Final Work: ‘Perception Pyramids’
“Art and design often explore relationships between humans and non-humans, the environment and ecology. How can contemporary art and design propose new possibilities for imagining the ‘human’ and the environment?”
Humans will always perceive the world differently from one another based on their own individual experiences. Depending on how we associate meanings and emotions to our surroundings, events, or even words, the things we deem positive may be negative for someone else. For my final piece, I wanted to explore how each individual human differentiates their environment from another person’s perspective. After breaking down the original topic question, I came up with a more focused query:
“How do individuals give meaning to their environment from their own, unique perspective?”
After looking at the feedback for my poster I decided to focus more on the individual, reducing the collaborative aspect of the work while keeping interactivity for said individuals in relation to my question.
My final piece is a set of three triangular pyramids made of white canvas board, with triangular windows on each side covered with yellow, red, blue, and clear cellophane. The pyramids each hold a single paper cube with words on each side—with one cube representing nouns, another representing verbs, and the last being adjectives. I categorised the words into noun, adjective and verb as I wanted at least one aspect in my work to be something that people can agree on, being bound more to fact than subjectivity, to act as a kind of ‘base’ before the division of opinions. I am also able to represent the environment through these three categories as we use nouns, adjectives, and verbs to identify and describe objects and their actions in our world. Building on from the previous assessment task, I used the words the class had written on my poster and added my own words when I used them all. I also incorporated the primary colours in the panels as each colour contrasted enough from the others to evoke three different vibes, keeping one clear panel to act as the control.
I researched colour psychology when planning for my project. People tend to associate colours to different emotions as a result of culture, context and past experiences. In his article about colour psychology, Nick Kolenda notes how our brain creates nodes for colours as we experience them, recording both positive and negative incidents. For example, getting hit by a car of a certain colour may result in a negative reaction to the same colour later on. While the blue ocean may be relaxing for some, others who have bad memories with it may feel anxious. I wanted to experiment with this idea of colours affecting our perceptions in my work. By associating a word with a certain colour, one’s reading of it may be altered. If the word ‘morning’ appears in the clear window, one may have no opinion of it other than its reference to a time of day, but if the word appears behind the blue window, one may associate it to be a gloomy, rainy one instead if they have a negative perception of the colour, or a calm, cool one if they have a positive perception.
I also took inspiration from Magic 8-Balls, taking the concept of how shaking the ball would give you a new answer each time, to instead providing you a new perspective each time you shook the pyramid. However, I inverted the idea of the 8-Balls giving an answer straight away, as the ‘new perspective’ from the pyramids is the result of carefully reflecting over your interpretations of the words and colours—relying on your own answer instead of a preconceived one.
As my work is an interactive piece, I invite people to shake the cubes inside the pyramids like dice and look through the coloured windows to see what they perceive of the words as they are presented under a certain colour. Rather than going by stereotypical colour meanings like the ones I found while experimenting, people should express what they really feel based on their personal feelings of the colours and words rather than relying on set definitions that dictate how one should feel.
Gans, S., Color Psychology: Does It Affect How You Feel?, Very Well Mind, https://www.verywellmind.com/color-psychology-2795824, (Accessed 3/9/18)
Grannan, C., Where Did the Idea for the Magic 8 Ball Come From?, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/story/where-did-the-idea-for-the-magic-8-ball-come-from, (Accessed 12/9/18)
Kolenda, N., Color Psychology, Nick Kolenda (Site), https://www.nickkolenda.com/color-psychology/, (Accessed 3/9/18)
Unknown, Color Symbolism and Culture, Incredible Art Department, https://www.incredibleart.org/lessons/middle/color2.htm, (Accessed 5/9/18)
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