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Research / Exploration
Produced during Art Omi: Architecture Residency, 2021
Project | Project explores purposeful slowing down in the process of making, observing, documenting, and sharing images of our surroundings in the world saturated with digital tools and social media that make the process efficient and easy. Instead of capturing a snapshot of an instant moment, the project explores the world’s most ancient imaging technology, camera obscura, to capture fuzzy yet uncanny layered images reflecting elements of time, weather, and movements. The project explores the fundamentals of camera obscura in three different ways: transferring images to a photo-sensitive paper using a hand-held device, viewing the surroundings with a wearable device; capturing projected images of the surrounding landscape, weather, and time at multiple scales ranging from a small object to a larger structure.
The device projects features of the surroundings and light quality in real-time through a hole on an enclosure, resulting in an upside-down projection onto a darkened interior surface. With lenses and angled mirrors that adjust viewpoints of the outside world, the images come into focus and redirect onto surfaces. The project takes advantage of the simple requirement of a dark, nearly light-tight interior that allows flexibility in form, scale, and materials. Objects and architecture curate and influence site-specific experiences, and the physical experiences elevate images beyond a mere projection by the participant actively influencing and creating spaces.
At multiple iterations at varying scales, the project pairs the haptic experience of navigating through the imagery with a physical making and documenting of the images. Both are equally time-sensitive processes that become a meditation requiring patience and heightened awareness of our bodies. This extended time and slow pace reveal hidden potentials or an alternate reading of environs through visualization. The quiet and subtle changes set the viewer’s world of thought in motion and create an experience where the physical and imagery are intimately intertwined. Through this process, the project reminds us that we sometimes have to change the way we see to change the way we think. As a result, familiar everyday landscapes and rituals take on a different perspective in this upside-down world.