As a first-year Design and Technology student, I have dedicated a large portion of my semester to exploring embodied spiritual practices, particularly ritual masking traditions. For centuries, spiritual masking rituals have allowed humans to psychically access and channel energies larger than ourselves — to make these forces physical and reduce their scale so that we can better perceive, understand, and contend with them.
As an artist and creative technologist, I am interested in exploring how ritual masks can help us inhabit and understand both positive and negative forces; to symbolically direct that which is usually outside our control. I'm also interested in how I might "remix" this traditional method of personification for challenges that rule our new age. With my masks, I want to ask questions about what Americans and the western world put our faith into; what values and ideals do we worship? What forces, ambiguities, and disruptions make us afraid? And how might those entities look if they were made visible, wearable, and human-scaled?
For my Computational Craft final project, I propose making a unique mask for the class that uses soft circuits, LED lights, shape memory alloys, and conductive materials to explore the idea of persuasion, influence, and diplomacy — soft power.
Before creating my physical mask, I will be using machine learning to help me "co-design" the final look and feel of my mask. By incorporating algorithmic technologies to create digital forms and then using those forms to inspire material work, I hope to continue to explore and extend the class conversation we’ve been having around computation and craft, digital and physical materials, old technology and new.
I have already generated hundreds of soft power-inspired mask designs using StyleGAN2, a style-based generator architecture accessed through RunwayML. After feeding the algorithm hundreds of images that I associate with soft power, diplomacy, persuasion, and influence, as well as images of blank masks, I got results that I could use to inform the final design of my mask.
A selection of images is below:
After sorting the images and considering how they might lend themselves to a final mask design, I decided to move forward with the specific image below. I was excited by the way that the smile extended nearly all the way around the face, giving it an eery ambiguity that, to me, hinted at the way soft power can be used to push both positive and negative agendas.
I thought that, given the shape and design of this mask, it would be interesting to incorporate shape memory alloys to open the smile, giving the design more drama and further highlighting the obsequious nature of soft power. The eyes will also have LED lights embedded in them to slowly glow as the smile deepens. Users will push a small, hidden button inside the mask while they are wearing it to create the full effect for their audiences.
Materials for the final mask will include:
I will create a slide deck tutorial to walk audiences through my project step-by-step, It will include these machine learning images, diagrams, circuitry, and images to showcase how I built the mask out of scrap materials, foam and cloth.
I will be using a circuit that uses multiple flexinol elements to pull the cloth back along the smile.
