You probably already noticed our fascination with masks. Masks are a reoccurring theme in our creative expressions and they have so many meanings and representations. With masks we are able to show an emotion, hide our true face, or detach from our surrounding, it's open to personal interpretations.
In our creations we love playing around, expressing our never-ending research about life and sweet corresponding subjects. During this research, we stumbled upon an interesting connection between rainbows, frequencies and emotions, so we wanted to explore it in our art and came up with this :
In this painting we experimented with a slight color gradient and facial expressions and felt an appropriate title for this would be : The Spectrum of Emotions. After we had done some more research we realized in order to convey it more accurately, to have the gradient starting from red to green and then to purple, apparently there's a specific sequence of color gradient that corresponds with an ascending vibration. A gradient going from red through green to purple is representing an emotional rhythmic transition 🥁 :
Red being the lowest vibration (around 430 hertz) then orange (500 hertz), yellow (580 hertz), green (550 hertz), light blue and purple (670-790 THz) being the highest vibration. In our research we enjoyed this sensation of synesthesia (mix of the senses) of all the colors mixing with sound vibration and states of emotions to create a full prism 🌈 . After a lil more research we realized it also corresponds with the 7 Chakras system.
Not long after, we participated in the 2020 Vancouver Mural Festival and got a wall that was mostly wide. This was the perfect opportunity to continue our color + sound + emotion research, so we decided to paint some big frontal masks in a gradient. Basically, we wanted to portray the spectrum of emotion with masks showing different emotions and spreading them side by side split from the center.
We sure wanted these masks to feel colossal, each mask had to be humanoid sized to achieve this ‘colossal’ effect, but there was not enough room to portray the entire gradient unfortunately. This time the gradient would start from red, orange, yellow, and will finish with green.
As the cherry on top, we added an element in the center, an androgynous being of pure white energy. While we were painting it, someone asked us if the figure in the middle is a boy or a girl, and well... we said it’s right in the middle 😅.
The best part about painting this mural was the lovely neighborhood dogs who came to visit us during their walkie.
it really felt like this painting deserves to move (almost) on it’s own, so for the first time in a festival we added Augmented Reality (AR). It was clear to us how it would be moving, revealing the pure energy as the core of these masks. After creating and testing the AR experience in our secret lab (at home) and only after completing it, we traveled again to the River District location to test out the experience.
Seeing our mural move (with a lil help from our cellular 'buddies') has sparked some fresh inspiration. You can try it out here.
We felt a calling to do more AR experiences as we later got accepted to Vancouver's AR festival - Winter Arts 2021.
After a brainstorm chat with the festival creators, we chose to continue exploring this concept with yet another secret ingredient - Sound! The organizers setup a tech guy to helpout with the technical side of things, including use of sound and interactive coding.
This time we wanted to use a creepy mask from our piece 'Possessions'.
After some retouching and redesigning we created the KEYMASTER, an AR sound experience that's also interactive! It's our sweetest wish to have our audience interacting with our characters. Even though we had to include cellphones for the full experience, we anticipate that we'll eventually be able to create a full on Extra Crunchy scenario with characters props and background. not sure when or how but we know we must go for it...
The Key Master allows the user to experience the 7 different states on consciousness as portrayed in a ravishing prism. This time we used the masks in our crunchy gradient from red through green and finally to purple, the highest vibration. This was our chance to portray the full gradient without using the excuse of 'no room for all the masks' haha. Each mask visually portraying a frequency, therefore a corresponding emotion, color and sound.
This experiences will be available soon.
We can't wait to see what more will unfold with these characters, we find this research fascinating to do.
