Bending the Everyday : Dress Form

 

 

 

In this project, we had to work in pairs to, “Projection map onto an “everyday” object to change its appearance and alter its perceived meaning, purpose, or value.” (Source: http://www.occupyearth.art/syllabus/#bending-everyday).

Our group decided to use a dress form and do a critical design piece highlighting a darker side of the fashion industry where there are certain impossible standards of beauty and how they negatively affect body image.

We decided to use a rotating source of light to indicate the passage of time. This was inspired from the sundial, which shows the time by the shadows cast on it by the movement of the sun.

We also used cling film and crushed it little by little to create wrinkles which signified aging and wrinkles on the skin. This was a prototype of our final project just to see how it would come out to be and show it to our class for feedback. This is the final outcome:

 

 

For the final iteration of the project, one of the challenges was to create the movement of light on the dress form, even though the projector was fixed. We made a 3D model of the exact measurements of the dress form in Rhinoceros and simulated the light onto model in the software. We then projected that simulation onto the actual dress form, masking out any areas which were going outside the actual dress form.

For the wrinkles, we took a sheet of paper close to the color of the dress form, and created wrinkles on it in small increments, taking a photo in between each step. We them combined all the images and created a video. We added this video as a layer in mad mapper above the dress form simulation video and masked out the edges. We then played both the videos simultaneously.

 

Here’s the Final project: