Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault, Eating Disorders
In Physics, the term ‘singularity’ refers to the phenomenon of all things colliding into a singular point. Theoretically, the singularity occurs at the middle of a black hole where the strength of the gravity is greatest. The gravity is so great that, at the Event Horizon, not even light may pass through; that is what creates a black hole. This means that past the event horizon, there is no possible future as light cannot move forward. As the mass is inevitably pulled toward singularity, it is torn to shreds by the sheer gravity of the point. Eventually, all particles that enter the black hole must move toward one point; there is no longer a past, and no other future— only singularity.
“Singularity,” or as my classmates know it “The Elevator,” was an experiment in space. Using Kluszczynski’s
Strategy of Network, I wanted to create a space for pause and interaction on a mental and physical level. The idea of The Network is that interactions between participants is the formation of the interaction of the art. In this case, I was eager to have participants not only interact with each other, but themselves. This was the intention of “Singularity.”
“Singularity” was also a product of my own trauma. In February, I was sexually assaulted by my partner. For many weeks, and still to this day, I suffered greatly; I often re-lived the assault and other past traumas, was unable to focus on work or entertainment, and visited therapists daily and then weekly. It was difficult for me to leave my bed for several days and still now I have trouble eating regularly.
The idea for this piece happened one night as I laid in bed. I wished, desperately, for a reprieve from my own thoughts. I wished for a place where the world would stop around me so that I could grieve, rebuild, and carry on. That feeling of loss, pain, and hope is what created “Singularity:” a place where time and space did not exist, only the sensation of moving.
When it came to constructing my space for healing, I wanted to encourage people to reflect on themselves. However, in order to reflect, I wanted to give participants the opportunity to enter the space with me. In order to invite my guests, I developed seating in the form of a large, communal bean bag and a projection that was intended for the ceiling. This would make guests focus on a plane that they don’t normally interact with: the above. The projection featured a starscape that infinitely propelled forward through space, featuring stars and planets of another time. The purpose of this projection, my Event Horizon, was to allow guests to feel as through they were moving forward, even if they may be standing still.
Originally, this piece was made for a much larger space. However, given time and practicality, I chose to move it. My ideal selection was the silver elevator in the Heimbold building at Sarah Lawrence. This elevator was massive and moved three floors, so it was ideal for all the components of my installation.
The theme for the Art Party that this work was featured in was space, which was very convenient. To match with the theme, I planned my aesthetics to feel simultaneously comfortable and futuristic. The result of this effort was an elevator covered in reflective mylar.
I had a deep interest in multi-sensory artwork. After reading selections from Design for Peripheral Interaction by Saskia Bakker, I focused my work on using auditory information as a way to stimulate the participant’s ability to divide and focus their mental capacities, or, multi-task. When choosing what audio to add to my projection, I thought very carefully about what I wanted my guests to feel. I chose to manipulate a public-use recording of Esti Dal by Kodály, a famous Turkish song. I chose this piece because of an English translation I heard and learned years ago:
Peaceful darkness
Night descending
Fragrant now with summer’s ending;
There I rested, softly sleeping
Wishing, wanting, His sweet safe-keeping.
This song encapsulated the exact sense of safety and momentary belonging that I wanted guests to feel. I manipulated the song so that it the singing sounded more mechanical. The end effect that I wanted was something between the sound effects of the gears of a spaceship and the low drones of meditative musics. Esti Dal served this purpose perfectly, and the audio was later looped for the video.
My other concern for this piece was the framing. I read The Two Magics by Nelms early in the semester, and was immediately concerned with how I would dress my next project. It was important to me that the ideas that went into the project were both communicable and fun. Using the power of social media, I reached out to several friends and asked them to help me translate ‘welcome’ or ‘hello’ into multiple languages. These words were then added to the beginning of the video, to officially welcome guests. I also crafted a warning sign, as I was concerned about people’s ability to move through my piece. Both of these supported the intergalatic feeling that “Singularity” required.
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Surprisingly, this piece was a hit.
I checked in on my elevator several times throughout installation night, and not once did I see it empty. In fact, at one point, a party of approximately twelve people were in the elevator, lounging and talking. I could not have asked for a better reception. The mylar was dynamic and moved as the elevator changed floors; the projection, now moved to a wall, was mesmerizing and beautiful; the sounds of the moving elevator complimented the squeaks and groans of my edited Esti Dal.
Most importantly, as I sat in the elevator at the end of the night, I felt at home. “Singularity” was a space of my creation, intended to bring peace or piece of mind to any guests who would join me at my Event Horizon. And, strangely enough, they did.
When I started in New Genres, I was determined to make a game. My original idea was to create a visually simplistic, text-based narrative that the user would progress through by answering questions. After reading “Strategies of Interactive Art” by Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, I learned that games aren’t the only cool way to create an engaging and thought-provoking interactive experience. For now, I put my original idea aside.
Once we decided on the theme “Supernova” for the Art Party, the rest of my idea began to take shape. As a lover of linguistics, my mind went straight to alien language. I could stick with the idea of asking questions to my audience by writing them in a language of my own creation and translating them into English. I later decided I would create a slideshow of questions and proverbs to display with two projectors simultaneously.
I started off by brainstorming a set of symbols with which to build my language. I wanted the symbols to look different enough from the latin alphabet but still recognizable as a language to my audience. I decided that they would be composed only of straight lines and could be strung together without spaces in order to form words. Pictured below is an example of the first version and a string of random symbols.
