When we first saw this topic we immediately thought of Victor Vasarely since his works were shown at Musee Pompidou because his work matches the idea of illusion which is an important part of VR.
All he used was simple shapes but the visual effect is incredible.
The first idea we had was to make a pair of wings that can be rotated so when it’s moving the pattern on it will also be changing, creating this type of illusion to the audience. And then, we kind of further developed this idea into a head piece which can also rotate, right in front of your eyes which will make the interaction more interesting. When this piece starts to move around you, it kinds of create the same feeling you will have when you have your VR glasses on.
In the beginning we were thinking that we should insert lights on some of the sticks so when the whole thing starts moving it will present this halo effect, which is also inspired by the idea of Lighthouse. Lighthouse always guides people in lost home and each lighthouse has its unique frequency of the lighting so that the sailors could analyze it to figure out their exact location. Then, we thought it would be too complicated to add electricity into this project and we can not make sure there will not be safety issues so we put this idea behind.
So the final piece is called Cyclette, which kinds of add a little fun to this project. There are several meanings behind this title.
This picture is from Musee des Arts Forains.
In Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris”, there is this “time machine” that when you start to ride on the cyclette the whole things Starts to move and the carousel kinds of represent childhood which is usually some of the best parts in our memory. If I have such ability to create a VR scene, I would definitely want to rebuild everything in my childhood because that is the best part of my life when I was living with my grandparents and everything is just so nice and beautiful. We want to have some nice and sweet meaning behind this piece.
The second one is that no matter how the outside world changes, you will always be you. This kinds of match the idea of VR because no matter what you are experiencing in that virtual world, that is not your real life, you will always come back to the real world. It’s like no matter how fast the structure is moving, you are still you. I mean it is hard to always be yourself now because a lot of people care a lot about other people’s opinions, and then they want to change so that they could fit in the environment. What we want to express here is that what you think of yourself is the most important thing, that is all that matters
Process:
This is all the main sticks of the structure on the top of different lengths.
These are the sticks pointing down and we want to make them almost the same length so we need to change the length for each group of sticks.
We first used nails to assemble them but it didn’t work and then Francesca suggested that we should use screws and it works.
At first we cut the edge at 45 degree angles because we thought it would be easier to assemble them, but it was not.
We tried different materials to put in the middle like wood and copper.
Final Piece:
