Week 2: Reflection/Refraction Task

November 22, 2017

For the Reflection/ Refraction task, we began with two words from the brainstorm done as a class. The words we looked at were exposure and revealing. From these two words we thought further about what they each meant, and thought of different things we could look at.

We came up with questions such as 'What do people who are blind or have little sight see?', and researched into this. We found a really interesting video on a guy with little sight, who described his sight as next to nothing, saying "if he saw shapes and shadows that would be amazing!"But to him he would not describe them as a person with sight would. Sighted people often assume that you would just see black, but as this man says "I have no concept of what black looks like" Sometimes I can sense what the light source is, and can just tell that there is light, opposed to sighted people who can tell different types of light.

"It's like a sound in a room, like a whir, you can find where it's coming from. If there's a light source, like the sun coming through the window, I can tell. You guys can see all the differences, and the different types of light, but I can just tell that there is light."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDHJRCtv0WY

We also looked at how the eye works, and how it flips the image you're seeing as it hits the Retina. We wondered if we could use mirrors or a similar material to imitate this process, so that (as humans whose eye's already flip the image) we would be able to imitate what the eye does.

We also looked at the way different thicknesses of glass and other materials emit or diffuse light, and how they throw different shapes and colours onto nearby surfaces. We looked at using chromatic glass, acrylic, and mirrors to create an optical illusion that would play with people's perception and distort their perception on how light refracts or reflects something. We asked the question "Do you perceive the same thing as me?"

We ended up using some very basic resources we had gathered and other bits and pieces we could find to put together this pyramid that would allow light to shine through it and bounce of the cut and crushed up bits of cd that we had floating around in water inside.