The next step was to create a font so I could type my language. I used fontstruct.com, a website that I had never used before but was easy to figure out. This is an example of what the interface looked like as I drew each letter:
While translating my hand drawn letters into their digital forms, I discovered that the diagonal lines weren’t working as well as the horizontal or vertical ones. They looked strange and out of place, so I wrote new characters using horizontal and vertical lines only. I also realized that it would be difficult to tell where one symbol began and another ended when they were all strung together, so I added a dot centered above every symbol to make it easier for the reader to discern. Finally, I decided to make one symbol for every letter in the alphabet so I had enough of a variety.
One problem that was troubling me as I worked on my project was, what does each letter sound like? I realized that creating an entire phonetic system was much too big of a task and also not relevant to my project. Because it was going to be projected, the point was for it to be visually interesting and different from English, so it didn’t matter what it sounded like. Whenever I was asked about this, I explained that humans are incapable of producing the sounds of the language.
When I finished my alphabet, I downloaded the font and began typing out my questions and proverbs. The questions were meant to be thought-provoking, not cheesy, and start conversation among my audience. As I wrote them, I imagined an alien civilization that wished to communicate with other planets. What would they want to know? I thought about what their planet/culture might be like and how those features would become apparent through the questions they asked, such as space travel, dimension hopping, crystals, slime, and beasts. I wrote 26 in total.
To create words, I mostly just typed random letters until I came up with something visually appealing. For some words, like sun and moon, I used the symbols to create shapes that looked like what they described. I also needed to create words for concepts that don’t exist in English, like solid-bodied or soft-bodied or body swap. I recorded every word I used in my journal and created a dictionary for myself to refer back to.
I also created a basic grammar system for my language. I did this by making up rules as I needed them, then sticking to them. To start, I decided that the basic sentence structure would be subject → object → verb. If the verb is is, it’s left out because it’s implied. For example, I like pizza becomes I pizza like, and I am a student becomes I student (am).
Here are some more of my grammar rules:
I then used Photoshop to make the slideshow I would project on the wall. Each slide consists of one question/proverb, with the English written above the alien language. I decided on a simple but declarative design, a black background with white text in all capital letters. This would allow the viewer to compare and contrast the features of the two languages easily. My inspiration for this was Jenny Holzer’s projections and truisms.
My two projectors were originally going to be set up on two walls facing each other, but because I was unable to build a rig for the projectors in time, I moved it at the last minute. Instead, the two projections were side by side in a different area. Ultimately, I was very pleased with how it looked in the new spot, probably more than I would have liked it in the original one.
On the night of the art party, some people only glanced briefly at the piece and then moved on. But those who realized what it was were really excited about it. I saw many people taking pictures with it and hanging out nearby. But nobody seemed to be talking about the questions. I would have liked for there to have been some kind of discussion going on.
There are a few ways I could have better engaged with the audience. There could have been a performance aspect to the project; I could have stood by the installation the whole time and held a lesson in the language or assumed the character of an alien and told about the world I was from. I also could have created some sort of hand out, like a book of lore or a dictionary. It wasn’t really visible to my audience that I put in such an effort to create my own grammar and lexicon, so a hand out could have better conveyed that. I actually did create stickers, but I forgot to bring them to the party. My installation didn’t end up being as interactive as I wanted it to be this time, so next time I will keep these techniques in mind. But overall, it was a huge success, and I had so much fun with it. I think this project is the first of many constructed languages and projector installations to come. 
Then there was the question of decoration. Again, it was a question of fitting the theme without being cliche; and of making Heimbold into something completely different from its everyday self. We gelled lights, changing the color of the space, and used mylar to cover a wall upstairs. The reflection of the colored light on the mylar really changed the experience of the space, and over the course of party almost everyone who attended wanted to take a picture in front of the wall. We also made balloon structures and mylar nests of candy, and covered projector tables and food tables in mylar sheeting, which really brought together the visual aesthetic of the party. The decision to make this change overnight also affected the outcome, and added to the mystical element of the party. Not having the work of setup as part of our fiction allowed for a more fun and carefree atmosphere at the party itself. A few semi-contained spaces of fully realized change rather than a half-realized change throughout the whole space proved to be very effective, and the gels and music throughout the building carried the spaces that were less transformed. The harmonious visual aesthetics of the decoration also helped with this – using mostly silver, white, and blue, even with things as simple as candy, connected all of the different pieces around the building.
Attendees expressed how much they enjoyed it, and bought into the fiction of the world we had created, dressing up and engaging with interactive installations. By concealing how we created things, and what work had gone into them, the party became a space of wonder and engaged the curiosity of anyone with a desire to enter the space of play. I struggled a lot with time estimation on this project – it was difficult to figure out how long something I had never done before would take, especially when factoring in multiple people working on the project at once. There were a few elements of decoration I had to abandon because of this, and I initially thought that I would be able to experience design and make an individual piece, which ended up not being the case. Because the format of the art party was new to Sarah Lawrence, I think it was also difficult for some participants – both artists and attendees – to fully understand beforehand what the art party would be. We also struggled with creating a large-scale piece in a shared space and the challenges that posed (not being able to use certain rooms, sound bleed, etc), even needing to change the date because of budgeting concerns towards the beginning of the process. Despite these setbacks, people really enjoyed the party, and I was immensely satisfied with the outcome. I learned a lot about creating a piece like this on a larger scale and how to preserve the mysticism in presentation; I also really value the work that I did with the rest of my class as a team. It was really rewarding to see everyone’s individual work and how it all fit together, and I’m truly happy I got to be a part of it.
