April 05, 2023 - Abandoned Final Project Concepts

I came back from spring break with a lot of optimsim regarding the final project. This faded quickly. I write this having finally discovered, after a difficult couple weeks, what I’ll actually be working on for the final, which will be covered in a subsequent entry.

Initial Concept

The primary idea for my first sketch came to me while I was fishing on a river near the Atlantic Ocean. As I stood on the rainy shoreline, giant yachts passed silently. After a few minutes, the sound of the shoreline would crescendo as a sizable wake washed up to my knees. In that moment, I was struck by the power of the vessels to create so significant a change from such a distance.

Most interesting to me at the time was the simple fact that the pilots of these vessels were entirely unaware of the tremendous effect they were having on my singular experience.

As the morning went on, more boats came to pass, each leaving a delayed reverberation in their wake. How could I articulate such a phenomenon in my work?

Sketch 1

As soon as I returned to my notebook, I began sketching. A eureka moment as pure as this is admittedly quite rare for me. Needless to say, I was excited. Oh, how I pity this Craig’s obliviousness; his cynicism must have been on vacation, too.

My primary idea at this stage was to create a video installation using a closed-circut camera on a delay and a projecter, housed in the ceiling. There would be a video of the tide rinsing the shoreline projected on the floor. When viewers would step into the frame of the tide, their prescence would interrupt the projection, casting a shadow, which would be recorded by the camera. Once that viewer stepped away (or after enough time had passed), the camera data would be subsequently layered back into the projection, incorporating the previous viewer’s prescence into the work for the next round of viewers to see.

The effect, I hoped, would be for each viewer to have an experience refracted through the lens of their predecessor. Ideally, it would be meditative, if perhaps frustrating. I was attracted to the concept of invisible repurcussions (the butterfly effect, in crude terms), in addition to the guiding hands of the past dictating the future. Plainly, I wanted to make an installation about $5,000,000 yachts making it harder for a pedestrian to fish.

Sketch (?) - The Fallout

As I should have predicted, my idea wasnt particularly feesable. Bummer.

Time to downscale. At the very least, I had to vet my idea and get some others on paper. Turns out, this was the beginning of the end for my tide project…

To begin, I asked myself some questions:

Would the video portion be filmed or animated? Probably filmed, since I got some gorgeous footage of the Atlantic washing up on the shore at sunrise, but animation might give me more frame-by-frame control if I wanted to go that route.
Should there be anything on the floor physically? This is when I decided that I might like to project onto a shallow sandbox, so that indexes of the viewers’ interactions would be left, like footprints, lines, etc.
Okay, with that said, would there be any means for clearing that sand? For this, I considered a myriad of options, each of which would go on to indicate a seperate direction I could take the project. I could constantly rake the sand as a performance, or leave a rake for a particularly dedicated viewer to employ. I could develop some sort of automated raking system. I could use some sort of vibration technology, like a small-scale earthquake simulator, to settle the sand. None of these leaped out at me.
What tech would I want to use? Motion sensors? GoPros? A Kinect? A DSLR with hacked software? A phone? A webcam with computer vision capabilities? Oh, God… this is getting complicated…
Will there be sound? Oh, probably…

The Final Efforts

Fealing lost, anxious, and generally down, I made a final attempt at reviving this concept which I had so recently grown enamored with. I created a sketch that revolved around a tabletop sandbox, perhaps in an effort to cut down difficulties for leveling the sand. I envisioned one possibility which used a partition to seperate two users who act simultaneously, but this lacked the time-delay which was so essential to the core concept. I even considered using actual water, but almost instantly abandoned that idea in favor of not electrocuting my peers. Bummer, again.

Where Do We Go From Here?

There was a common sentiment by my grade school teachers that you should always ask two classmates before bothering the teacher for help. If it worked then, why not now? I gave it a shot. Asking around, I found out that Grace, whose concept I really meshed with, would be open to collaboration for the final project. Sweet.

And like that, my tide concept was left to gather dust on my just-out-of-reach shelf of neat ideas. Truth be told, I am still quite proud of the way my midterm project turned out. I have learned a lot during this class, and do not feel let down lending my technical skills to a project that won’t (directly) build out my current body of work. I value collaboration, and am very excited to see what Grace and I can make happen for the final.