to interact with it by activating it through sound, as if it were a dialogue between ourselves and ourselves.
Sometimes it’s nice to just take a moment and play with an interesting installation, isn’t it?