Dimensional Destinations
Designed for the lights, music, and arts festival "Buzzfest" held in Beecave, Texas. This project was a collaboration with two other partners and created through the course, In-field Installations at the University of Texas at Austin. We designed mesmerizing, alien themed infinity mirror dioramas to be displayed at the event. Using several techniques and craftsmanship, we created 6 unique infinity mirror boxes for guests to admire.
During my Junior year at UT, I was in a semester-long group project where he had to brainstorm, fabricate, and display a creative installation for an upcoming music and technology festival in the Austin area. After pitching an idea and finding group mates with similar concepts and routes for our ideas we began to form a final pitch and design that we would spend the next 12 weeks working on in order to meet the deadline.
Our final design was essentially an illusion based installation with 6 different boxes that displayed infinite rooms within the box, sort of like a diorama that would keep repeating. This effect was created using mirrors and lights that would continue to reflect on and on, making the inside of the box have a seamless space that would forever continue.
Originally, when we began brainstorming we knew we wanted to incorporate these infinity mirrors in some way for our installation, but we just weren't sure what we could accomplish. Our ideas started out quite large, thinking about how we could build a giant immersive experience for guests to walk through and see reflections of themselves. However, we quickly realized that this wasn't going to be possible with our short timespan, lack of fabrication experience, and quite a small budget. We wanted to make sure we could still provide our piece and meet the requirements for the assignment, but also continue our mirror concept on a much smaller, and more reasonable scale.
Once we were all on board with the infinity mirror concept we really put a lot of effort into researching and studying exactly what separates a good visual experience vs a more lackluster one. The use of lights, creating seamless borders, and interesting patterns were all concepts that we had to learn about in order to create a successful fabrication of our project. We also took some time to agree on what our theme would be for each box design, considering the three of us would each be creating two boxes. We all had cool ideas for alien related boxes, so we stuck with that and everyone created visually interesting and unique rooms that could share this unifying theme. Throughout the process, our group collectively had a strong vision for what we wanted to create and I believe that our final product was exactly what we were aiming for when beginning this project.
​For this project, our group was given a budget to order supplies in order to make our final designs to present. I believe that we utilized this to the best of our abilities, as well as sourcing resources that we already had between the three of us. There was some slight difficulty with finding the correct type of mirrors for the boxes, considering they needed to be both one way, and normal reflecting mirrors, but ultimately we found just the right ones for the job. Once we decided on our alien theme, we began researching all over the Austin area for stores that would be selling little knick knacks and toys we could use to make our individual ideas come to life. For the boxes themselves, as well as the shelves they would sit in, we used spray paint that my groupmate, Brian had. He had quite a large collection with some very high quality cans and cool colors that helped our design look more polished and professional.
We each designed 2 boxes for a total of 6 displays. Below are the two dioramas that I designed and fabricated.
After looking through our collection of junk that we were going to use for our dioramas, the golden statue really stood out to me and I knew that I had to make a box that revolved around it. I spent a lot of time moving around and experiementing with different designs and layouts, but ultimately decided that simple and symmetric was the most satisfying approach. I still had to incorporate our alien theme, so I cut this alien bouncy ball in half to add to the walls which look like spectators of the statue, I also added a bunch of googly eyes all along the walls which would repeat infinitely and add more substance to what was a simple box.
My second box I wanted to have something more dynamic. After several playtests with the LED strips that we bought, I discovered the setting for color cycling and was fascinated by the way it would visually change the color of objects as they absorbed the different hues. Inspired by the original Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope I wanted to make an alien trash compactor room. So with whatever leftover trinkets we had lying around I placed them into my box and created a unique scene. The varying lights allowed for a fun viewing, as you could watch the colors of all the items change with the rotating color palette of the LEDs.
Our project may have had some bumpy times throughout the process, with our group being a bit unaware of the scope of our project in the beginning. I believe that the project was a huge success still, and every single group member was very contributing and helpful in bringing our vision to life. Through good communication, some decent planning, and strong creativity we were able to display our Dimensional Destinations for hundreds of visitors to see at the festival. Overall, I was very satisfied with our results and learned a lot from the process that we worked through.
Video Walkthrough