Unit Three: Environment: Uncanny Inspiration

So for Unit Three, the theme that we are required to adhere to is The Uncanny.

What we have to focus on is Ambiguity and create something that is vague, undefined and has multiple interpretations.

What I had in mind was creating something from reflection. In Ransom Brigg's book Miss Peregrine's school for Peculiar Children, the author uses old photographs to create a story that makes one believe in the spooky and magical nature of the subjects captured within the photographs.

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Then my eyes were caught by the images of the reflections and I remembered the plot of CLAMP's manga Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, where the protagonists travel through dimensions using mirrors. That stemmed memories of Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician's Nephew (Where there is a forest with ponds and each pond is a gateway to another world).
So what I have in mind is an environment of a multiverse. A region where all dimensions collide. And where everything's true nature is reflected but not seen by the naked eye.

I wanted to show a collection of dimensions and use familiar objects to represent them. Imagine a room filled with birdcages, where each birdcage contains a different universe.

Other objects I thought of using were light bulbs. This reminds me of The Hall of Prophecies in The Department of Mysteries in The Ministry of Magic from Harry Potter. The inspiration for this was the photograph by Jeff Wall with the ceiling filled with light bulbs

Figure 3: Photograph by Jeff Wall

Figure 4: The Hall of Prophecies

Figure 5: Visual Inspiration image: Light Bulbs

 All this would be in a room that one could enter. Like a walk in closet where you could pick a new dimension every day.





Here are the images that have sparked the sense of The Uncanny in my thought processes.

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Figure 12 Bruce Munro's Field of Light at The Holbourne Museum in Bath

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 Figure 20 is a picture of a boat that was parked on the river that I can see outside my window. I put it with the 'influence images' because the very reflection of the boat, made me look at it as a Pod Racer from The Star Wars Saga. That's when I began to think about how a reflection can make the 'real' object look different.

Figures 16, 17 and 18  also have a strange hold on me. I got the idea of putting disks together. Like a short stack or a pile of onion rings. Each disk is a dimension and there are bridges connecting these worlds together.
These piles would be placed in such a way that they look like sky scrapers in a city. Their reflection resembles the worlds that they hold.