Space

This hastily spawned project was inspired by a reading a got to slip while backtracking to school, leaving me with 2.5 hours of extra transit since it was during “let’s-keep-the-hard-working-night-owls-away-from-their-soft-beds-for-even-longer” hour.

Inspiring excerpts from “Sensing a Dwelling.” The Green Imperative. written by Victor Papanek.

“Scientists tell us that we experience the world primarily through our eyes…We are endowed with five senses and more: we have sensory nerves which make us aware of the body position and movement in relation to a space (kinaesthesia)…”

“Why are we only now becoming increasingly aware of the impoverishment of our sensory ablilities?”

“It has been known for decades that certain red-orange colour will kick into high gear several psycho-physioloogical systems that deal with aggression and sexuality; recent studies in colour thereapy and photobiology seem to show that ‘passive pink’ (the bubble-gum colour), has an almost immediate effect on aggressive behaviour. When people displaying berserk behaviour are put into a small passive-pink room, they tend to calm down within minutes and go to sleep.”

“We walk through three-dimensional spaces with light changing through windows, clerestories anf other penetration of walls or roof.”

“Light through a rose-window in church floods the space with brilliant colours.”

“… visual acoustics.”

“Light needs space: it is the room that dictates the flow of the light – it is the light that modulates the volume of the room.”

Color therapy and photobiology has always fascinated me, so these notions easily peaked my interest. Through framing of architecture and infliction on our line of sight can create space and a feeling of enclosure. This could easily be illustrated by creating blinders to wear over you eyes to create a physical blocking of peripheral movement and light. At the same time this gives the wearer a feeling of privacy and focus on one’s work. This can also be illustrative of the desensitizing of our other 4 senses. We have the whole of our body outside of this small enclosure, having a constraint on our vision that is uncommon for us punctuates the what we might take for granted and heighten the senses that might have been dulled through neglected conscious awareness.
There was surely more to explore, other than physically enclosing a space around your field of vision, and what feelings that might invoke. There was room for color and light play.
This was a project that was a resourceful one. I wearily (though not reluctantly) looked around my room and spotted my materials, black frame glasses without lens, a small box, and a stack of colored origami paper.

The idea was bind the box to the glass frames and create a sliding system of which to interchange color slides made of cardboard with the origami paper adhered to it. There would need to be a fine slot cut into each of the slides in order for you to see, still obstructing your view to a fine plane.

Once the box was attached to the glasses, I put them on and immediately knew that the color slides would be useless due to lack of light. The slides would not me immersive enough anyhow, it wouldn’t effect your mood nearly as much as being surrounded in a room by one color.

Well, this led me to turn to the component that is the LED. From here, the project become a proof of concept. An LED, or five for that matter, would not be a controlled enough frequency of light wave with the right tint of red on painted on the bulb. It could still effect you mood, but with a “you take what you can get” attitude.

This is what I proceeded with, the idea of installing five LEDs into the blinder box with an on/off switch.

quickly sketched schematic

silver conductive ink used to paint on traces

I hit the underneath of my pre-punched holes of too for extra coverage

taped down components to traces

upside down and inside look at the installed LEDs