“I gradually walked into this old lecture room, the first thing caught my eye was the significant high windows on the other end of the room. Light poured in and cast onto the wide stairs that extend towards where I was standing. I made my way to sev-eral stairs, and saw two screens on both sides of the diagonal ceilings above. Within a close look, I found myself in them, but something was weird.And then I turned around and saw the person behind me stand-ing several steps away. She raised her head up and had a looked at those screens that I was in. I looked up, in the voids of the large rafters above her, there were moving clouds on a blue sky.”

The extended screens

“For the spectator, it was both inside the room within the painting and outside in the real landscape. This is how we see the world. We see it outside ourselves, and at the same time we only have a representation of it in ourselves. “ - René Magritte La Ligne de Vie II, February 1940

Since the boundary between inside and outside space is always an end-less and consciousness-relevant topic, my work moved away from draw-ing definition lines to literally showing the coexistence of these two spatial concepts by playing with screens. Both of the two pieces dem-onstrated the notion of extended screen in different ways. According to the sequence of participants viewing, they firstly see the doubling of the scene with chairs, stairs and other spatial components in the room on screens that were captured by web-cams, which is the extension of inte-rior space. On the other hand, the participants then also see the record-ing of sky move reflected onto the rafters, and in this situation the screen shows the extension of exterior space. Within those screens, the room becomes an aggregation of inside and outside space, a maze.

Final Project

Amy Yan Pings3270131

Interior Design Year 3

The logic space

“Surrealism has sometimes seemed to signify a rejection of the ex-terior world, insofar as automatic writing, automatic drawing, and auto-matic painting are frankly oriented toward the “interior model,” in other words, toward the unconscious.”- José Pierre The Great Exterior Object

“I think in terms of psychological aspects, how we locate ourselves in a room, how we fill a space and are comfortable in it. I am also inter-ested in how we control a space......You do try to make yourself comfort-able in a space. You try and know the space in some sense.”- Bruce Nauman

Inspired by the exploration that surrealists do about transforming exte-rior familiarity into unconscious interior model, as well as their obsession with mirroring effects. I came up with the experiment of digital mirroring using web-cams, which is under an ordinary scenario that people take for granted, and by arranging the angle of the cameras and shifting its func-tion, created an opposite and meaningless effect to arouse unfamiliarity, comfortableness loss and the sense of counter-logic. The same effect was reached by introducing exterior appearance into an interior space, which happens on the other piece. And if the later is considered as indi-cating physical exterior outside the room, the former is the psychological exterior outside participant’s logical and conscious mind. Here, the com-plex of interior and exterior in terms of both the space and mind is the space-people relationship of the work as a whole.

The two views

“He didn’t put it there and it’s in my head; He put it there and no-body knows it but me; He didn’t put it there and it’s there anyway.”- Peter Plagens, “Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio

The big step I made was adding another participant into the whole navi-gation of the work. Since a large proportion of my intention of digital mirroring was to show how vision could detect as well as conceal, by put-ting another participant there, not only the sense of scale and presence was emphasized on but also the layering of vision got richer. Although they all have a clear understanding of the other party’s situation, par-

ticipant 1 can never see his/her face while participant 2 doesn’t get the sense that she/he is involved in the large image of exterior sky.Both people watch and get watched, and both of them see and don’t see. It’s a vision game that people are trapped in. It’s also an interesting peo-ple-people relationship that the work creates.

Light

“As for the light, I think that if it has the power to make objects vis-ible, its existence is manifest only if the objects receive it. Light is invis-ible as matter.” - René Magritte La Ligne de Vie II, February 1940

The explanation of the relationship between the two pieces ends up with a question. Like René Magritte’s explanation of clouds and sky in his paintings indicating day, and how light can only be visible while objects receive it, the moving sky in the work can be considered as light. Light is supposed to be invisible, but we see objects, so we know it is there. What if we can never see our front appearance, as the maze that the installa-tion creates, how do we know we are there?

http://theextendedscreenscreenspace.blogspot.com.au