My goal for this class and the final project is to feel comfortable with 3D modeling and printing, which I have never done before. I also wondered whether I should do something data-driven, or something purely for aesthetic enjoyment...and I'll probably end up imbuing data into the project because old habits die hard.
Initial ideas
Idea 1: Wuxia Actresses
I have been working on a dataset of Wuxia (ancient Chinese, often fantastical, martial arts movies) actresses of the last century with the amazing folks at Kontinentalist, and the most compelling story we found from that dataset is: not only did many of these actresses portray strong women on screen, but in their private life, (intentionally or unintentionally) paved the way for other actresses to enter the genre.
I want to portray each actress as a mountain, with each peak representing a movie in their filmography (the height most likely mapping to the importance of their character).
Aesthetically, I'm aiming for something like this past project of mine:
And these films and paintings:
The feelings I want to evoke are weightless, ethereal, light, but solid and strong
But in translating to the physical world, I kept gravitating towards these plays with light and shadow:
My original thought on how to combine them:
I wanted to incorporate the softness of the mist or the reflectiveness of the water a lot, so I wondered if I could recreate at least the mist with thin fabric that would billow (perhaps with a small fan to the side?)—and I liked that idea also because it'd be a nod to all the beautiful, flowing clothes that appear in Wuxia movies.
I also wanted to incorporate the idea of the earlier actresses paving the way for later actresses, by connecting the mountains (top view). I'm not 100% satisfied with this visual yet, because what I want to get across is that the earlier actresses were the pillars, and simply connecting them doesn't achieve the effect.
Idea 2: Time
I was really inspired by Akinori Goto's ballet zoetropes and went down a small rabbit hole of zoetropes and other cyclic and kinetic works. I wondered about visualizing something time-based, perhaps along the lines of how long it takes trees to grow and how quickly the wildfires in California (and now the entirety of West Coast) are wiping them out.
But ultimately I was more interested in this idea at the potential of familiarizing myself with 3D modeling and printing, and am not as excited about the topic/story itself.
Thoughts after office hours
The most interesting points/feedback from office hours with Danny:
- how to mimic the softness and muted colors of the paintings with a hard material like acrylic, where a lot of the coloring becomes saturated?
- to mimic the softness, perhaps make the fabric and how they move the center of the piece?
- currently the focus is on an overview of all the actresses (a very scholarly view), but what if we shift the perspective of the work to only looking at one actress at a time? And highlight that an individual actress wouldn't easily be able to see her impact, and then shift perspective to reveal the overall?
When talking to Danny, I imagined something like this:
But as I was compiling my ideas, I kept coming back to the initial sketch, and the potentially fun challenge of recreating a softer color palette in a hard material. Which led me to think about using resin as the material, where I'd also potentially have control of how to color it. And that would also potentially let me play with 3D modeling, printing, and using the print to create the mold for the resin.
Including Data
The initial feedback I got in class was that the fabric might be a more interesting material to work with, so I got excited about programmable embroidery. I kept imagining a robe, or cloth, or a fan with embroidered flowers for each actress and lights that spread out from each one of them to show their interconnectedness. I thought perhaps I could put the light behind the cloth thus diffusing the lights, and the generated PCB for the lights might also be really beautiful.
To see how that would look like, I coded the graph with a few actresses selected. And just for completeness, I also coded the timeline, with x-axis as time and y-axis as an actress's bill order. I also connected the movies that multiple actresses were in together.
When I shared the ideas in class, Danny encouraged me to go in a direction that didn't rely so heavily on the medium that I'm so familiar with (the dynamic lights idea falls back too much to what I'm comfortable with) and instead try to constrain myself to a static medium.
Fabric
From Taobao:
(Need to be viewed without VPN, if on VPN it'll ask for login interestingly enough)