#cofa1002weekfour

[cofa1002jackiecai]

FINAL STATEMENT: 

For my final poster, I decided to do something that responds to the question by creating an object of desire; or more precisely, an object that shows you your desire. This idea was first incepted and influenced by the ongoing discussion with my classmate about what classifies Desire, and it’s different forms and subsets. My conclusion arrived that Desire cannot be completely pinned down and categorized; in fact, it is multifaceted and constantly evolving. Trying to solve it is like moving pieces to an endless puzzle.

Informed by this, I moved onto looking at other stimuli that encourages further analysis of the question: “we desire what we lack, and we move endlessly (and impossibly) towards the object of desire… consider art and design practices as ways of exploring the radical possibilities of desire”. What I arrived at was a poignant fictional piece; known as the Mirror of Erised, a mirror that shows you your desires. This concept fascinated me, as such an object would perfectly encapsulate a “desire of what we lack”, and symbolizes us “mov[ing] endlessly (and impossibly) towards the object”.

With this in mind I researched more and more into the attraction of mirrors and how we desire to see ourselves as the object of desire, and how we strive for self acceptance day by day, seeing ourselves reflected back to us, checking to see our progression.

My final piece is an artistic response to the question, and a reaction to the concept of a mirror that displays your desires. It holds the capability to act as a medium to show you yourself, but only after you interact with and solve the puzzle; symbolizing a chase to find self acceptance.

In keeping with the A2 poster specs, I devised that key text must be included for it to be classified as a poster, no matter how vaguely.

In conclusion, I’ve created a poster that interacts with you to show you what you ultimately desire.

[cofa1002jackiecai]

Mirror Experiment

As said previously, I wanted to replicate the look of water reflecting distorted and blurred images. I tried sanding down a piece of mirror to see at what point does the images on it become incomprehensible. IN the end I was able to partly replicate that hazy look, and the final piece looks almost like a piece of ice, which is a form of water I suppose. 

[cofa1002jackiecai]

Using Nature’s Natural Mirror

It’s been implied throughout several texts about the invention of mirrors, that nature herself was the first one to create such a contraption. So that animals and other living creatures alike can look at their own reflection when appearing in front of a stilled pond/lake. 

This fascinating concept of using water as a mirror I believe is something I definitely want to use, or at least respond to in my creative poster utilising the Desire question.     Since Desire and Mirrors are something that is constantly alluded to in popular culture - (see Mirror of Erised), I feel like what would be better than to recreate a look that harkens back to the good old days before time. 

   In this experiment, I played around with the reflective qualities of water, and left it in a bowl for sometime to make sure it’s completely still. It was very fascinating to see that it does reflect very well. Pictured Below: (You can see the light on my ceiling, so the reflective properties are quite high at a large surface area)

   I also made ripples through it to see if it was capable of reflection at all if the water was disturbed.  Pictured Below: (Distilled Water make really poor reflections indeed)

   Even though the above produced a really poor reflection, it inspired me to do something different with my mirror concept for my poster. I knew for a fact that I couldn't create a water tight poster in the span of less than few days, but this influenced me to try to recreate that sort of rippled haze on a mirror, something which I know I will be capable of doing in a few days; but I don’t know how effective it’ll be, that will be explored in the next posts. 

Sidenote: “a Water Tight Poster”?? What the heck is that you ask? Well, for my idea I wanted to do something with a poster that you have to interact with to see your own reflection, and the more you move the pieces the more distilled the water would be. Now whilst that’ll be a cool poster piece, I didn’t believe I could make something water-tight -  so the idea was scrapped immediately, but after this experiment I feel like I could achieve something similar with just mirrors. All this is keeping in theme with the idea that what you seek (what you desire) is simply your own reflection - responding to the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter.