APD - Week 4 - Play and Place

By Juan Felipe Cadena Parra

CONTEXT

For this week, reading the class material, the exploration of many places in this city came to my mind, whose variety is impressive if we think about both the development of urban infrastructure and the incredible number of parks and nature reserves that are mixed perfectly with suburban life. Melbourne is clearly an inspiring place, where creativity comes to the fore at every turn.

However, my housemates recently started a small garden where they planted rocket, jasmine, basil, among others. After a few weeks, we saw how the plants grew and that small place made up of only earth and pots was transformed into this magical place full of different shapes, green colors and a beautiful flower that adorns the space. After seeing it in its current state I thought, why should the exploration of space be exclusively of sites that fit our size? I would really love to be able to be smaller, hike the terrain, camp on it, climb the vine. It is with that goal in mind that I decided to conduct this little experiment.

METHOD

I simply used my camera as a tool to take photos as close as possible to all the plants that are part of the garden. The idea was to achieve frames that would allow these small pots to be imagined as lands or worlds. After taking all the photographs for the backgrounds, I did a studio inside my house where I took all of my photographs, seeking to achieve poses according to each situation to be able to include myself in the most natural way possible within the context.

RESPONSE

My response is a series of photos that imagine the small garden in my house as a habitable and explorable place.

REFLECTION

Even though I don't have enough photo editing skills, I think I achieved a result that allowed me to effectively communicate what I wanted. The fact of being able to explore, not in a literal way, a small space in my house, I was able to verify that Play not only appears when we carry out an activity in a physical / face-to-face way, but that by using our imagination in conjunction with digital tools, we can play with factors such as size, shapes, colors, among others; that allow us to create the illusion of transporting ourselves to new worlds or microscopic or giant corners that we cannot do normally.

Each time digital tools not only allow us to transport our image, but also reach the point of deceiving our senses, placing different worlds before our eyes such as virtual reality or adding elements to the existing one through a screen as augmented reality does. This, added to all the levels of interaction that we can have with those worlds or objects, will make these simulations become indistinguishable in the future.