Week 14 started with preparing the presentation and its contents for the progress session #03, fixed on Tuesday, 17th of April. Main contents were the prototypes in use and how they influenced the concept and in which aspects. After this preparation, I met with Florian Dombois who is the head of the Master of Transdisciplinary at ZHdK. I have heard a lot about him and wanted to have his inputs not only as the head of the master but also as an artist working at the intersection of sciene and art. I explained the concept to him and the main statement, next to many other hints, good tipps, and book recommendations, to use the installation layer itself as a representation of the data structure and to create some kind of a rabbit hole, which enables the visitor to use this specific points to gain a deper insight into the topic. These points could be realized with sound devices which play the specific statements of the particular topic islands in order to enable the user to find a connection between the hanging acrylic glass tiles and the sentence fragments.
To sum up, the whole chat with him was very inspiring and we exchanged a lot of ideas how I could push this project further, not only in the boundaries of this bachelor thesis.
At the presentation the next day, I talked about the whole prototyping process that happened over the course of the last month. Sometimes in this time, I felt some kind of losing track of a proper process structure because I never did such a long project on my own but seeing it all written down and actually putting the focus onto it made me realize that I followed a proper process without actively forcing iteration- and prototyping phase. I rather went into a prototyping phase and after letting myself guide by the intermediate result in the current phase, I felt the need to sit back and contemplate about if that serves the concept and what else can be taken from that. Furthermore, I could precisely state where I am right now.
Right after the whole session, which was opened up for the whole departement this time and lasted the whole day, I had a mentoring with Björn and Clemens and we talked about the annotations they stated after my presentation. They foudn that the interactive part was not cleary defined by me. Not that it was missing, it was rather not clearly defined how it looks like and what experience I want to provide when interacting with these rabbit holes. I explained the ideas of sound that could be pronounced by a text-to-speech application to show the disprepancy of the emotional statement itself and the schematization in this data set. Furthermore, ever topic islands is a thematically clustered gathering of the statements, based on the similarity clusters in the original digital visualization. This means, that all the statemrnts of one island have more or less the same meaning. Maybe one word is different or the way the words are arrangend, but all in all, the same meaning is stated. When having this extract of one situation in multiple ways as a sound component, I could firstly have some kind of repetitive moment because this TTS app will pronounce most of the words the same and secondly, I could underline the visual image of the tiles stacked upon each other with the help of this repeating statements and thus, make the pattern perceivable through sound. TO gain an overview of what is possible, I had a chat with Joel Gähwiler who helped me in terms of feasibility and codewise in order to keep it simple.
Coming from that, this and next week will be used to explore this sound system in terms of extracting the example sentences out of the data set into a TTS app, having them all looped and maybe having them only played when lifting up the sound device. For this device, I intend to use the gummi bowls used for mixing gypsum which I used in a previous project. What is important for me is to have this sound system tested in combination with one prototypical cluster. Therefore I needed to concretize my concept in terms of hanging the tiles and how to arrange this stacking to show its schematized and quantified character. I tried several hanging methods. My focus was on finding a system that is a) not disturbing the projected appearance too much but still displays the constancy of how these statements are interpreted, b) easy and practical in terms of assembling since I will have to make 96 of these stackings (the current top 481 of the data set divided through 5 items per stack = 96), and c) cheap in production costs since my budget will be eaten up by the acrylic glass.
steel cable
Steel cable is somewhat cheap but very time-intense to assemble and to adjust the tiles in order to hang without inclination. Furthermore, the shadow they produce is rather disturbing since I am not able to use only one cable. Another negative aspect is the more complex hanging of this cable.
Acrylic glass sticks
Acrylic glass sticks would have been nice to use since they are translucent when less material thickness is used but still show some kind of shadow that indicates this constancy. But when experimenting with that, I realzied that it is somewhat hard to create quardatic acrylic sticks which are rather precise to stack the tiles onto it. Since it is not possible to saw them due to missing accurancy and traces of the saw blade afterwards, they only option for me was laser cutting them. When testing with a 20 cm piece, it just melted. I tried a bigger piece to cut it entirely out of that but at 40 cm, the heat just deformed to whole piece with 8 mm thickness. We had ready-made acrylic glass sticks in the workshop, but they were very flexible and only by using a thickness of 1 cm, they showed the stability I needed. At this thickness, they were no more translucent but rather occurd as a black shadow and were extremely expensive at that point. What should be considered as well is the necessity to think of some kind of stacking system so adjust the tiles at the desired height without being instable. This is why I decided for the last option.
Threaded bar
Threaded bars have the property to be very practical in terms of adjusting something onto them with nuts and washers, to be available in different diameters, and to be extremely cheap. The only negative point was that they will produced inevitably a very harsh shadow, letting the hanging system interfere with the projection. But this could also enhance and amplify the concept to show a somehow strict catalogization of the statements and their fixed position and use in the data set. Thinking of the whole installation, this could generate anoher overlaying pattern which is inevitably intertwined with the underlying narrative pattern since both concepts depend on each other.
My concern till now is that the pattern of these statements is interfering too much and makes the narrative pattern move to the background, but this has to be tested the next week to make precise statements what works and what has to be adjusted or rethought.
