IMG_1559 This is the final project for Digital + Sculpture. The prompt for it is to create a digital sculpture that speaks to repetition, pattern, or multiple in some ways.
Project description
In the time of social media when people can share information and opinions freely, some of the more serious terms and concepts were used and misused in social media as the title of a “hashtag” or a trend, so repeatedly that their original meaning begins to fade away into nothingness. More often than not, the hashtag posters on social media haven’t even thought of the meaning of the concept they are posting — they just think that it is cool to follow the trend and pretend to be thinking about the deeper concepts.
This project is the first piece of a group of kinetic sculptures that tries to convey the idea above. It consists of the main part which is a group of laser cut pieces with the shape of a hashtag, placed in specific ways to form a shadow that has the shape of the Chinese word “女权” (feminism) when the light was cast on at a specific angle. When the main part rotates, the shadow turns into the original form of the laser cut pieces, which are just meaningless hashtags. The rotation of the main part is determined by a dataset of the frequency the word “女权” has been used on Weibo (a social media platform) over the years. The more frequently the word is used, the more the piece will rotate towards the ‘hashtag’ side.
video documentation:
The ideation process:
I have always been obsessed with shadow arts, I think through the shadow they tell one time more story than ordinary sculptures so I wanted to expand in this field myself. The initial inspirations come from a pinterest post that I saw, and the work of Mr. Hu Weiyi. (linked in the images below)
I wanted to build something like the first piece but also want to have my own narrative inside just like the second one. So I pondered upon the feeling of “fragments” in the first piece and came up with the idea of “meaning becomes fragmented or dissolves”.
The fabrication and prototyping process:
p1: 2 plans, rotating the light or rotating the sculpture
p2: testing the definition of the shadow with cardboard
p3: hand drilling the holes in the supporting plate, to have more control over where precisely I want to put the sticks
p4: printing the characters out and use them as building templates
p5: detailed look at how are the individual pieces were put together: Laser cut pieces, hot glued on a wooden stick, then fixed in a hole on the grid board at the exact position.
p6: the finished piece (light is distorted by the projector)
Reflection and future improvements:
I think this piece is one of my more completed projects recently, it speaks to my true feelings about the internet and social media in a precise way, and it is clean and pleasing to look at. So, as for this single piece, I wouldn’t say there is too much to be improved, however, I do plan to make this into a series of sculptures in which each one has a different word that, similar to the word “feminism”, got also so overused that their meaning dissolved. So for the future, I will have a more factory-line fabrication process and change the plan of displaying them.
