Lightboxv3 at Blow Festival, New Zealand more images

And now with added reflectors...

Lightbox v3 at The Blow Festival is an installation that uses a large scale Camera Obscura (The Lightbox) It uses imagery and sound from the Antarctic and video of the Aurora Australis (The Aurora that appears above Antarctica), these are projected and reflected onto the walls of the room in which the Lightbox sits.

By standing inside the Lightbox, people are surrounded by imagery that is inverted, refracted and combined through the use of multiple apertures. A star field of holes projects the Aurora in the pattern of constellations from the mid January Southern sky. Upon closer inspection each glowing pinpoint of light is, in fact, a tiny camera obscura showing the Antarctic scenes. As The Aurora Australis glows, clouds form and dissipate, the sun rises and sets and the moon races behind Mt Erebus. The Lightbox and the room it is in fluxes and moves with a thousand images of the Antarctic environment refracted,reflected and inverted.





Ghost in the machine

can you see the legs poking out the bottom of the Lightbox?


Anna looking at all the pretty lights and deciding that the 3rd wine wasn't such a good idea.

Lightbox at Blow Festival New Zealand

more to follow..

completed..

Larkoff and Johnson

In their influential book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that metaphor is something many of us
associate solely with language and the written word. They challenge this limited outlook: “We have found, on the
contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary
conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (1980, p. 3). They
argue that we are often unaware of our conceptual system despite its central role in making sense of the world around
us. Lakoff and Johnson use the term metaphor, then, largely to encompass the view that we make sense of new things
by the use of association or similarity.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson. M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press.

analogy in design for the lightbox

“This is like being in space”

“This feels like outer space”

“This is like being in a swimming pool at night”.

“... its more like swimming in murky water at the seaside.”

The Lightbox explores how an audience could engage with science, the exploration of Antarctica, and optics by using an analogical design strategy.

As David Wong (Wong 1993, p 1259) notes, “Through analogies, an understanding of novel situations may be constructed by comparison to more familiar domains of knowledge”. Hernan and Goldschmidt refer to Vosniadou and Ortony when describing analogy as entailing “the transfer of relational information from a known situation (usually referred to as source or base), to a situation that needs explanation (referred to as target), where at least one of the related elements is not known. (Hernan, C and Goldschmidt, 1999) The Analogy happens because of the possible relationship between the target and the source.

This case study will seek to discuss ways we can reflect on the use of analogy and how this may inform design research

questions for NORDES presentation and references

1/ The Lightbox project will seek to discuss ways we can reflect on the use of analogy and how this may inform design research

2/ When we understand a structure as an object, is it different from understanding it as a phenomenon


REFERENCES

Bestor, C. (2003) 'Installation art: image and reality ', SIGGRAPH Comput. Graph. , vol. 37 no. 1 pp. 16-8.

Geczy, A and Genocchio B (eds) 2001, What is Installation? : an anthology of writing on australian installation art, Power Publication, Sydney.

Glynn, R. (1996) Attributing space, Inventing Attributes, installations. London. Bartlett School of Architecture

Hasekawa, Y. (2006) Ryoji Ikeda, Jones, C. (Ed). Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art. Cambridge MA, The MIT press. pp 68-72.

Hernan, C and Goldschmidt, G. ( 1999) Expertise and the use of visual analogy: implications for design
Education. Design Studies, Vol 20, No 2, March, p 154

Kozel,Susan.(2007)Closer:performance,technologies,phenomenology. Cambridge MA. The MIT Press, p164

Stone S, (2002) How Do Experts Design Compelling Experiences : A Qualitative Identification Of Key Dimensions [Online PDF]. Available from
[Accessed 25 May 2009]


Saltz, D. (1997) “The Art of Interaction: Interactivity,Performativity, and Computers.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no.2 (spring), pp117-128.