Push Pull 2 – Ashley and Kat

As you walk through the library bookshelves looking for a book you need for class, you feel something touch brush against the top of your head. You look up and see a creature’s head peer over your head, its tongue sticking out, and its large bulbous eyes looking back at you. Although it startled you, you strangely feel tempted to pull its tongue as it just dangles there – so you pull. A couple of bookshelves over, your friend begins to see a similar creature’s head moving. It seems to be coming alive as its mouth puckers tighter and tighter.

Process

For this project, we combined elements from our last Push/Pull project into creating this much larger inflatable version. From Kat’s, we implemented the patch worked sphere into creating the heads for our creature. Although we wanted our creature to give off a creepy and morbid feeling, the patch work allows us to create a feeling that appeals to more childish features instead of those of a real monster that would incite true fear.

From Ashley’s, we really enjoyed how you could interact with her pieces. By literally pushing or pulling certain parts of the face, a new previously unseen element comes out. We really liked how for one of her heads, you could pull the hair and it would transform the face so it looks as if the face is sucking its cheeks in. For another one, if you reach inside the head’s gaping mouth, you would find puke inside and can pull it all out.

Therefore, we decided we wanted to created an interactive piece of a two headed creature that has elements that can affect one another through inviting an audience to interact with the piece. Because the piece has to be set in the library, we wanted to take advantage of the environment given to us and make it a part of the art piece. With the high academic rigor at CMU, it can be easy to get stuck constantly working/studying by yourself in the library and forget about maintaining your relationships with others. Therefore we wanted our piece to represent that you always function better when you surround yourself with others instead of being by yourself and that it is important to keep a network of friends with you. Therefore, we made the creature span across 2 bookshelves so you can only get the full experience with other people, not by yourself. When you pull the tongue/puke sticking out from one of the heads, it moves the other head so that its mouth begins to move. This symbolizes the knowledge you can pull from those around you and that the more you pull knowledge from others, the more you then have to share with others as well.

In making this inflatable, we wanted to give it a creepy yet cartoonish feel to it so we chose black and red to make up the heads. We would have like the body of the creature to not have been white so that it could have matched better with the heads but we could not find black/red scraps big enough to form the body so we settled for white. For the eyes and mouth, we purposely sewed them on so that the stitching would show so that it could have a more childlike feel to it like it is a doll. The hardest part was making sure that the interaction part would work and that everything would still inflate. The heads were created by cutting out petal pieces and sewing them together beach-ball style. After the heads were finished, we then created the body to connect the heads together. We sewed the tongue/puke onto the head with the lips and pulled it through the body to stick our through other head’s mouth. We wanted the tongue/puke to inflate to give our creature a more lively instead of limp feel but it was difficult figuring out at first out to get the tongue/puke to also inflate because it was a separate piece from the body that needed to be able to move on its own. However, we were able to solve this problem by creating a feel holes to allow air to flow through when it is being inflated.

You can see in the video below how the pulling on one side affected the other head.

Reflection

After inflating our creature with air, we noticed that the heads did not inflate perfectly round. Although we were not intending the heads to be perfect circles either but instead more of an oval shape so as to give them more unique shapes, we did not expect the petals making up the head to fold onto each other. This was problematic because it caused the eyes and lips to be not as visible when inflated. However, it did allow the two heads to have more distinct characteristics from one another as the head with the lips resembled the look of a fish. We also wish that we had more time so that we could have implemented even more interactive features instead of just the one. The body could have had limbs dangling down since it is currently just a white tunnel with a piece hanging down for the fan to inflate the piece. People can interact on the two outer sides of the inflatable the the middle part is not interactive at all.

Overall, we are pretty happy with our project. Looking at how excited people got over being able to interact with the piece and how this interaction allowed our creatures to come to life was very satisfying.

https://vimeo.com/user109206203/review/394957382/19075eb7b0