Distortion — 2/7

Written on October 23, 2020

Concept

My concept for today is about distortion. How do perspectives getting shifted depending on the angle we look at them? Especially in the beginning of the pandemic, a discussion started if the numbers of infections are trustworthy or not. Different possibilities on how to look at the calculations gave different outcomes.

Process

I wanted to use the metaphor of a prism and how it distorts the view of the truth. Being super fascinated by how this website manages to subtly changes the perspective of the truck when scrolling. It adds this natural feeling of a 3D object. Wanting to understand three.js, I took this opportunity to go a little bit deeper into this field, trying to understand how it can be used. I started with a gray cube to get the principle of rotation right. It was a little try-and-error to find the right parameters, so it somehow feels natural.

After that, I focussed on the refraction, the element that displays the distortion of the message. I played around a lot to find the right refraction from a code perspective.

I created a background, initially saying “what is the truth?” to be distorted by the prism, however, the focus then only lied onto the middle, the word “the” which does not seem promoting the purpose. Thus, I decided to only use the word “truth” in the center. The resulting shadows and sometimes visible and sometimes not visible word support, in my opinion, in the ambiguity of what is told to us by the media quite well.

Outcome

I used the font redaction as I think it underlines the message of hiding information but also displaying it, leaving the reader in the unclear if it is actually the truth or not. You can find the code for this prism here.