Abigail George: Projection 2 Tape Mapping

Melanie Estes and I partnered together to come up with our own tape mask. She drew inspiration from the croquet charts she uses and I from my henna designs. Both ideas were spiral-like in nature, one organic and the other very geometrical. We blended our ideas together to form a spiral crystal-like shape.

We each individually looked up concepts we liked and brought to class the next week. Once we settled on one, Melanie took the design into Rhino to recreate it. We distorted the shape to throw off the apparent symmetry and it became a turtle-like shape. We then passed it into Illustrator to export an SVG file for Mapmapper. After scaling it to take up the maximum space available, we started taping the design up with thin black tape. This was one of my favorite experiences. I worked with an exacto knife to make precise cuts. The next major portion of the process was mapping of the different sections of the mandala. Melanie masked the shapes and categorized them to make it easy to add materials to the sections and tune our designs to utilizing the entire space.

Although we had put a lot of time into making the Mandala tape mask, I spent more time working on the Frankenstein Mushu Design. The dragon tape mask instantly reminded me of Mulan's Mushu, I was moved to bring that movie back to life. I started creating mapping and morphing the SVG lines to match the taped lines on the cabinets. I used the red to resemble the strength of the red dragon Mushu wants to be. I added a storm to the background of the cabinets to add to the electric Frankenstein feel. I placed the gif of Mushu rising up above it the red dragon and I moved it so that the phrase "I LIVE!" could be read on the speaker. Melanie helped me find a way to load the gif to go reverse and flow which helped it come together better. Finally, I added a dark blue smokey and watery texture to the cabinet space on the left and overlaid a texture with sparks dispersing to make it look like they were coming off the flames from Mushu.

I hope to make the audience feel the rumble of a storm and remember Mushu for the strong character he proved to be in the end. My goal for the final presets was to have them musically reactive. The turtle mandala design had the speed of the oscillation set to increase and decrease depending on the bass input. For Mushu's preset, the fire coming out of the dragon's mouth changed colors according to the amplitude input, and for the video I tried to sync up the bass with the lightning.

 

Overall, seeing everyone's work active on the walls at once was a really enriching experience. People bring their own unique twist to their projects and the approaches surprised me. Partnering up really helped to identify the strengths of my peers and I hope to work with them on future projects.