Monday, December 19, 2016

Ok so it's a lil different but it's all good

Hey guys, it's me.  This is the latest installment of my thesis project, Optimism vs Pessimism.  A few things have changed since I last gave y'all an update.

On the last post, I said that the words would be really big - like, each letter would take up an 8.5-x-11" piece of paper - but that didn't quite work out.  I wanted the piece to be more interactive, so I made the words into cards roughly 1-2" tall, so the viewer could pick them up.

I also implied that the words would face the same way, and that's changed as well.  In a given pair, one word is written normally on the paper, while the other one is written upside down.  This forced me to make the piece into more of a game.

There are two baskets and a round table.  One basket is labeled "Optimist or Pessimist?" and it's filled with green-pink 3D glasses.  The other basket is labeled "Are you sure?" and it has about thirty paper eye-occluders (paper circle on a stick) in it.  On the table, 64 cards say either bad things or good things, depending on which color lens the viewer is looking through, and a sign above the table reads "Put these cards right side up."  If the viewer is a pessimist, they'll look through the green side and arrange the cards so the bad words are seen.  If they're an optimist, they'll look through the pink side and arrange the cards so the good words are seen.  However, more than one person will look at this at a time, and there's only one set of cards.  If an optimist and a pessimist are looking at the cards simultaneously, they'll disagree on which way the cards go, because the optimist's words look upside down to the pessimist, and vice versa.  They'll inevitably have to realize that they have the option to look through the other eye and therefore see the words from the other person's point of view.  This teaches them that, when they don't understand what someone else is doing, the best thing to do is to try to figure out where they're coming from.

I'm worried because the cards are just words now, and it's gonna be harder to make art out of it.  Unless I can color them or something...

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