Deep Submergence
"And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
Friedrich Nietzsche
produced by: Soon Park
These days everything is lighten up and revealed underneath the recent technological developments. It’s hard to find real darkness or unrevealed part in our daily lives. But a few hundreds years ago, when the electricity hadn’t been invented, our life and the darkness existed next to each other. In that darkness people saw some unknown creatures at a corner of the dark room or outside in the night. In Japan, where I was born, people saw many unique monsters, well known as "mononoke", in ancient era. They depicted them and told others what these creatures looked like. Otherwise there was no way to share what they saw because these creatures could be seen only by themselves by using their imagination. These creatures were special beauty that only allowed to be seen by someone who could use their own creativity.
In the real world's darkness there are creatures that we can’t see by our own eyes. They live in the deep part of the ocean. These mysterious lives are hidden in the darkness of the sea so it’s impossible to see them without some technology to submerge deeply to observe them. They are hidden but also exactly existing there like the monsters created by people’s imagination.
In this project I drew imaginary monsters inspired by deep sea creatures and Japanese monsters by coding a program with OpenFrameworks.
Scene 1: The first creature is tube shaped jellyfish with tentacles. This scene is the hook to lead the audience to the atmosphere of this world, so the creature needed to remind of some water creature. It moves from left to right as the phycological study shows that human recognise the movement from left to right as active beginning.
Scene2 : To make a contrast, I put several creatures on this scene. They are all same species but each creature has their own unique designs. They appear on the right bottom corner and slowly move up to the left top corner and disappear. The appearance on right leads the audience’s eyes form the previous creature’s end point.
Scene3 : The creature looks like a sea serpent with transparent body skin. It moves from top to bottom with wide horizontal movement. This moment is set to depict the feeling of this creature’s power and pressure. While the previous two creatures has light feeling this creature needs heavy impression to compare to the others.
Scene4 : The last one is a big jellyfish having fractal tree shapes inside of its body. It moves from bottom to top to show the feeling of this world's broadness.