https://youtube.com/shorts/CahyJjBC_eU (with sound)
For week 10’s response, I decided to play with flower photographs and arrangement to make an animated psychedelic mandala art. I was impressed with the vast number of activity and experience generated by nature, such as nature play, hiking, gardening, foraging, powers of nature and many more. Personally, nature feels and seems like a collage or a mix of possibilities and elements, which builds up to complexity. This complexity can be rather overwhelming, so to represent it I did it in a form of a trippy psychedelic mandala. The trippy visual that can be confusing can also be an analogy of how nature can never be fully understood by us humans. Nature is so broad and complex that even after centuries of studies and research we still have plenty of aspects and secrets of nature that are not discovered and understood yet. Additionally, the motive behind creating this response is that the word mushroom and shrooms from week 9 abstraction’s word cloud stood out to me. It is interesting to see how people say they may get trippy visual from consuming certain type of mushroom. Hence, I carried that interest, and it seems to be applicable to this week’s theme.
Method
I used my own photographs of found flowers for this response. I tried to use flowers that seemed symmetrical for the purpose of accentuating the geometry naturally found in nature. I then isolated the flowers by removing the background and arranged them into a mandala-like pattern to resemble psychedelic mandala art. Apart from playing around with the arrangement, I also played with colours to see how the pattern would look like with edited colours to make it even more like how psychedelic mandala art generally looks like. Specifically in the animated version, I tried to make the colour change a part of the animation, as I have seen how psychedelic mandala art animation tend to have changing colours, and to incorporate rotations for the trippy experience. I intend to create an experience from or of nature that can be accessible digitally in a funky way. This intention also adds to the idea of how amazing nature is, that even without being outside in nature it can still bring an experience to us. Furthermore, it is interesting to see how digital technology can manipulate nature in various ways without disrupting the wellbeing of the actual nature.
Context
Manipulating nature in a digital environment without disrupting or harming the actual, physical being of nature is the main idea of my response. Coyne (2014) mentioned how “Technologies also have the capacity to disrupt” and that they can confront what we think. Coyne (2014) also mentioned that “human beings are interested not only in natural environments, but also in the representation, recording … of those environments.”. This shows how technology can manipulate the idea and perception of nature cognitively, allowing us to create new products of nature in a non-physical world/dimension. Coyne (2014) stated that technology allows us to perform actions that couldn’t be done in the real, physical world of nature. My response challenges the concepts and ideas surrounding flowers in nature into an artificial, digital trippy experience that can be achieved without the influence of substance (accommodating healthy and preferable method and practice) only through technology.
Reflection
In terms of the visual outcome of my response, I probably should have created a version with the flowers’ natural colours, as they are already vivid and bright, and would make a great comparison towards the edited one. Technology can be beneficial in opening ways and possibilities for people to harness the potentials of nature into new experiences and experiments without the risk of altering the balance of nature. It is interesting however, that this intention has the possibility to rather ruin nature as well, in a hypothetical situation if people get too attached towards the altered version of nature, if people enjoy the artificial better than the actual being.
Reference
Coyne R (2014) Nature vs Smartphones, ACM Interaction, accessed 9 October 2022. https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/september-october-2014/nature-vs.-smartphones
About This Work
By Eugenia Cynthiaputri
Email Eugenia Cynthiaputri
Published On: 21/10/2022