For my interactive touch project I aim to explore the concept of reality, and how other people’s perceptions can act as an extension of our own to ground us in reality. For my piece, I aim to make two sets of eyes and ears from different entities. When the user makes contact with just one eye and ear, a digital animation will commence that is blurry and unclear. Once another eye or ear is touched, the animation and sound clears up, to represent the shared and grounded reality that multiple people create. I plan to make the physical piece out of cloth with hidden wires. I’ve been inspired by cubism with some of the faces.
As one might expect, when making contact with eyes, the visuals will activate, and when the ears are touched the sound will activate.
I want it to be clear in the piece that the two eyes and ears are from different entities, and not the same person. What is the best way to do this?
One way you could show they are different entities is to pursue different styles. If the second eye is a very different shape or eyeball/iris/pupil size ratio, it would be more than clear. It would be similar to how cartoon characters (even ones belonging to the same world) can look more varied than real humans.
also ear lobes or ear rings
To showcase that there are two different entities, there could be a play on the color scheme, with each character being assigned their own palette. Also bouncing off Nathan’s idea-another way is to use various drawing styles such as realistic, manga, or animal style eyes/ears.
To show different entities belong to different people, I would say that style and color would work really well, also having the senses experience different world views would help such as the eyes seeing different things completely and being shifted differently.
To make the difference clear that the eyes and ears come from different entities, I would also suggest playing with shape, color, and maybe style. You mentionned how you were inspired by cubism, so it might interesting to see the different parts through different art styles (i.e. maybe an eye follows the pop art style elements).
Another way you could play with the differences between the two is to have them be made of different mediums. Maybe one could incorporate 3D forms or something. Additionally, I have a question about the implementation: You’ve mentioned the eyes and ears having specific impacts on the animation part of the piece, do the nose and mouths have any?
The mouth and nose would not have an impact on the input, actually.
To answer your question — perhaps if the eyes and ears made up different faces, it would be pretty clear that they are from different people. The faces could all be in the cubist style you’re taking inspiration from, and so there could be a funky assortment of them as the input.
I think the best way to show that an eye and ear is from a different person is possibly to have both eyes and ears be either right or left, because in my opinion if you do a right eye and a left eye, then it may be more likely people will see it as one person.
Also, have each set of an eye and ear be distinguished. For example, brown eye with larger ear and green eye with smaller pierced ear.