Project Introduction
My project is a set of mirrors facing different directions. When you look at this set of mirrors, it doesn’t reflect a normal image like a smooth mirror. Your reflections are broken into pieces and reordered, and even some pieces are missing. It’s about the distortion of the senses. I got the inspiration from Nerhol. They distort multiple photos so they look out of focus. I replace the medium with a mirror, and I want the user to see a chaotic, broken portrait, or something that doesn’t exist in the face dimension at all.
Perspective and Context
From the video about Merleau-Ponty, I knew that Merleau-Ponty thinks that common sense can be wildly misleading, that’s why we need the method of the phenomenon. Although we can never remove ourselves and have a view from nowhere, we should do our best to find essential features of that experience. It reminds me that the initial experience we gain greatly influences our future perception. When what we see is no longer the same as what we experienced before, it challenges our common sense, and people get confused, try to find a different angle, or twist their senses back to “normal” in their minds. If what we first see is a broken and distorted image, our identity might be different.
Development & Technical Implementation
- Huarong Road knot arrangement.
I arranged a cardboard with a classical Huarong Road knot structure and cut it into pieces. After segmentation, the bottom rectangle is taken out, so that each segment in the Huarong Road knot can move in turn.
- Multi-angle 3D structure.
I designed and calculated different polyhedra and then combined them on different pieces to present facades with different angles.
- install mirrors
Using laser cutting, I cut the acrylic lenses into the shape I wanted and then attached them to the cardboard structure I had built. In this process, I am constantly experimenting with the order in which the pieces are placed to ensure that my reflection and the reflection of the surrounding objects are combined at different angles.
Presentation
In the presentation, my user took a long time to find his face in the mirror, but he was surprised to find that he could see the sweaters, hair, or eyes of many people around him in the mirror. This is a phenomenon that I did not find in my tests. Users standing at different positions can also see multiple images in the mirror. It’s as if the fragments of a scene that you need to look around at come together in a lens between your palms. Unexpectedly, the light reflected off the mirror was beautiful and attracted everyone’s attention.
Conclusion
When users experience my project, they eagerly look for their shadows in the mirror and are pleasantly surprised to find that they can see the shadows of others in the mirror. We know that people tend to constantly use their senses to verify their fixed consciousness and common sense, but when the routine is broken, people enjoy the sudden intrusion of new things into our sensory world. I think the senses should be people’s spades to validate themselves and explore the world, and by pushing the senses to places where they have never been before, our understanding of both will be richer.
For a technical part, reducing the tilt of the mirror might make the reflection look less messy. What’s more, if the mirrors could interact with each other, creating an effect similar to an endless tunnel, it might make the distortion of the senses even more interesting. In addition, if the light reflected by the mirror not only enters our eyes but also reflects on the surrounding wall, what connection can be generated with our senses, these are the questions I will consider next.