Reflective Properties

Location

New Orleans

Date

2014

Investigating Human Relationships & Communications Across Space & Technology

Landscape Architecture concerns itself with what connects us: the earth beneath our feet. However, with the ubiquitous use of digital technologies, how can our physical, earthly landscapes interface with our ever-evolving digital landscapes?

It is almost impossible to define what a landscape is as the scale of “landscape” shifts between local to regional constantly as each landscape project defines a different, “landscape” or “space” to construct or manipulate. As humans, we experience all these different landscapes, these environments, constantly. Our senses allow us to register the world and thus these landscapes in infinitely different ways. It’s common knowledge that we all experience the five senses differently, our perceptions shape our reality and to be a landscape architect, a designer, means to actively participate in designing that sensory experience through which we can sense light, touch, smell, color, and make sense of the world around us. In Reflective Properties, Diane Jones Allen constructs an interactive installation meant for analyzing the multiplicity of landscape and our perceptions of them. Through the use of projection, cameras, and mirrors, a complex sensory experience is created to facilitate the contemplation of perception, landscape, the self, and the community’s around us.

Reflective Properties: Investigating Human Relationships & Communications Across Space & Technology.
Diane Jones Allen

This temporary installation was an interactive place for collecting and reflecting on others and the surrounding environment, and not one’s self. It was a mirrored enclosed space adjacent to a shallow pool reflecting users and the environment around them. A maze was contained within the space with contemplation stations were users could sit and reflect on the image before them. A camera behind one of the images in one of the contemplation stations projected the seated user’s image onto the monitor that was located on the outside of the structure adjacent to the pool. The concept was that one’s image is projected to the public, which is common in the Instagram, selfie, social media world we live in today, but the user could not participate in the viewing. Only in the reflective pool area could users gather with others and look at an image of someone else. The only way they could see themselves is in the mirrored structure, and this reflection they could not control, for it included the reflection of everyone else standing before it and the surrounding environment.

Capturing Reflections: Visitors capturing the moment of reflection as the installation's wall of mirrors catch their attention.
Diane Jones Allen

An Interactive Display: By making the installation interactive an element of engagement, or play, becomes crucial to how visitors understand the installation.
Diane Jones Allen

Reflective Properties: Investigating Human Relationships & Communications Across Space & Technology. An enclosed space for contemplation, the user's image would be projected outside of the structure into the adjacent pool
Diane Jones Allen