Final Adjustments

After the final presentation I made a few adjustments to my design, the main one being the addition of several concave reflective panels along one side of the lane. This idea was suggested to try and create more distortion in the reflections as I wanted people to pause and reconsider what they’re seeing within the site. I really liked the idea of the reflected image being upside down as I feel it ties in with the concept of parallel worlds and how those might exist alongside ours. The upside down reflection is also a part of the initial image sequence that inspired a lot of the design.

To begin with I was unsure how to create an upside down reflection without using some sort of video/camera trickery. I wasn’t really able to get my head around a lot of the examples I found, I just couldn’t visualise it. Eventually I stumbled across an example using the front of a spoon… having spoons in my house I was able to test and visualise this for myself and yes, the concave front of a spoon does indeed give an upside down reflection when held at a certain distance. With this knowledge I looked into concave mirrors and found my answer as to how exactly this works. Basically put it has to do with the light bouncing off the curve of the reflective surface and how far away the object is standing.

The issue I had was that the angled mirrors already in the design reflected the tops of the buildings and the sky, bringing them down into the lane which was an aspect from the image sequence I wanted to carry through. The concave mirror would almost block the bottom from reflecting the top and I was worried I would lose that effect the angled mirrors create. I did some quick tests in Rhino and Blender to see if there was a way around this, perhaps if the curve isn’t equal top to bottom the reflection of the higher site elements could still work.

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The uneven curve on concave mirrors gives a reflection that isn’t distorted but that doesn’t fall in the middle of the mirror “frame”. I like the image created in the even angled reflection and decided to go with this but only placing it in certain areas of the site, allowing me to keep both the exisiting flat angled mirrors and the concave mirrors. The effect of both these mirrors in site gives a kaleidoscopic effect of spliced images and upside down reflections.

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With this addition to the design I redid the necessary plans/sections and renders. I also went back and made the LED lighting more prominent in my renders as it was mentioned that the colour was slightly lost in the previous presentation.

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Sound was also introduced into the design in specific areas where I wanted to draw viewers attention to. Some areas of the installation don’t force interaction on the viewers so my aim is that through playing audios not usually heard within the site that people are drawn into these spaces through the sound. Hidden outdoor speakers would be used, and the sounds would be audible around the site (although not super obvious) and grow louder as you moved to within the space they are targeted for. Hopefully this draws attention to smaller details of the installation that might otherwise go unnoticed. Initially I wanted to choose just a few sounds to play but eventually settled on having a broad variation that would suggest the history of the site (things like horse and carriage, old trucks/cars, boats/water/docks, cinematic timers and muffled sounds of people talking – think groups leaving cinemas or concerts) but also sounds that allude to sci-fi or futuristic elements (sci-fi soundtracks such as Interstellar, Dark, Inception, Fringe, or “outside club sounds” – like when you’re in a bathroom or waiting outside and can hear the music but are removed from it). These sounds can alternate over day and night and I think they help tie in all the realities of the site, past, present and future.