THE
SHAPE
OF
WATER
Water and women are where life begins.
Water can be regarded as feminine symbol in chinese culture.
Water is intangible. From what mentality you look at it, it is just as you think.
produced by: Cheng Yang (cyang017@campus.goldsmiths.ac.uk)
INTRODUCTION:
Nowadays, when women post photos about themselves on social networks, they always receive various comments. A large part of these comments is about the evaluations of their bodies. It can cause many women feel anxious about their body shapes.
Water and women has deep connections in chinese traditional culture. My project is an interactive installation, five different shapes of glass representing different shapes of women bodies, the audience could knock the glass to see the animations from a projector above the table.
During the exhibition, I will break one of these glass and present the broken pieces on the table every day. It represents women should not constrained by the shape of glass, water is intangible, like our souls are also free.
WHY I CHOOSE THIS CONCEPT:
I use social medias like ins or weibo. Sometimes I post my photos to show the good side of life, but people will focus on my body shape, I will receive some comments like you are too fat, it really hurts me and I want to lose weight because of these comments. Sometimes we pretend we don’t care about these comments, we just ignore them, but in fact, we still suffering by them.
I have a friend who almost didn’t eat to lose weight because of these kind of words, and even went to the hospital. Luckily, my parents always give me positive influence, they made me understand to be healthy is more important. So I want to make this project to let women get rid of the impact from body shaming, be more confident and be aware of the true beauty of ourselves.
HOW CAN I PRESENT MY IDEA:
Women and water are where life begins, water is also regarded as feminine symbol and in traditional Chinese culture ( I found an article talking about this see in reference), women are made by water. So I use five different shapes of glass with water inside to represent different shapes of women bodies.
My interaction method is that the audience can see the dynamic effect by knocking on different glass. The movement of knocking represents the evaluation of different women from the society, in fact, unique sound like the unique shape, but I think people will also evaluate whether the sound and shape are good or not. I want every audience to feel the power of these words to women, it is equivalent to the lethality of women’s body and mind, so if you do not have enough strength to knock the glass you may not see the effect. And the greater the strength of knock, the more glass will sense it. Just like, the worse you judge a woman, the more will affect the self-perception of other women.
During the exhibition, I will break one of these glass per day and present the broken pieces on the table. It represents women should not constrained by the shape of glass, water is intangible, like our souls are also free. I very much hope that every day more and more women can release from the influence of social media and to be the one they want to be. Considering safety, I will not break glass in my exhibition room, so I make a video to present my idea. And this video will be played next to my installation, so that the audience can better understand my concept. In this video, I took the water in the Thames River with a glass, which represents the restraint of a fixed aesthetic form to women, then I merged with this glass gradually, wanting to break free, and finally break it, let the water return to the river and flow to the ocean.
WHAT IS MY DYNAMIC EFFECTS:
There is a Chinese saying -- “The surface is calm, and there are waves of ripples in my heart” which means I pretent I do not care, but I can’t avoid it. So I use water ripples represent the hurt of these verbal attacks on women. And fish leads women’s souls to swim far away along river to ocean, the freedom.
One of my glass I made the text effect, it will randomly generate some words when I knock it, all of these words are derived from people's real evaluation of female bodies on social networks to let the audience feel the authenticity.
HOW CAN I REALIZE MY IDEA：
OF: I use opedframeworks to code all the effects, using 2d water algorithm to create the water ripple and flock algorithm to create the fish.
Arduino: I use five vibration sensors to detect each knocking, reading values from sensors and sending messages (esp32) to openframeworks through osc. Connecting my own wifi through GL-MT300N-V2 (Mango).
FUTHER DEVELOPMENTS:
I think it is better to make different water ripples, for example, one kind of water ripple can represent a emotion that connects with the comments, the other can represent another emotion. Or let the water ripple moves more randomly. Moreover, It’s more interesting for the fish to interact with the knocking of the glass, while I haven’t fully considered how to interact before the exhibition.
REFERENCES:
Water ripple tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZUdGqeOD0w
Equivalent of Processing’s loadPixels: https://forum.openframeworks.cc/t/equivalent-of-processing-s-loadpixels-pixels-not-using-ofimage/35296
Text sorting tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywSNL2Ac8Rs&t=1064s
Flock reference: Andy's live coding particleLab6_boids & https://junkiyoshi.com/openframeworks20201029/
Vibration Sensor Module: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/albertoz/vibration-sensor-module-c88067
50 Women Share The Ways They Were Body-Shamed And It’s Just Too Horrible To Read: https://www.boredpanda.com/women-body-shaming-stories-theysaid/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
Connections between water and women: https://chn.oversea.cnki.net/KCMS/detail/detail.aspx?dbcode=CJFD&dbname=CJFD2007&filename=ZHLZ200704016&v=b2nFDGOmkuqG%25mmd2FBaJroKtTPUYNON1zmsDKxhr%25mmd2BhXlSwM0Q4fVUEwkd46wusrN8E54 (Chinese Article)