APD Week 1 - Play and Self

Theme

The way I chose to take the theme of self was by examining the multiple emotions that make up ourselves – a mishmash of elements that create a personality.  By representing these emotions as animals, I created a generator that generates a unique chimera, built up of your own or others drawings that represents your emotions, with the primary emotion taking up a more prominent part in the chimeras makeup.

Methods

The interactive piece was created in Unreal engine, using cards exported and UV’d from Maya. The initial pieces were drawn on paper and I tried to assemble it to make the body parts line up. This was then used to create a template that you could draw animals into using Photoshop. In Unreal, the user can fill up four different buckets with beads that represent whatever emotion or aspect of personality they want to assign to them, and the chimera is generated using the most prominent emotion/aspect, with some randomising of the remaining three aspects building the rest of the body parts.

Context

This work is primarily influenced by the Exquisite Corpse project(Gotthardt, 2021), in how by handing over control of a part of an artwork to someone else, influences the final outcome and creates a mishmashed yet unique creation. Such a work would be difficult to authentically create individually. Similarly, the piece is a combination of parts of our own drawings, reflective of how we see certain parts of ourselves. As the drawings can be from infinitely large pools, these could be done by multiple people, and the resulting chimeras would in essence be completely unique each time -  a representation of our own uniqueness as individuals.

Reflection

Looking back I think it fits with the theme really well. In terms of improvements and how this could be developed further, I would definitely like to implement a system for storing the generated chimeras, and creating a ‘Calendar’ of different chimeras, and then having those inputs stored for later use, so they can be used for more qualitative reflection with respect to time.

Gotthardt, A., 2021. Explaining Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist Drawing Game That Just Won’t Die. [online] Artsy. Available at: <https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-explaining-exquisite-corpse-surrealist-drawing-game-die>

Downloads:

Download File: videodemo-1.mp4