Machines for Seeing

We finally finished with the machines for seeing and the cubist painting!  The machine for seeing cubist was a simple machine that had two sides of plexi so that they would reflect the object.  It also had four slides that have horizontal lines based on the regulating lines of the landscape that worked off the regulating lines of the painting.  The effect was to show depth and perspective.  It works fairly well because you can see the layers of space.  The second machine, for seeing nothing, was built from a cylinder of mirror with four lenses spaced throughout.  I think it is effective at refracting the image so that you can't tell what the object is.  However, in the review John brought up a good point that the user of the machine has no sense of the build up of layers of refraction.  I agree that that would have made the machine much stronger and more interactive.  I should have at least studied it by looking at how just the mirrors affect the image and then how each added lense distorts the image further.  It was also interesting in the reviewto hear about the machines that made you aware of the space inside of them versus ones that did not.  At one point in the project I wanted the machine user to know that they were looking through something but I never really made a conscious attempt to stick to that or to really think that maybe that meant seeing the space inside the model.  Overall it was neat to see all the different ideas that the group came up with for the machines.

Machine for Seeing

Machine for Seeing Nothing