As I was pursuing the building of more and more sophisticated (or at least more full of parts that made me happy to see amongst the other chaos) there came a week when I had a meeting with a professor in my department– and she basically said she wanted to see a digital aspect to this… “You have to see if this thing is going to work,” meaning, demonstrate what it was like to look through this guy’s eyes, and figure out if that really did give the impression of wandering a landscape or… whatever. I had admitedly, its true, not been developing that side of this thing… So, I took a side-track from this project of building these larger and larger bodies and turned to the location of the digital part of this project: the head.
I needed an LCD screen, in order to project an animation from the computer on.
So I borrowed a mini-dvd player from my department. Unfortunatelly, it turns out that a 7.5″ screen with an 8″ frame is way, way larger than any head… it would surely not fit comfortably behind an ordinary mask from the store… So, I had to construct a custom-made head… which would also necessitate a custom-made mask, to hold the dvd player inside.
I started by making a little box for the dvd player to sit on (and oh this was the start of my current love-affair with hot glue) and then just started attaching strips of cardboard all around it– first a large loop over the top, then another around the side, a large oval at front… Then kinda just adding and adding, closing the gaps one by one… Trying to keep smoothness in mind…
This part was quite therapeutic actually…
…At around this point, a friend commented that it looked Bauhaus… I don’t know much about Bauhaus but that’s awesome 🙂
Seeing this big object on my desk, housing a mini-dvd player… it totally seemed like a portrait of what digital media could mean, beyond computer games and websites
The “skull” had to be as tight as possible around the dvd player, so that it was at least somewhat close to the size it will hopefully eventually be– so I kept the player in there the whole time for reference, always making sure it could be removed…
Then came the really unknown-territory part… and the strange-looking part… building the face.. or, rather, the Mask…
It was hard to know where to start with using strips of cardboard, trying to use a plastic mask as reference (this mask is about 20% larger than a typical plastic mask from a craft store)
I realize that it’s probably hard for anyone, even those who know my project and character, to follow the logic of what I’m doing. It’s just so unusual it’s hard to see what I’m working for and what these steps signify, I suppose.
If you hang in there, I hope to satisfy your curiosity and settle your bafflement abundantly 🙂
…although you may still have a long while to wait before that time 🙂
In the curvature of the mask, you can see the opportunity to peer inside, but also the question of which way its eyes look– outwards, into our world, or inwards, into another? The illustrations never fully answer this question– for while he is often portrayed visibly searching, it is sometimes vague whether he is searching for something in the world around him, or inside his head.
In the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, there is a simple trick, inverted portraits in the wall, and passers-by get the distinct impression that these are 3d faces, which are “following you around,” the eye flips so easily between directions when it isn’t given clues which direction a 3d surface points. A face can seem to be looking one way, when it is actually pointed the exact opposite, when it is inverted.
This can especially be a problem when one of these confusing figures is transposed onto 2d… Of course, I’m not suggesting that’s a big issue here– the cardboard isn’t exactly convincing enough for that 🙂
had to leave a hole for the A/V in
I almost forgot to leave the hole for the A/V in on the dvd player… I was so engrossed in laying down strips to cover…
And there we basically had it– covered enough to set up the simulation anyway (an interior space for the dvd player, which didn’t let in too much light anyway) I continued a while after this point, trying to seal all the major holes, but of course I didn’t go so far as to absolutelly seal all of them… and I tried to lay down as much consistency as possible in terms of strips being higher and lower than each other…
And now, you’ve got to know that there was of course a good reason for there to be a dvd player in there. When I wasn’t working on this object, I was discovering, and learning for the first time, the 3d modelling system Blender– which is my current one love as far as 3d modelling programs go– and after much struggle I was able to build a very simple, very basic 3d animation, basically illustrating what a person could see *in theory* through the eyes of the mask.
So here’s the rudimentary vision of what you would see through the eyes of the rudimentary object above…
I warn you, it’s very rudimentary…
don’t laugh– it took me all day to figure out how to get this to work 🙂
so you have to imagine that this is what you would see, through the eyes of that mask, on the mini dvd screen… more or less….
It’s an incredably, incredably basic version of what i’m planning. And did I mention it was rudimentary?
(you have to click the pic to view the animation)
Thesis Project 2010 