The object I chose for this project was an old phone, the Nokia N97, which still worked but had parts of it that were falling to pieces such as the plastic frame and the cover that I used for it.
I wanted to capture the idea of how the phone never really changed, but it was my perception of the phone that changed. The phone stays the same, and there were no upgrades or downgrades made to the phone when I made the decision to change my phone to a newer and better one. However, the way I looked at my phone change because it was no longer the latest phone and in a way, even though its hardware remained the same, how I viewed the phone has changed because my impression of it is now imperfect and tainted by the fact that a newer, better phone is out there waiting for me. I wanted to capture this idea with my project.
Another aspect I wanted to capture was the age and wear-and-tear of the phone. I decided that my project should not be too well constructed or too refined because it otherwise wouldn’t be a very accurate representation of the phone. Initially i reinforced the edges of the wooden box with corner supports to ensure that the piece could stand firmly, but I realised that it was quite counter-intuitive to my desire to accurately portray the idea behind this project. The phone was in shambles, and therefore the project should too.
Viewing the project from a certain angle would allow you to see a perfect phone case if you moved around enough, yet these phone cases seem broken up when viewed from different angles. This was a play at perspective from me, as I wanted the audience to realise that the way you view your old phone will always be imperfect unless you can bring yourself to look at it from a different angle. The phone did nothing wrong, and the phone never really changed, and if you want for it to be perfect again, you could. This was the concept behind my piece; that sometimes, forced perspective is what makes an object seem perfect.
The wooden box was held together by contact adhesive, and could wobble without the entire project falling apart if you wanted to wobble it. This was to capture the rickety frame that was falling apart on my phone. The body that holds together the concept that I want to express should be as rickety as the case that holds together the contents of my phone, and hence I left the project this way instead of ensuring that the frame was completely solid and rigid.
Overall, I quite enjoyed this project due to the amount of thought that had to go into it. The thought process behind it truly was enlightening to me and I’ve learned newer ways to see things and portray what I feel about these things through art.