Prototype 2
Human + City + Music
For my second round of prototypes I decide to explore masks, their form and our relationship as humans with them. This inspiration came from one of my peers who created a mask prototype for her thesis research. I became interested in masks because of our ancient relationship with them and how they are able to communicate—or hide—parts of our identity. As I did my research I was also intrigued by the multiple uses we have for mask. Throughout history, mask have been used for artistic/perfomative purposes, like rituals and representations, as well as for functional reasons, like protection or privacy.
Some of the questions that sparked this round of prototypes were:
What is the relationship of masks with the city?
How would ancient mask have evolved to exist in the modern city?
How might city data shape a mask?
What rituals do we perform in the modern city? And how might the masks for these rituals look?
With this questions at hand I decided to create some prototypes that explored the form a project like this could look like. However, right at the beginning, I found some challenges with some of these questions. Mainly, the problem of distortion when trying to visualize data in a 3D space. Although this is definitely a problem to take into account, I decided to ignore it for these explorations as this first round would help me ideate solutions for this issue.
In addition to this, I also wanted to explore how different types of data could potentially look on top of a mask. given that producing a 3D artifact is time consuming, I needed to find a way to make several prototypes in a short amount of time. I made the decision to use projection mapping to solve this hurdle. By using a projector, I could overlay different types of data quickly and from multiple sources.