My original idea for this midterm project is inspired by the works of Mona Hatoum and Tracey Emin. When I visited Hatoum’s work Hot Spot III at Tate Britan in July 2016, I was fascinated by how light objects affects the environment.
Besides, Tracey Emin’s Neon words installations are also cute to look at.
Based on these works, I intended to construct a prism shape light object. Inside the light object, there would be several words hanging mobiles. The obstacle with this idea is hard to hang the mobiles in the prism. And the idea with words indeed requires serious consideration.
Then my idea totally shifted to another dimension. My capstone is a large glowing box (room). Why don’t I make a small glowing box with more effects? I then laser cut the box first.
I tried with transparent acrylic first, but it would expose the led strips (which I intended to hide). I then tried with the mirroring acrylic to both hide the led strips and better reflect the light.
I then tested with the light.
To both considering the requirement of generative and the glowing idea of my box, I used NeonPixel with Fast LED. It actually took me a lot of time to figure out the color, the gradient and the composition of these three led strips.
I also started with knowing I want to maximize the idea of Glowing. This is one material that my cat really likes to play with, shown as follows:
In order to make it glow, I cut them to strips:
I pasted all the strips onto the box:
a 
b 
c
This is when I was testing with the display. I wanted my audience to walk around from the farther area to a closer area. According to my estimate, people would not be able to see the led strips when they are far away, but only seeing the glowing box. Feeling too hollow with just the change of light, when seeing the box. I thought about the scene in 2001: Space Odyssey, when the ape men discovered the stone tablet, and the stone tablet was a metaphor of civilization.
My idea of wanting people to discover the box is aligned with the film. And I decided to put the phone into the box. And here’s the test:
final show:
1) People’s interaction
2) Documentation:
Professor Eric critiqued this project for the use of the telephone, which was said to have made this project way too complicated than it is best to be. However, I personally enjoy working with symbolism and metaphors. I will leave the question there then.