“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”
- Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

The quote by Margaret Hungerford is true, but in society today it does not apply if you want to be considered beautiful. The main part is the first impression one makes is usually with the appearance. Though the person’s personality or kindness makes them beautiful the people that first meet an average person they don’t find them beautiful. If a person is judged as beautiful on the outside, it does not mean they are beautiful on the inside. Despite the way the models and celebrities look on magazines and in public, it is just make up and air brushing. The reality is the celebrities are just like anyone else when they do not put on the make-up. Many get surgeries to make them look younger, thinner, and beautiful. In reality they can turn out to look horrible, if you look at Michael Jackson and his plastic surgeries on his nose. The piece is an interactive textile based sculpture. It gives off a nostalgic feeling of blocks and a jigsaw puzzle. The name is Image³, which plays on the fact they are images that are in cubes.

Description:

The project is called Image³. It is a piece that consists of cubes that are made from images collected by few different methods. The piece is mostly a commentary on the way people see others linked to the media’s portrayal of beauty, and plastic surgery. Even though beauty can be defined as things other than the outer appearance. The media makes it seem like that is the only thing that matters and would get you far in life. Many people growing up have a hard time avoiding these striking images of what is beautiful and what people should follow as the trends. It causes many children growing up to hate themselves, try to be thin at any cost, and want to be beautiful. It causes campaigns like Dove’s Real Beauty to exist. It has workshops to try to help teens growing up to be able to get some confidence. Many teens grow up wit very little confidence because they are chubby or not beautiful and shut themselves in and not interact or make friends. I think my piece is very simple to interact with and easy to set up so the people can interact with it in any way they like and not be wrong. The piece can be easily duplicated to be created for another location and can be modified to fit any time period’s beauty standards.

The piece can be interpreted in many different ways. The piece will contain different types of faces and features that can be interchanged. The end result of the face after mix and match will turn the faces to look hideous. It draws on the idea given by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. The monster was created with all different body parts and had features that were considered to be beautiful but turned out very ugly. The truth is that after too many plastic surgery procedures the person would turn to look scary and not human like. There are occasions that they plastic surgeries are justified because of an accident or because of a disease. The people would normally go for a normal look if they were to have it done. The images that can be built had some that look normal. The piece also is a commentary on they way science is being played with because the scientist are playing with the genetic make up of animals and humans. There maybe animal mixed with human hybrids. There are people that try to adjust the DNA make up of the baby before it is born. We see the process has been done to animals with the animals that glow in the dark, cloned animals, and hybrid animals. The people already mixed technology into the humans. There is the University of Toronto professor Steve Mann that lives his life as a cyborg. He had a wearable computer with him at all times. He was one with the technology. There were already the people that mixed with electronics whether it is attached to the body or an extension of the body; it is already done with prosthetic that only currently had an upgrade to use the nerve signals to control them.

Technical:

The piece contains many cubes that are created by origami. The way to collect data is to ask a few people to name some beautiful people and find the information online on charts of beautiful people. A major tool in creating the cubes is using photoshop. It allows me to manipulate the faces so they are all the same size and the facial features are located in the same vicinity. The face will be separated in 9 parts that are equally the same size. The images are printed out on paper and cut out. Then the images are folded to be able to make into the cube. The origami cube consists of 6 squares folded together, so I need to create the images in ratio of 6. They are glued together and are suppose to build faces. I put all the same features in the one cube. The images can be mixed and matched. The paper used is plain white paper but it carries significance towards the piece. The paper is very recyclable and changeable and can be manipulated in any type of way. The people are making the plastic surgeries seem like the same as a piece of paper that can be easily manipulated. The cubes can be stacked but are unstable like the condition of people that are addicted to plastic surgery. The more you stack them up the less stable the structure like the people that need surgery of their own gain. The cubes are 3cm by 3cm and take little space. The piece can be placed in many places and it could bring more copycat pieces.