Assignment 2

Working Title: Many Ways of Seeing

Winnie and I right side up and upside down, respectively. 

Ideal interaction:
I want the user to put on the glasses and walk around, ideally for long enough to become somewhat accustomed to their new viewpoint and interact with the world accordingly. I was so delighted by the sudden drop in my stomach when walking out from under the low ceiling to the high, warehouse ceiling in the Exploratorium. I had adjusted just enough to my new perspective for the height difference to cause me to hesitate, and I found that really wonderful and kind of hilarious. I loved it.

Next steps: 

Walk-on-the-ceiling-glasses relaxing in Art 203.

To make this a full exhibit, I would expand and separate the effects that I combined in the glasses that I presented on Friday. I would make three (potentially more, but there are three specific effects that I think would be particularly successful) pair of glasses to be used in succession.  

The weakness of having a single pair of glasses is that the user puts them on and immediately becomes disoriented. I think the experience would be more powerful if they had other effects to compare them to side by side.

I also think that this would make it more interactive. Multiple visitors could use the glasses simultaneously and describe their experiences to
each other, walk around together, get freaked out or tripped up by different things, etc. 

Overview:

In my improved exhibit, there would be three pairs of glasses.

1) The upside down glasses. This was one component of the glasses I showed on Friday, but if reworked could deserve its own moment in the limelight. To make the effect stronger, I would make the mirror's downward angle adjustable but remove the front portion that reflected the gaze up toward the ceiling.

A small person that, distorted, looks like an ear.

2) The “walk on the ceiling” glasses. These would be similar to the glasses that I showed on Friday, but reworked for a better fit. I would rework the glasses to be less cumbersome. This would probably include making the earpieces out of plastic rather than acrylic mirror, even though
the all-acrylic aesthetic was nice (and especially because Edmark found that aesthetic misleading).

Britt's bird pecking Brian's arm. 

3)I would love to make glasses simulating the effect that Britt and Dan worked with--stereo vision? I loved their idea, but I thought that the effect would have worked better as a wearable device. When I'm at a museum and an effect takes some time to see, I'll often abandon it (I've abandoned the Cheshire cat exhibit at the Eploratorium several times, for example). I don't like being pinned to one place, waiting for something to happen. But I think when the device is wearable, I'm much happier to amble about, waiting for something to take effect or just exploring what I'm experiencing.  

Infinity mirror + mysterious black worm + blood stain 

Execution:

As mentioned, the key improvement that I would focus on would be making all three pairs of glasses less cumbersome by:

1. Adding plastic ear pieces, rather than laser cutting them from acrylic.
2. Adding non-slide nose padding, so that the glasses sat more stably on the nose bridge.
3. Adding a bit of elasticity to the ear pieces, so that they hugged the head a bit more and fit snuggly enough to not have to worry about spinning or lurching.
4. Improving the hinges on the adjustable mirrors so that they both glide smoothly and stay solidly in place once set.

Nish's Good-trip-in-a-box machine. Feat. blue masking tape.

Other reflections ideas:

For some time I've been hankering to build a sort of “infinity igloo.” Since seeing one of Kusama's infinity rooms last year (the ones Daph posted about), I've thought it would be neat to make a really physically constraining space (like an igloo) into an infinity room. Nish's infinity box (I don't know what it's called so I'm including a picture here) re-ignited the spark for me. His piece was fantastic.

What I'm envisioning is a sort of small, geodesic dome with LEDs in each corner that you could crawl into by removing a panel from the base and then replacing it somehow to leave the reflections unmarred by anything but your reflection. I saw an exhibit over the break in the Majorelle Gardens in Marrakesh (I can't find any pictures of it online) that was a sort of quasi-infinity room with really low lighting that achieved a similar effect, but again it was a really large space. Part of what would make this cool, I think, would be the perception of infinity paired with physical constraint.