The goal of this course was to analyze a visual communication design, apply empirical methods to quantify visual information, and ultimately visually communicate the main insight by creating an artwork with P5.js, a tool for creative coding.
I chose to analyze a distorted Mona Lisa created by photojournalist Arthur Welling (Weegee) in the late 1950s. He decided to estrange Mona Lisa because he felt that the public had made her unnecessarily untouchable, while still holding various prejudices about her. In today's globalized and digitized world, I believe this untouchability has vanished forever. By empirical experiments I found that viewers are more likely to rely on their preconceived notions about a celebrity's nature, rather than allowing the distortion itself to speak.
Therefore, I created an interactive artwork featuring different celebrities in a consistently distorted Mona Lisa state. In this deliberately confusing and absurd merge of persons and personalities, I challenge viewers to reflect on the interplay between their thoughts, feelings, and visual perception when interpreting personalities.
This project is a result of the Industrial Design Engineering master course 'Visual Communication Design' - awarded with a 9/10
