Assignments

Observations

• Some shadows looked cute, others scary, why? upturned/downturned circles + rounded edges/sharp corners + simplicity/complexity
  
  
• Generating emotions through experiences and explore unconventional ways of storytelling
  
  
• People’s perception changed based on what others said.
  
  
• Most shadows were identified as either animal or face-like. Chris observed that it was very unlikely for us to recognize objects or plants, which could stem from an evolutionary standpoint, due to the urgency and necessity of distinguishing faces and animals instantaneously, to easily recognise unpleasant threats/predators. Whereas maybe when it comes to poisonous plants, colour is more important than shape.
  
  
• People mentioned Plato’s myth involving shadows
  
  
• When we were unable to identify something familiar, we labelled it as “alien”
  
  
• Didac observed that for him, seeing the shapes as shadows displayed on the projector was totally different than seeing the cardboard object: the object “does not provoke anything” whereas the screen does. It could be due to the nature of projections themselves, given that we are so used to seeing things on screen and creating stories through projected images (tv, movies, cinema…) or also because of the lack of dimensionality and intense contrast. When projected, the materiality of the objects is lost.

Showing how the Rorschach model works.

Feedback

• Context of current world events was interesting in relation to the activity, but it could have been even nicer to interconnect it even more. For example, I could design the inkblots directly from headlines or social media data through web scraping numbers or words and transforming those into noise.
  
  
• Possibility of adding automatic rotation and combining multiple pieces.
  
  
• Playing with scales and different sizes, because there are not many limits to shadows

People had questions about how the digital ink blots were made using noise, so I gave a short presentation on how I created them.

I explained what noise is, and what kind of parameters you can modify to achieve different results.

What alternative futures does this create?

I would hope that this can encourage a future where we care more about the impacts of new media & geopolitics on the youth and come up with concrete solutions to speaking up about mental health issues derived from it. My generation is the first to live in such an interconnected, data-driven world, and I believe it's important to come up with methods of coping or discussing the anxieties that come along with it.

I myself am not a psychoanalyst or interested in pursuing the field but I thought it could be interesting to have an artistic approach to these problems.

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