This is a web-based art piece exploring the sense of intimacy through hand-touching. Instead of using traditional ways to tell the story in a single video format, I want to put it in a different display mode. In this website, you can't speed up or jump to the end of the story by dragging the progress bar, you only have two choices, watch it till the end and see everything, or leaves at halfway getting something.
http://www.studyofintimacy.tk/
Intimacy levels & Hand interaction
In human interaction, body language can reveal many things. Different levels of intimacy determine what kinds of body language you should perform. For someone that is closer to you, you may tend to have more physical contact. I am interested in how intimacy levels affect the hands' interaction. My null hypothesis for the experiment is the closer the relationship, the tighter the hands will be.
Research
I further my research by experimenting. I used myself as the subject and chose three groups of people that were in different intimacy levels with me.
The first group (Confidante) includes people who are closest to me like my best friend and my lover. We can share secrets and talk about things that are very private.
The second group(Good friend) includes people that are relatively close to me, like my classmate that I will chat with during breaks or friends that sometimes will hang out together, we will share some aspects of our lives, but we won't go too deep into each other's personal lives.
The third group(Acquaintance) includes people that I know, but we never share our lives, all we do are say hellos.
The instruction for different groups was the same, which was to interact with my hands using theirs. I told them that there was a camera recording and I wanted to use the video as footage of my art piece.
I first experiment with a normal camera. However, I can't really tell the difference because everything is happening so fast. So I decided to use a slow-motion camera instead of a normal one. In this way, I can better observe the detailed behavior.
Documentation
Confidante
Good Friend
Acquaintance
Final Outcome
Based on the research, I build my piece on Brackets first, then packed the whole website and host on Github. I used typed.js for the typing effects.
I create an interactive website where the audience can check on different slow-motion videos that I captured. I chose different sentences from Rabindranath Tagore's poems and use them to describe the different intimacy levels. The audience will be able to click on different sentences to see different full-length slow-motion video.
Audience can preview all the hand holding moments in the first stage.
Audience will be able to click on different poems to see each videos.
