For our final in our design class, we were prompted to “make something invisible.” After thinking for a long time about the definition of invisible, I realized that the conventional definition of invisible has always been something that disappears into thin air. Instead, I wanted to approach this project thinking of an invisible subject simply as something you can’t see in plain sight. And the easiest way I found to make an object unseeable was to shield it from view on all sides.
I painted an ink picture, placed it in a 6 sided cardboard box and closed it, hiding it from view and thus rendering it invisible. However, something was still missing. Wasn’t the object still “visible” if somebody opened the box to take a look?
I was reminded of the "Schrodinger’s Cat" theory, in which a cat was sealed in a box that was, for theoretical purposes, completely tight and unbreakable. In the box was a deadly poison, which had a 50% chance of being triggered and killing the cat, and a 50% chance of not killing the cat. In this way, the cat was both “dead” and “alive” at the same time, because the box is sealed and nobody can ever know for sure whether the poison was triggered and whether the cat is alive or dead.
This theory is what inspired the rest of my project— I wanted to see if I could make the ink picture invisible across every possible set of conditions, not just one. To do this, I added a mechanism to the cardboard box: If somebody lifts the lid of the box in an attempt to view the picture of the cat, a container filled with ink will fall and splatter on the picture, making the graphic on the paper inside “invisible.” With this irreversible mechanism placed in the box, nobody would ever be able to see what was on the piece of paper again. I was able to make the image “invisible" with the box both closed and open.
Completing the project prompted me to ask myself a few questions. If a paper had an image on it but nobody could ever see it, did it ever exist? Can an object be invisible even while it exists in the material world? Lastly, can an object be invisible and visible at the same time, just like the cat in "Schrodinger’s Cat” can be "dead and alive" at the same time?
