junebug-ARSculpture

AR Meditation

Follow this guided meditation to help you relax. Base your breathing patterns on the movements of the entity.

After watching this video and following the meditation, are you relaxed? Or are you more anxious as you watch this boding entity hover over you for an extended period of time?

For this project, I decided to base my project on stress and anxiety. During childhood, whenever I dealt with stress and anxiety, I loved going to my backyard and just stare up at the sky. I enjoyed the soundscape that it immersed me in – the sounds of my pool and fountain, trees rustling, and birds chirping always seemed to calm me down. Since I was back in my childhood home and living in a stressed time, I’ve been going back out there to take Zoom and school breaks.

Then, I started playing with this idea of a conflict between audio and visual. After building my sculpture and running some Unity tests, I realized that since it’s all digital, the installation is much easier to manipulate than if it was in physical, real, space. I thought what if I made the sculpture slightly foreboding as it hovers over the viewer/audience? Then the audio would be trying to get the audience to meditate and de-stress, but there is a lingering feeling of unease from watching the video and watching this thing bob up and down slowly for almost 30 minutes.

My initial idea for this project was to get this sculpture to be floating above my pool because I thought playing around with reflections and transparency would have been cool, but I had troubles with getting the sculpture to appear directly on top of the water, so I had to switch gears.