2020-11-27 / Sunny

 

Brief: Final Major Project 

Partner: Chuyi

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The Final Project

This week, we basically set up the installation. Next we are going to invite our friends to experience the “Womber” device. The first experiencer is a female named Han Huang. When Han first saw our work, she told me that she could probably understand that it was something like a uterus. And then we helped her to get into the device, (it's a pity to get into the device here, because if you add an air passage, it helps the experier to get in better, but because of the space size, we can't do that. So now we have to wait for the experiencer to get into the device and then inflate the device, and the experience is a little bit bad. This is also the point I will improve if I have the opportunity to improve my works in the future. The whole experience lasted about 2 minutes. At the beginning, Han thought it was very interesting. When the color of the lights began to change and the background sound also changed, she put herself into the role and imagined herself to become a baby to experience the change of emotions. She closed her eyes and lay down slowly. Later, she told me that she thought about her boyfriend at that time and wondered if she would face their own practical problems and conflicts if she became pregnant. So what's the point of being pregnant? Is it to carry on the family line or to satisfy the needs of a partner or parent? Because babies have a right to choose when they are born, then how should the gestator face the life that is about to be born?

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The second participant was a man named Hong Ji Hao. When he first saw the device, he had no special thoughts. He entered the device just as we requested. The whole process is about 2 minutes. He was also extremely excited at the beginning, shaking around in the device. Then, as the sound of the light changed, he slowly calmed down and lay in the device. Because he was relatively unfamiliar with the topic of pregnancy before, he just understood that pregnancy is a very hard thing in the mouth of the public, and giving birth to a child will endure the uncomfortable pain of human beings. It is difficult for him to truly understand that pregnancy is actually a matter of two people. This is a matter that requires careful consideration. Coincidentally, he also thought of his girlfriend while experiencing the installation. He said, "At that moment, he felt that he was standing in the perspective of a baby, as if he had an emotional resonance with his parents. This is a magical force that connects three separate individuals."
We made his experience into a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ1QehRcczc

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Feedback

​We got some feedback from the experiencer about the device：

 

1. Women are more likely than men to understand our art installations without explaining them in advance. Because women have more background knowledge about pregnancy, they have more empathy.
 

2. An interesting phenomenon is that both men and women are deeply impressed by the process of growing up out of the womb, similar to childbirth. "It feels a bit like real childbirth... It 's also weird.. "
"As an adult baby, I felt for a moment that I was not ready to come out of my mother's belly..."
 

3. People love the sounds we make of the heart and amniotic fluid, and the experience is much better if the background sounds of life fragments can be made into a continuous and complete story.​

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My Thinking 

It's been a very special experience for me, and I'm very grateful to my partner for coming from her hometown to my city to work with me on this installation. In this process, we kept learning and revising the scheme, and promoted our project with clear division of labor. Only in this way could we finally complete the work to our satisfaction. In the process of finishing the work, it also helped me understand more issues in women's topics, and gave me a deeper understanding that as a designer, in addition to solving practical problems, we can also convey our thoughts and voices through our works. I would also like to thank John, Alaistair and Emily. Although distance learning will face the problems of jet lag and other categories, each teacher did their best to give us the most help and suggestions on the project. Finally, I would like to thank everyone who participated in our project, including the students who proposed various modifications to help us finish this project together.

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