APD Week 9 - Play and Materiality

'Making Of' video: 

Theme

Play and Materiality

Context

My idea for this week is partly inspired by my response the previous week, ‘MAGI Door’. While MAGI Door was about audience and play, it also happened to be about materiality and play as well. MAGI Door was partly inspired bythe idea by Huizinga that "Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life" – I’d thought, “why not take the ordinary act of walking through a door and make it magical?”.

I also wanted to make another really feel-good and positive work – a bit of a boost for people. This was partly in response to the end of winter here in Melbourne (at last), partly in response to a stressful time of year for many students (particularly those a long way from home) and partly in response to recent tragic events at RMIT. 

I was also inspired by interactive exhibits like Cocoonat this year’s White Night festival in Melbourne.

Method

My Week 8 response, MAGI Door, combined sound, an ordinary door and interactivity (made possible using a Makey Makey). This gave me the idea of doing something similar with a hallway, but instead of focusing on sound, this time I would play with light.

A while back I bought some cheap foil curtains from a party supply store for a ‘winter wonderland’ party I was having. My original idea was to hang them on an old hills hoist washing line and to test projecting snow through them. I never ended up doing it as I ended up getting into an intensive VR workshop at the last minute, so ran out of time. I’d never seen anyone project onto foil curtains before and I wanted to see what would happen. The curtains are semi-transparent, but also reflective, plus they move with the slightest breeze, which I thought could create some interesting visual and haptic effects.

I settled on the idea of using a hallway instead of a Hills Hoist, mostly because it was daylight at the time of my experiment, but also because I thought there was something nice about taking the ordinary experience of walking down a hallway and turning it into something other-worldly.

Some of the foil curtains I had were less reflective than others. I tried out a few combinations of spaces (my loungeroom, then hallway) and also played with the number an order of the foil curtains, eventually putting the most reflective curtain closest to the projector because of the amazing shapes that it reflected on the white hallway wall.

I also experimented with different projections – first I tried stock video footage of luminescent jellyfish. These were subtler than I wanted. The black or deep blue sea background also didn’t cast enough light to penetrate the back curtain. Eventually I found a more abstract, multicoloured animationfromEnvato Elementswhich worked really well, adding to the ‘magic’ feel I was after.

I was excited about the reflections that the foil curtains cast – they were almost holographic in their look. More to be explored here.

My 'Making Of' video that shows more of these refelctions etc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOdYL7e1gKc&feature=youtu.be

Response

Here is a video that documents an animation projected onto reflective foil curtains in a hallway. (This is physical installation, designed to be walked through in a real-life hallway).