Today in my Comp Form class, we talked about how human is better at inferring meaning than a computer over the following example:
Consider the image below. What would the image look like if the black circle were removed?
When we look at the image, we quickly infer that it represents two overlapping circles on a blue rectangle, but the raster image doesn’t contain information about shapes at all. It contains only blue, red, and black pixels. Humans are very, very good at inferring meaning from visual forms. We fill in meaning without conscious thought. When we look at the image above we see the circles automatically.
We make assumptions and associations based on what we've learned and experienced when we try to understand the world, and that is very much related to my thesis. The example image also demonstrates how we see the moon: it's always a round planet, but we think of it as a changing shape at different phases because it's partly blocked by our own shadow. Honestly I didn't think of this metaphorical layer of misperception of the moon when I was making the previous moon prototypes.
In today's prototype I created two moons that are constantly changing colors and slightly moving. The disappearance, merge, separation are all illusions. I want the two moons to be like two parties in a conversation, and by interacting with each other they create a relationship. The subtlety in color, shape and movement is the key to build up an emotional "performance" and provoke thoughts from the audiences.
The following video simulates a scene of how audiences would view the "performance". I chose Movement 1 from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata as the background music for the theme of moon. After adding the music I found that the audio has really added an important layer of the whole sensorial experience. I will explore more in the future prototypes. I also like how the human figure sometimes disappears in the darkness and that creates another layer of illusion.