Concepts: For this project, I was interested in using MadMapper to transform one of the newer spaces on the UT Dallas campus. Besides the Edith O'Donnell Arts and Technology Building, there aren't many new art/creative facilities at UTD. The buildings where I spend most of my time as a theatre student on campus, in fact, are 40 year old lecture halls whose conversion into artistic facilities was lackluster at best. So, I had to draw inspiration from the cutting edge science buildings, many of which have been built in a very modern architecture style in the past 5 to 10 years. This concept reignited interests which used to be very dear to me several years ago as a high school student. Before deciding to attend UTD (majoring in ATEC with a particular interest in theatre/live events), I was actually very interested in studying one of the pure sciences. In fact, my senior year of high school, I studied advanced chemistry and physics concurrently with advanced study in theatre and language. I drew on this experience to inspire my compositions which use the very new Sciences Building as a canvas — creating a piece with 3 distinct movements focusing on chemistry, physics, and biology respectively.
Techniques: I used MadMapper's tools to create several quad surfaces — splitting up the facade (large floor to ceiling windows set into a wall) on the left hand side, the pillar and trim alongside the ceiling, the orange diagonal ceiling bars in the high foreground, and then the facade on the right hand side (sets of windows set into the wall). Altogether, including the background and two instances where I duplicated the window quads in the interest of layering the content I mapped there, I used 9 quad surfaces throughout the composition. Some of these quads required extensive masking; the ceiling bars in particular required all of the black space to be masked out. When creating each composition, I layered found media and the built in parametric preset media throughout each of the quads, focusing on content which highlighted, related to, or reminded me of my scientific studies in the disciplines of chemistry, physics, and biology.
Interpretation: Inspired by my past studies, the first composition focuses on the discipline of chemistry. The first half employs the quads mapped to the left facade and ceiling. The wall has a shimmering blue grid, reminiscent of the lattice/matrix molecular structures seen commonly in transition metals. The windows include chemical equations (the Born-Haber cycle which calculates the energy involved in forming compounds) being scratched onto a virtual whiteboard — I mirrored them in the interest of creating an effect like that of a professor writing directly onto the windows from inside. The second half uses the right window quads to display a compilation of flashy chemical reactions — combustion reactions in particular. The pillar, walls, and ceiling bars included media which focused on swirling translucent colors, which reminded me of the process of creating chemical solutions.
The second composition focused on physics. The pillar and ceiling bars focused on vertical lines, which was reminiscent of the spectrum of frequencies detected when particles transition between energy states. The ceiling in particular, with its use of the entire visible spectrum of light (a rainbow) actually looks quite like a composition of different emission spectra. The right windows contain content which reminded me of space travel, harkening back to times when I studied basic astrophysics not understanding a single thing besides that I thought the concepts were interesting. The second half of the composition uses a video of several pendulums swinging — a classic example of basic mechanics. The walls on either side contain preset media which reminded me of representations of electromagnetic fields.
The third composition focused on biology. In the first half, the left window displays a video of an organism undergoing cell division while the wall, pillar, and ceiling display media which have undulating growth as a theme. The second half includes more of the undulating/organic movement in the wall, and displays a compilation of 3D representations of the activity of different organelles inside human cells.
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