DISCOVERING THE EMOTIONAL QUOTA OF EVERYDAY OBJECTS

Picture a scene in which highly valued objects d’art are being examined and appraised for their worth.  Laid out is a precise system for emptying your baggage, your self-worth, your memories, and displaying them in a visual system of objects, a classification order intending to be a mirror of yourself.  Part performance, part interactive art, the Object Fetish Atelier (OFA) seeks to help people understand the meaning and the emotional attachment behind the things they carry with them everyday.

More than interactive art, the OFA offers a service using the metaphor of renegade art agents, who engender the user to question the objects in their posession.  Today, the selection process behind the objects we buy is all the more essential, in light of the new economic order.  In our consumer society, we tend to buy certain objects because we are told that it is like nothing else; in reality, we also buy certain objects because everyone else has done so.  In such a way, these objects are a way for us to project onto its entity our desires, and allows us to become oneself through the accumulation of such objects.  We aim to have the user question the things they own and our appraisal of these objects will imbue them with new life, allowing them to extend beyond mere objectification and rather, giving the owner a chance to develop a new love affair.

PROCESS:
Under the cloak of the OFA, we will ask participants to drop off the contents of their purse, pockets, bags, etc. onto a tray that will be engraved with a matrix that is broken down between different emotional states.  The agents will than insert the tray under a camera that will take in the contents of the tray and going through an array of pixels will distinguish the objects from each other as well as their specific location on the tray.  Using an algorithm in Java that we will develop, the final output will take the user’s objects and create a visual system in a spatial panoply that arranges their objects according to either: (a) emotional state; (b) color; and (c) size/shape.

PROJECT REQUIREMENTS:
In order to accomplish this, we will need to borrow a black table, on top of which we will build a hutch that will house our camera and lighting equipment.  Within the hutch the trays will be inserted.  Underneath the tray we will place a sheet of retro-reflective material under a sheet of clear plexi.  We will also need an LCD screen to display the visual output.