Signal

Practice Assignment 2
Visual Design

A practice assignment for Visual design where we had to create a visual installation based on the World Press Photo 2014 Winner 'Signal' by John Stanmeyer. The photo depicts several people holding up telephones on the shore of Djibouti City, looking for a signal of neighbouring country Somalia; Trying to keep in contact with their relatives abroad. The photo was taken at night, it's foggy and the moon is out. The people are merely silhouettes and the moon is washed out. The photo almost feels as some sort of alien invasion and gives an overall eerie feeling.

We wanted to put the audience in the shoes of the subject of the photograph; Desperately having to work and try to get the whole thing. First we wanted to have some sort of presentation behind a hole or something other that constrained the viewpoint of the presentation but we struggled to come up with something to present. Another idea was to put the audience in the shoes of the subjects in a somewhat more literal sense by projecting on phones hanging from the ceiling, where they had to align the phone with the presentation in order to get the full image. We ended up going with this idea.

Prototype setup (2-10-2024)

The first setup consisted of three fake phones, message visuals projected upon them and a soundscape. The messages were mostly meant to be the messages you wouldn't want to miss like invitations to events, people dying, being fired, etc. The messages were basically full on conversations with a back and forth. The soundscape consisted of a low frequency humming and the sounds of a digital modem from the time before broadband. The phones were suspended from the ceiling in a small group.

The feedback we received had several improvements: The stories were not all that interesting according to some, missing a meeting would not be a reason to go out in the middle of the night and the fact that the conversation was being answered kind of broke the illusion of desperately trying to find a signal and a response. Additionally, the phones often blocked each others projection, which caused the interaction to be quite a bit more difficult than anticipated.

Semi-final setup (9-10-2024)

The final setup upgraded the installation to eight phones and two projectors. The phones were made of wood this time since the cases used last run were somewhat flexible which made viewing even more difficult. The phones have been suspended in the air in a row instead of a scattered group; While this made the presentation somewhat less interesting, it made the projection mapping a lot easier and allowed for the suggestion of a sequential story. The soundscape stayed nearly the same, only adding the occasional inbound message sound. By far the biggest change was done to the contents of the messages themselves, this time we decided to make the stories a bit more vague and mysterious and they could, through the interpretation of the audience, be strung together somewhat.

Reflection

The reception of this installation was quite good and I'm quite proud of it, I put it on here for a reason. While the interpretation was quite literal with the phones in the air, I thought the concept with the seeking of the story through manually 'fixing' the projection mapping was quite interesting. People enjoyed the interaction and described it as being somewhat analogue horror-esque.

The ambiance of the entire setup could play more into the mystery and be fully dark, that would be an inprovement. Additionally, the overarching story in the text could be somewhat clearer so it is still mysterious and dark but not fully upto audience interpretation.

Attributions

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