1: rethink the human-nature relationship
We want to address the problem of environmental protection and let the audience think about the question: how closely man can interfere nature. The insight comes from one writing class both of us are taking, the topic of the class is called: the question of the Anthropocene. The reason to declare this new era, the Anthropocene, is because of the acceleration of environmental changes caused by humans are so profound. And we need to rethink the relation of human and nature. It’s relevant to all of us. In the researches, we found more and more contemporary art works start to look at nature and humanities, including the exhibition in our school’s gallery. Also, in my research, I think it’s better to involve more people in an interactive experience.
We want to shoot videos ourselves of scenes that represents nature, combine it to processing and add web cam interactions that the users can see themselves in the scene. In both our research and personal experience, we found that projects involves mirror or some kinds of reflections that we can place ourselves in can attract our attentions more. By seeing themselves on the screen realtime, the users will want to move farther of nearer, or have different poses. We want add some kind of sounds can visuals that will change according to users distance to the screen with the distance sensor. In this case, we want the users to think about their distance between nature and the power of one man and a group of them.
2: Project title: release your magic
As a fan of Harry Potter, I always imagine myself to have that kind of power: controlling things in a wave of the wand. For this project, we aim at children or Harry Potter fans of all ages, to interact a scene from the movie, seeing themselves on the screen. In our research, there’s a very playful interaction screen that the movement of objects on the screen is depending on the act of users. This interaction evolves huge physical movement and multiple people. The issue we want to convey a positive attitude towards our users: we all have magic power. Recently especially after midterm, many of my friends are under great pressure and keep looking down on themselves. So, I think it’s really important to send out positive messages towards our project.
3:project title: Listen to the non-human
We are inspired by a project called “Meaningful interactive audio experiences” created by Playtronica Studio Showreel which experimented with sounds from different objects such as plants, water, and our everyday objects. The project involves different kind of senses including watching, hearing and touching. In this artistic way, everyday objects take on new identities. In our project, we encourage users to experience the relationship between themselves and the objects around them by interacting with the objects in a totally different way from what we are used to: to touch and hear. In this kind of practice, we want to encourage people to be not that rush in everyday life and ignore the value of little object around us.
we are trying to enhance the interaction between human and non-human to make humans realize that non-human like static object has its own logic and even possesses some human traits, so as to raise humans’ respect for them and challenge assumption about them as disposable. In terms of the interaction, we will attribute human traits like generating sound (even language) or make movements so that the user will realize that the seemingly static and non-living thing has its own logic and life.