Liminality
Graduate Graphic Design 1
Prompt: Explore the term “liminality” from your own personal perspective in a print and digital format.
Beginning Ideas: The definition of liminality is a state of transition between one stage and the next, an in-between period, typically marked by uncertainty. I already knew that when Artivive and p5js was introduced to us as tools to explore that I wanted to use them in my final digital output, but wasn’t totally sure what I wanted my printed outcome to be. I started with moodboards detailing my initial ideas about liminality, including liminal spaces like airports and trains, movement, and expressing liminality through photography.
Turn Of Events: After our class discussion about our first ideas, I decided I wanted move forward with expressing liminality through photography. Over Spring Break I was to experiment with different techniques of photography and see what different ethereal-looking effects I could accomplish. I was still unsure about the content of the printed material, but figured I’d nail down the photographic aesthetics I was going for first and let that inform the rest.
After Spring Break, however, there was a wrench thrown in everyone’s plans when the coronavirus became a threat and caused BU to switch to remote learning for the rest of the semester. While there are many things we can do as designers from home, printing big posters is not one of them. So, our project was altered: instead of doing a print and digital component, we were going to stick to digital. We were to use 3 images and use Artivive to create an augmented reality composition for each image. Because I was going to essentially do this anyway, this was a welcome change and didn’t change too much about my course of action. I was still going to use my photography experiments in the layers of the AR, as well as the p5js sketches I was working on. What I needed to figure out was the subject of each image that would ground everything.
I started thinking about dissociation, something that I’ve experienced myself as a result of anxiety. It is defined as a break in how your mind handles information. You may feel disconnected from your thoughts, feelings, memories, and surroundings. It can affect your sense of identity and your perception of time. It can feel as though you are temporarily detached from your immediate surroundings.This seemed like the perfect subject to use to describe a liminal “feeling” that also applied to me personally.
Final Output: I decided that my 3 images would be seemingly normal spaces. I chose 3 pictures I had already taken in the past, given that the situation with the virus meant not being able to go out and take new pictures. These images would represent a normal situation or place, and the AR layers I added would represent the feeling of dissociation, rendering the normal pictures unseeable and covered by this overwhelming feeling that is surreal and detached from the original realities of the images. I used the p5js sketches as a way to convey a “floaty” feeling, an element of instability. I also used After Effects for some of my typography to create movement there as well. In keeping with the idea of using an app to create our final output, I used an app called Crystaliq to manipulate the original images. I gave them a kaleidoscope look that still kept some of the integrity of the original image but also made it seem unfamiliar or unsteady.
These are the final 3 images:
These are the photography elements used:
These are the final AR outputs:
