A Different Light is a project developed by me as a Graphic Design student in an Art and Technology exchange programme. In my studies I’ve always liked to work with photography, illustration and graphic compositions mostly to print instead of creating things for the web, because of the physical interaction that we can have with the material, and I wanted my project to have this physicality also. One of my professional goals is to work with inclusion and elaborate meaningful projects for society, because my greatest passions besides Graphic Design are mainly related to people and how plural and different they can be. For this project I chose to talk about gender as something fluid because of society’s tendency to put everything inside “boy or girl” boxes while people are way more complex than that. This kind of segregation induces prejudice against everyone that is not inside “normativity”. The product’s operation mainly consists in one image printed in cyan, magenta and yellow that reacts to a red, green and blue LED strip. I had this idea while painting next to some coloured lights because while the colours were transitioning from one to another I had the illusion that the painting was changing, so I picked this transition effect to present gender not as a pink or blue subject but as a gradient of possibilities. After presenting my idea to the class, K.E.J. Kamperman told me about an IKEA billboard with RGB lights, which I used as a starting point for my researches. I read some articles about subtractive and additive colours to understand how they would work together, I did a lot of printing tests until I got the right effect and I measured the minimum distance and the angle between the LED strip and the image for it to light the entire area so I could define the frame dimensions. I began prototyping with illustrations, but talking to C.A. Tellegen during the experts’ consultation class I decided to use photography instead, to get a more realistic look. Then I took several pictures of V.A. Amirabile
getting his makeup done by T. Simons and picked three of these pictures, one without makeup, one in-between and one with the makeup done to represent different identity expressions or even different facets of oneself. I overlapped the three pictures, each one in a different colour, and went for a halftone look with Photoshop to blend them together and get the effect that I wanted with the lights. In the final product, the LED strip is hidden inside the picture’s frame and connected to a distance sensor that faces what’s in front of the frame. In this way the sensor triggers the LED strip when someone is approaching the picture and it’s lights start transitioning, looking like the image is changing. All of the wires are hid in a second frame, attached to the back of the first one to give a clean and organized look to the product. With this project I got to work with illustration for a while, photography and image editing, I could also develop graphic design skills with this report and technical skills with the soldering, programming and frame building. In addition my problem solving skills were also enhanced due to some misfortunes along the way, but it was a really fun project to work on and I hope people can enjoy it as much as I did.
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You can see people differently when you look through a different light, but in the end they are all the same, as important as anyone else.
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- Anaïs Siqueira, 405453