A video installation to get people to take a breather.

The course’s brief was to come up with a creative way of objecting something, anything. A couple of my classmates and I got this idea to get people to take a moment in their hectic lives and try to relax for a bit. Our inital thought was to have different pieces of the displaced word “RÓ” or “calm” spelled out on multiple signs in a seemingly random order.

A bypasser would then hurry on past the signs but notice in his peripheral view that something was off – or on, really – and hopefully realize to take a short breather, now and then.

We liked the concept, but we knew we could make the execution more sophisticated. At some point, an idea came up of using a projector to cast the message onto a ton of woven strings. There was something calming about the notion of having the typographic pieces of the word playing on and in between multiple rows of string.

We hit a bit of a wall when the message proved to be too hard to read on the strings. Following some intensive brainstorming, we arrived at the conclusion that the string projection was still a keeper. We just needed something else than the literal word “calm” to be projected onto them.

We read online how to achieve really interesting chemical reactions and ended up using milk and strong coloured ink. We had a video camera set up on a tripod above us and facing downwards it recorded the swirling chemical reactions when we added the ink off-screen into a large tray filled with milk.

Below is a short, compressed and sped up excerpt from the recording.

The result was a hypnotizing experience of playful color and morphing forms projected through a collection of strings fastened to a wooden frame. The frame itself was strung up with really thin wires so it seemed to float in mid-air, imbuing the overall piece with an additional sense of airy calm.