CGIwoods

AEON, the latin word for eternity, describing the current time where identity is antiquated. As of 2045, there is no end of life - the advance of CGI and AR technology bring people back to the world as realistic as ever. Scanning one's face and storing it online, people can preserve the best moment of one's life forever and access it on the web for use during social interactions. This 3D replica is now something we take for granted. You no longer have to lament over the loss of a loved one, fear to speak with your own face, or travel a distance to see friends and family. There interactions all come whenever you want them. However, how does out current interactions compare to those when we used to talk face to face.

The exhibition space illustrates how we build relationships with CGI and questions what this relationship is bringing to us today:

01 | What if you let your loved one go?

Thanks to the advance of CGI technology, we don’t need letting go rituals anymore.You don’t have to be afraid of farewell, but what if we did let go? Would it help us advance more in the future?

02 | What if not everything in love is perfect?

Right now you never have a heart break again. Your partner is as perfect as you had ever wish, but could perfection actually be an imperfection in a relationship..? How did faults create stronger bonds in the past? 

03 | What if we had an identity? What would legacy mean in the future?

CGI helps you watch Ryan Gosling and Audrey Hepburn fall in love in the rain. You can even be them by ‘wearing’ their face on yours. However, as their legacy lives on your face, what happens to your own? How do you want to be remembered?

Context

The biggest question we hope to provoke through the exhibit is the question of what identity and legacy in means in the context of a highly digitalized age and what does it mean to us? Though advanced CGI and VR/AR technology might enable us to communicate in a more efficient and quicker method, in this future, personal identity is becoming obsolete as such technological innovations has made it simple to walk beneath the face of another. The exhibition will begin with the viewer seeing relics of the time when social face to face interaction was prominent, and just such social interactions decayed, the figure of the exhibition itself will begin to disintegrate from light to dark. Such journey across the exhibition and watching as it becomes slowly “pixelated,” will hopefully give a clear timeline of the direction CGI innovations are leading us and provoke questions as to whether it is really helping bond our social network.

The three of us gravitated around the topic of CGI. We initially started with the idea of what the future would look like if directors could use images of anyone and pick from a catalogue. What happens if there was a movie where all the actors and actresses were CGIs. What happens if a CGI actor wins an Oscar? We then began shifting it to an individuals lose of identity during the backcasting activity. The timeline indicates the possibility of a few things - the extreme advance of mixed reality technology, massive lawsuits filed by celebrities whose identity is stolen, and the released of the first online CGI transaction web market. 

We were looking to create a walk thru experience that relate to CGI and provides the visitors with a provocative line of questioning. There will be elements of obscurity where things will be revealed along the way. There will be a start an and an end. We will start with an introductory hallway with the explanation of each theme. (resurrection, de-aging and dating with CGI) The visitor will interact with 3 projected exhibits and see audio and video surround the CGI themes of: resurrection of the dead, dating, and returning to youth. 

The final booth can be a place where the visitor can actually choose a CGI dating partner with active interactions. The visitors can view and choose CGI people they like to date with, using gesture interaction. We might use the Pepper’s Ghost method for another exhibit if we have time. The interaction in the booth will be recorded so that we can turn it into a short film or mentioned that the user’s image is now added to the directory of images for CGI.

During the midway critique with Mary Lou and Eddie, we received feedback to push forward with the a component of CGI, so we push forward the idea of relationships: family, love, and community.  Also, given the time constraint, we thought making the live scanning and RFID interactions might be hard, so we decided to make our booth design more concise. 

Instead of building a scanning booth, we focused more on exhibiting three themes about relationships and added interaction parts using 3 projectors. We also used a webcam to fabricate a 'live scanning' moment - when the audience read and watch our exhibition, the webcam broadcast their face behind the booth.  

The projectors created a serendipitous effect - when we projected images with them, the light was refracted on the film and the scrim fabric and made a beautiful visual effect. It was a pretty effective strategy to use the reflective film on the booth!

The render above was created to describe the mood wanted in the exhibit. While we wanted a sense of privacy while entering the exhibit, we also sought to make the silhouettes apparent from the outside. The silhouettes without the faces being apparent was a another effect that we sought to utilize towards the loss of ownership and identity theme. 

A large underlying aspect of the exhibit was the idea of "lost identity." Hidden behind one of the description tags in the exhibit was a live camera attached to a projector in the back. As a visitor read about the second artifact in the exhibit, their face would be projected onto the sheet in the back. Often times the person would not be able to identify where the camera was or that their image was being projected onto the back as they were in the exhibit. This effect was an important key in portraying the overall message of the exhibit :  the loss of identity and ownership through the advancement of the CGI technology. 

To create a transparent feel of the artifacts within the exhibit, we laid a metallic paper onto the facade. On this reflective paper, we then projected the "artifact" clips that we wanted to show pertaining to CGI in the exhibit. When the clips were projected onto the paper they had a bit of a transparent glow to them, which added to the overall surreal and disorienting mood we wanted of this future/past exhibit. 

Reflection

Given the time constraint, the resolution we came up with the end was effective. It was the first time that any of use built that big of a life size scale model of room. The idea of the projector with the hidden camera and the takeaway were really effective. If we had more time, we would like to try creating a fake scanning environment using ropes. We also found interesting properties for the mylar once you project on it and would like to explore that more.