Murrrph

Assessment 2 Final Result

In this assessment, I reflected on the last project and decided to choose another pair of binaries. I chose “seen & unseen” as the theme for this one and used a specific and representative example: depression.

This inspiration came from a recent new I read online which says a young girl in China jumped off the cliff of a well-known mountain. The visitors who saw her tried to convince her to calm down and think twice, but she looked so sad and depressed. A friend of the girl said she was not like that in daily life. She describes her as an out-going girl who laughs a lot.

I got a mix of feelings when I read this. Depression is something that we might not notice from the behavior of people. Thus I want to show the outside behaviors (the seen) and the inside feelings (the unseen) of a depressed person.

So in the final project, I keep going with the audio in the last experiment. The audiences are supposed to sit in the dark room with their eyes closed and listen to the audio. I want to create a sense of isolation and helplessness. 

Assessment 2 Experiment 3

In the last experiment, I used underwater sound and weeping. After that, I added more elements to the audio to reinforce the depressive feeling.

I experiment with the setup in the satellite room. The computer is placed in the middle, connected with three headphones. When listening to the work, the audience needs to sit on the ground, close their eyes, and face the wall. I want to create an atmosphere that really gives pressure to the audience.

Assessment 2 Experiment 2

After discussing my ideas with Andrew, I decided to choose another media rather than visual drawings. The point is to let the audience feel, not see, what is going on in a depressed person’s mind. Their feelings, the fluctuations in emotion, and the contrast between what they act and what they actually feel. So I think about using audio as a way to show the work.

Depression is something everyone may feel in their lives. When a person encounters depression, he/she may lose interest in activities and life and sometimes lead to suicide. I want to show the feelings by mixing different sounds.

In this experiment, I go with the binaries “seen & unseen”. This was inspired by the 3D glasses, which is half red and half blue. When using the red side, everything red cannot be seen and vice versa for the blue side. Through this pair, I want to show that we shouldn’t believe our eyes so easily and think what’s behind what we see. And I want to take depression as a specific example to demonstrate furthermore about what we see on the surface and what we don’t beneath the happy faces.

I choose the 4th topic for this assessment. And the binary in this work is the truth and the lie.

The poster consists of three parts: the background, a polypropylene layer, and two clay balls. The background is a cardboard painted with four different colors: orange, yellow, purple and green. Orange and yellow seem to give a positive feeling while purple and green represent the opposite. But in this poster, I switch the meaning of those two pairs of colors. The next part is the polypropylene board. I chose the one with chose the textured one so it will blur the image of whatever is placed beneath. When you place the polypropylene board a few centimeters far from the background board, the colors will be blurred. Then I place the two clay balls on the background board.

The idea I want to show is: the process of looking for the answer is difficult, and sometimes even though you find it, it may be a lie. When you put the two clay balls on the background board and cover them with the texture layer, it would be difficult to see the balls. And when you push the top layer, they reveal. I want the audience to guess which color is the truth and which is the lie.

The meaning of this poster is: the world is full of truths and lies. Don't judge the answer you find by its appearance. Look from a different angle and think more before you believe in anything. And sometimes there is NO answer.

In the experiment, I used 4 different colors to represent different meanings. The orange and yellow are mostly considered positive colors while purple and green are negative. So I use the former to represent lies and the other two colors as truths, cause the truths and lies are not always so obvious when only looking at the appearances.

For the background, I planned to mix the four colors together. The idea is: the world is not only true and false but sometimes mixed together and it’s hard to distinguish.

And I planned to cover the background layer with a textured polypropylene layer. The texture will blur the background, but when putting the two layers closer to each other the patterns will reveal.

The two clay balls represent ‘answers’.

I chose the 4th topic for my assessment. The topic is: Contemporary art and design often look at the idea of constructed binaries, such as man/woman, soft/hard, straight/gay, dirty/clean, organic/synthetic. Considering the history of these ‘pairs’, how can art and design interrogate these binaries and offers new insights?

The pair I choose to talk about is true(truth) /fake(lie). The truth means the correct answer to a question, and the lie is the opposite. Everyone, not only today but also in the past, seems to look for an answer to the question they have, some are ridiculous like ‘how to eat without gaining weight’ or ‘how to be rich in a short time’. Some questions are not so ridiculous and are more philosophical. In the novel, The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham, the male protagonist Larry Darrel kept looking for an answer to his seemingly unanswerable question in mind: what is the meaning of us existing in the world? What is the true wisdom? No matter what kind of question it is, the answer is everyone needs. But how can we define what is true and what is fake? Is the answer we find real, or it’s just a lie? Is it possible when we search too hard for the answer, it deforms and transforms into something that can no longer be called truth?

So I start to make my poster based on this analysis.