OVERWHELM
October 7th - November 1st, 2019 | Installation Design
Project type: Individual
Completed for: Bachelor of Environmental Design, Faculty of Architecture at the University of Manitoba, Department of Interior Design | 2nd year
Programs used: Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign
"They (interior spaces) transmit our personal desires, collective anxieties, collective aspirations..."
- Gregory Marin
How do we inhabit a space?...Can we insert, incur, and or invent new rituals? How far can we modulate the pattern from familiar to unfamiliar? Can we forge a new spatiality through such modulation?
- project brief
This project, completed for a second year design studio, asked students to transform their bedroom into something unfamiliar by disrupting familiar habits and rituals.
I began by studying my habits and rituals. Two practices stood out to me: firstly, my use of my space as a haven from reality, where I often relax with a cup of tea at the end of the day. Secondly, I thought of my inconsistency in keeping up with world news, a habit I struggled with due to the constant and staggering influx of information. Combining these two concepts, I decided to bring the chaos of world news into my safe space.
Projectors, screens, and radio bounce off layers of newspapers and magazines, combining to create a disorientating vortex of information. These audio and visual stimuli are meant to confound the viewer and disrupt typical use of the space, just as the constant influx of conflicting facts and world views paralyze the average media consumer. The space is distorted from an atmosphere of bright openness and comfort to an unfamiliar maze of sensory overwhelm.
The transformed space inspires waves of discomfort and anxiety, and no longer allows for the ritual of letting go of the day’s events, as, like physical manifestations of our fears and anxieties, they have followed me into the room.
