BM 2: Projecting on Perspex

Creating this piece required that I throw myself into working with alien materials and new skills. It was ambitious and maybe a little fool hardy. But careful planning, practising with maquettes, determination and hard work paid off because it's a powerfully pleasing object built to a high quality.

Taking a thing with strong visual coding and blowing it up to 5 times it's natural size makes it become more thematic in property than literal. Messing about with scale in this way really amplified the messaging of a piece and I want to experiment with this more.

It's really important to get the form of something right when it's a familiar everyday object like a milk carton. People have a subconscious notion about what everyday objects should look like and unless you want to build tension in this way, not recreating it accurately could create disease in the piece. And so I have realised that paying meticulous attention to the dimensions and details is essential when you translate scale in this way.

I know I've said it before but I really do fucking adore Baker-Miller pink. I want to work with it more.

The portraits of the AI children slide off the milk cartons surface; referencing the missing graphics that used to be displayed on these objects in the 80's. I used PowerPoint to create a simple but effective looping slide show with minimal glitch effects to add some bite and create a subtle but palpable uncomfortable, nervous tone.

I played about with the positioning of the children's face in relation to the surfaces. I made the decision that what works best is having their mouths sat on the milk carton top. It breaks up the image of the faces in an interesting way and suggests consumption and is slightly inappropriate, referencing child abuse and child pornography. I like how it's not key stoned properly and wraps around the edge of the wall; the distortion adds more bite to the visual language and stops it being too literal.

I've not experimented with large scale projections before but I have definitely caught the bug and will investigate this more soon. 

I wish the projections could be bigger in size, filling much more of the space, but I have to accept the limitations of my access to budget and other resource right now.