Malena is an interactive installation trying present the struggle of women in the contemporary society with ridiculous expectation and stereotypes.
Simone de Beauvoir said "one is not born a woman, but becomes one", implicating that society’s ways of seeing women and expectations. Women are defined, labeled, and those labels are limiting the possibilities of women. We know there are labels, and we tried our best to remove them, but it seems those labels are not that easy to be removed.
In my final project I will make an interactive art installation called Malèna. Malèna is coming from a famous film called Malèna, and it tells a story in Italy about a beautiful woman called Malèna being judged, discriminated and insulted by all of the people in the town just because she is prettier than other women in the town. This film shows the malignity and prejudice of society to a helpless woman. I want to make a installation that shows the labels that the society puts on women, actually, any girl is Malèna to some degree. So I named my project Malèna.
This idea comes from a video called “Be a Lady, They Said”. The video is about the labels that be put on women: the society always tells women who they should be and should not be, what they should do and what they should say. The whole society tells girls and women tons of shoulds and shouldnots. Those words are lables to women and also they like chains that limits women. So the idea of my project is to make people be aware of those labels and even help women liberate those from those labels.
My installation will be two parts. One part is the woman figure and the other is thelabels. I’m going to use a mannequin to represent the women figure. Simultaneously, I will put on some very feminine clothes on the mannequin. There will be a lot of very famine elements on it. Also there will be real labels on it. The label part will be a screen. The screen will shows sentences and words to show the content on the labels. The words and sentences will keep popping up to the screen, also there will be audio keep playing, saying the same thing on the screen.
The interaction for the user is the user can take off the lable from the mannequin, and the certain words and sentenses on the screen will disapear. This shows the revolt of the women, you can choose to fight back those labels, you can take them off. And if the user take off all the labels, the words and sentences on the screen will all disappear. The labels on the mannequin is off, the words and sentences on the screen will be gone too. But after a few seconds, all the text on the screen will back. The effect will be the words all fade in. I want to show that, it is indeed there are so many labels to women and some women do try their best to fight with these labels. The the reality is, no matter how hard you try to take off the labels, the labels from society is not that easy to get rid of. At some point, they will come back.
To realise these effects, I will use light sensor and hard black paper. I will use light sensor to sense if the labels are off or not. I have alreay tried different values of resistance and tested the return value of the circuit. I think this is the way that could work.
This project is not a game device that because the research that I did changed my mind. Interaction is about conversation, it is the dialogue between user and the machine. Indeed, design a game in this case can bring the biggest iteractivity, however, though the conversation is important, the meaning behind the conversation is important as well. I think what the designer want to express through the project is as important as the interaction itself, even more important. So, this time, I didn’t consider the interaction first, I found a topic that I like first, and then try to create an interactive experience based on that.
In my project, it seems just the interaction between the user and the machine. But, the label and the mannequin is the metaphor of real life. So the interaction is also the interaction between society and people in it. How people live in a society and the situation of women in the real life. I think that it also important.
