Findings & Insights
Working on this project has given us fresh revelations as well as new perspectives in approaching the seemingly strict and rigorous design principles or rules. The project conveys an indirect message of beauty in chaos. People are also free to pick their own music and observe how the less restrictive visuals we had produced are interactive with the chosen sound. This way, they are gaining a new experience of being inside our own version of The Pandora’s Box.
Design Decisions
We were required to make a lot of decisions regarding the aesthetics and style direction that we wanted to go towards. Being heavily inspired by metamorphosis and psychedelic art, we mostly used organic shapes since it is easier to create a sense of movement with them. Making the visuals audio-reactive was also one of the most crucial design decisions that we made. We initially didn’t have any plans on making them interactive with audio at first, however, upon consultation with lecturers, we then realized that audio reactivity ties together the concept as a whole better.
Challenges
We faced our first problem as early as the visual-making stage. At first, we were working with p5js until we were advised to use TouchDesigner instead since p5js was too complex to use to achieve what we wanted. Learning how to use TouchDesigner while also having to produce visuals from it was quite a lot on our plate. Another challenge we had to go through during this stage was going from making the visuals amplitude-interactive to bpm-interactive. Fortunately, after a session of consultation with Joanne, we were able to tackle this issue and went ahead to the next stage of the process.
Since this was our first-ever experience building a life-sized installation, we had to figure things out as we work on it. Dealing with the constantly falling PVC screen consumed a lot of time. We kept needing to make alterations to the fishing rod attached to the PVC, tightening the strings every hour to make sure it won’t drop. The distance between the projector and the partition was also quite an issue that we had to tackle since we didn’t have that much free space to position the shelf which holds the projector in. In the end, we still managed to set everything up in place nicely even though the projection from the projector didn’t fill the whole PVC screen.
Lastly, getting people to come down to our installation also took a while since most of our classmates are quite busy at the time. We ended up inviting students from diploma to test out the installation and shared about the concept of our project with them. Even though a lot of our classmates couldn’t make it, we still managed to get enough people to try out and experience our project. Joanne also came down to check on us!
