Holographic Moons, Accessible Engineering, and Painting by NASAs Numbers.

I highlighted the main points to try and keep things short and sweet.

What I did this week:

-Create 8 digital studies to use as the basis for later animations

-Built a hologram projector

-Documented and Iterated on the idea of a hologram projector for sculpture

-Created installation sketches to get an idea of how the work would look in a gallery space

-Documented and experimented with projection on painted acetate

-Researched/documented geological properties of five moons and replicated their activity with paint and digital media.

Io Print 1

Titan Study 2

Unknown Moon 2

Unknown Moon 1

Encledus Study 2

Europa Study 4

Titan Study 1

Encledus Study 1

More Specifically:

I have this wonderful (but incorrect) notion that the most unsolvable, frustrating, hair-pulling problems have awesome solutions. It's becuase my parents used to give me problems and tell me they were impossible to solve... but then encourage me to try and solve them.

These cute, accessible engineering problems are how I approach a lot of my work: by disregarding how intimidated I should be by a problem and shamelessly going at it with the internal confidence of a male freshmen engineering student and the external self-criticism of that same engineering student five years later.

The hard problem I've been trying to solve this week is: how to create the perception of entering a world in five square feet without VR.

I want to create an abstract visual to go with the more data-representative sound work, because my objective is to inspire curiosity, but my sound pieces (for the sake of being true to the data) are not always beautiful. So the conceptual and scientific interest may be more rooted in the sound works, and the visual and subjective interest will come more from the installation.

I say without VR because I feel like it would be cheating. VR might have a wonderful place in art, but for this purpose it would take the cognitive challenge out of it for the viewer, they would be able to understand it as soon as they read the label: “I’m looking at a VR representation of this world”. And for me, it would take all the physical challenge out of trying to invent a machine that adds to the subjective experience of the piece. And it would suck the joy out of figuring out that machine for the viewer.

My first idea was DIY holograms. If I could figure out systematically how and why they worked, maybe I could extrapolate them into a medium. I used a magic trick from the 1800s called peppers ghost as a starting point, and then combined the key concepts with modern DIY hologram reflectors to create something a little more complex. I call it a holocube… and it totally doesn’t work (becuase the more holo projectors you add in a small space, the smaller they become)(pictures to come).

Simpler versions of it did, but on a very small scale. Out of this failure I realized I could create the perception of depth by folding the hologram reflectors in on one another using the same light source. Like peppers ghost squared.

My second idea was fragmented, partially transparent, suspended projection surfaces. I essentially broke sheets of painted acetate with a hammer, hung the shards up like a mobile, and projected my art onto the smooth side…. It was beautiful! But not quite an entire world. I kept it in the back of my mind for future reference.

My third idea was reverse projection in an enclosed space. VR essentially only uses the area around your eyes, so it makes sense that one could create something smaller than the body to trick the brain into perceiving a larger space. So I took a sheet of thick acetate and reverse-projected a pattern onto the semi-transparent side it and bent it around my head. The effect was that the bent light made the pattern look like a landscape! Aha!

Realizing I actually had to get something done… as opposed to being quirky little experimenter all day… I made more of the textures I would want to project and animate.

I used the creative practices I learned in the previous weeks to create these textures. They are research-inspired (but not research based) representations of the moons Europa, Titan, Io and Ganymede. I made them first with paint using techniques that visually mimic their geologic activity (Europa is scraped by asteroids, Io is covered in volcanic blisters, Titan is covered in thick haze) and then digitally augmented them to better represent these environments.