Today I’m going to take you on a journey from chaos to serenity.
This is how our scene begins, with various lights and diffusions spread out in a battle field of light art. I had work lamps, emergency lamps, desk lamps, various light bulbs from halogen to LED. There was cardboard, paper, tinfoil, and at one point a sweater.
I began cutting out shapes to try and create something interesting to look at, and to me, what’s more interesting than an optical illusion. My next thought was which one would be best illusion ed as a shadow. I decided on the classic two faces or one vase illusion.
So I got my cut out, built my white box, and picked a light source. After all the experimentation I ended up using a simple flashlight, but it gave the best result surprisingly.
This is what the image looks like up close, the flashlight uses 3 LED’s which produced some dimensional shadows. I think this really illustrates the idea behind how you don’t always know what you’re looking at, when you can only see the effect of the shadow.
This was my final set up, I cleaned up where the light was coming from, choosing to secure it from the top with magnets. I also hung the cut out from above so I could control where my shadow was coming from in order to easily transport it in my car 45 minutes.
I made a periscope to make it more interactive with the viewer. It serves to show a peek of what is actually causing the shadow when the viewer only seeing the shadow from above wouldn’t know. There is an additional surprise to behold with the periscope. I did not attach it because I wanted people of various height to be able to interact and explore the space from which ever angle they chose.
This is a view down the periscope which didn’t turn out very well. I am ultimately happy with my project, I think it was a rough road getting here, but all turned out well. I’m really glad I went with a minimalist approach and stripped away all the unnecessary steps I was trying to take and completed a unique concept idea I think works well.