Sarwesh Shah

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Fabric of Truth

In the pursuit of truth, one often gets exposed to their own biases and prejudices. This is especially true in today’s time when everyone of us is bombarded with information constantly through our online news and WhatsApp forwards. The identification and verification of true news from fake one is a serious issue that concerns everyone of us. For the technologically unaware population, this issue takes new forms of evil. The blind belief in the information from the internet and an absence of critical reasoning establishes a trust ‘network’ that is very difficult to break and open for exploitations. Such exploitations, whether for political or monitory gain, lead to rampant unrest and spoil the underlying fabric of our society. Fabric of Truth aims to invoke a sense of responsibility and awareness among the audience by making them realise that in today’s world ‘seeing is not believing’.

Fabric of Truth lets its audience uncover various interpretations and meanings of truth, both in its absolute and contemporary forms. It also critiques those who use their ‘words of truth’ to mould the innocent mind of masses.


PROCESS

The process involved the construction of a semi-transparent screen to project our interaction on, writing the program for the interaction and mapping the skewed output on the screen. The tools used by us was Processing 3 and Kinect2 for programming and depth sensing and MadMapper for projection mapping.

Our interaction depended critically on the tension of the screen and hence we had to hang weights (metal poles along a groove) at the bottom of the screen. This also ensured a uniformity in the force that was applied on the screen. Please find pictures below.

We highly recommend MadMapper for projection mapping related projects. We initially went for the free version of vpt8 on Mac and soon realised that the software was buggy and had a shitty interface. Compared to that a rental version of MadMapper for 1month comes for around ₹3000 (~43 dollars) and is totally worth using and learning.

INTERACTION

The fabric presented with an excellent opportunity to physically warp the projection surface and interact with it in a more tactile way. The screen served as a border through which physical things could not pass but also served as a corridor for the light to fall and express itself to the onlookers. The second image is the final interaction. I admit its not very pretty and needs more design interventions.

The technical implementation of this project are discussed here.
Special thanks to Ajay Wagela, Dr Jignesh Khakhar.