By the end of our third Lab week, On the Go had envisioned and discarded a number of tech-heavy ideas for innovating our both-sides-of-the-glass design. Material lists were due, and we were already wrestling with the challenge of transporting and mounting plexiglas of any kind. Here’s the body count of rejected ideas:
Television screens
It was so exciting to hear from Guillermo that the thin screen at the back of an ordinary monitor could work as a translucent flat screen between two pieces of glass. We found some old monitors and got to work wrecking them. Guillermo then figured out that this plan wouldn’t work for our demo – due to the polarized nature of the screens, we’d have to add additional layers of depth to make them visible. No bandwidth for this in our remaining time.
Magic disappearing materials
Guillermo is something of a wizard. He discovered and then nixed a series of materials over just a few days, each giving us different options in terms of variable transparency vs. opacity – each with its own logistic challenges. The most exciting was opaque, becoming transparent when electric current ran through it. Perfect for our piece – if we had a significant budget. But necessary? Perhaps not…
Audio beacons
Let’s mount speakers over our installation, with voices reading questions (or past answers) to reach people’s ears and hopefully draw them in! Yet the feedback we got in response to our audio idea suggested that we let this go and concentrate on the visual. Could people write and focus clearly on composing their own words if they were listening to others’…as well as reading backward through the glass?