FACE ( ) VALUE
2019
Face Value is a collaborative exhibition project by myself and Peter Tak.
We have been itching to explore the use of Virtual Reality for art due to many recent exposures to VR innovations, and wanted to take a stab at artistically utilizing the unreal but realistic experience that VR permits.
We used After Effects to assemble the scenes, and displayed the VR portion using an Oculus Go.
We were given the opportunity and space to exhibit this experiment at MICA's Graphic Design department floor, so we decided to go big with the displays.
Artist statement:
"A picture can tell a thousand stories, but words tell a million lies.
The 21st century presents our daily lives with increasingly concealed, conflicting, and inconsistent information. Words, images, and values are often instrumentalized to convey misconstrued messages that mystify, demonize, and justify controversial decisions and events. Especially in the age of “fake news” and the internet, flexibility and fluidity of meaning and context is constantly abused by those who we consider both good and bad. We are then left to solve and read through these “information illusions”, and make our judgement based on seemingly authentic, but warped and wrapped values.
“Face value” dares you to face the reality of information, value, and images, and how easily their use/misuse can convey entirely different messages.
Will you make the right judgement in the face of value?"
Two videos are synchronized to an audio of 3 quotations with mostly neutral meanings.
One video is displayed on a projector. It displays three positive (+) clips that are synchronized to the quotation and force a positive meaning to the quotations.
The other video is displayed in VR. It displays three negative (-) clips that are also synchronized to the quotation and the other video, and force a negative meaning to the quotations.
Each set of 3 videos are repeated twice for viewing purposes.
Face ( + ) Value displayed on Projector.
Face ( - ) Value displayed in Virtual Reality.
VR VIEWING EVENT
Leaving the VR Headset on constantly can be damaging to the device, so we held 4 VR Viewing Events for people to see the full experience.
A challenge we faced during set up was a limitation in vinyl cutting scale. The scale we wanted the vinyl display fonts was 40 inches tall, but the only vinyl cutter we had access to cut 24 inches at max. So we cut the vectored letter forms in half, printed them in tiles, and pasted them in segments.
When not displaying on VR (and for people who get motion sickness from VR), we made the VR view available to be viewed and scrolled through via an interactive video displayed on a monitor to the right.
PROCESS
The word mark of our logo is in Neutral Standard, Book (value) and Italic (face), for its close resemblance to Helvetica (the most "neutral" font by function) and its literal name, "Neutral".
The empty parentheses represent the blankness, the neutrality, the lack of content of the audio messages. The + and the - respectively represent the positive and negative connotations and values that can fill that void to immediately change its whole meaning and identity.
The warped shape was created by accident while we were trying to sketch out the in-Vritual Reality view of the viewer. The slant in perspective felt appropriate for many reasons: It referenced the cubical nature of the type of Virtual Reality that we were creating, it seemed to physically make the words face each other (the face is facing the value), was coincidentally a perfect fit for the exhibition space we were displaying in, and it just looked more dynamic.
As we put the logo in perspective, it immediately occurred to us that the shape closely resembles the dimensions of our display space.
We immediately created this mockup which describes the display font locations and its warping "effect", the placement of the statement, and the locations and logistics of the projection and the VR station.
Vinyl cut tile-cut and division.
