Michelle It's a Sign - mhernandez688/MIchelle-Hernandez GitHub Wiki

It’s a Sign.

The idea for “It’s a Sign” came from from a few themes I have been exploring in my artwork: ambiguity in the context of probabilistic beliefs, variable realities, VUCA, and the ways we cope or escape from the unknown aspects of our day to day lives, especially when we think about our futures. (V = Volatility. The nature and dynamics of change, and the nature and speed of change forces and change catalysts U = Uncertainty. The lack of predictability, the prospects for surprise, and the sense of awareness and understanding of issues and events C = Complexity. The multiplex of forces, the confounding of issues, no cause-and-effect chain and confusion that surrounds organization A = Ambiguity. The haziness of reality, the potential for misreads, and the mixed meanings of conditions; cause-and-effect confusion(thanks Wikipedia.))

I often think of the movie “Big.” Tom Hank’s character (still a boy) goes to Play Land and makes a wish on a Zoltar-like Fortune Teller arcade game “to be big,” and his wish magically comes true. The movie is actually the strangely perfect formula for a fantasy driven delusional reality but the momentary trust and desire instilled in the machine before the possibility of the wish’s fulfillment existed as reality is what I am interested in. Belief always seems to be in conversation with imagination and interpretation. This interactive device asks participants to use their touch to trigger the dispenser in order to retrieve a message. In this line of thinking, the message is meant to make its way to each particular participant to clarify any ambiguity the participant sees most fit to associate it with, like you would with any fortune.

This version of the fortune teller is very preliminary. It feels like it’s the first draft in what will be a much longer term project. I find that the effect of the thermal printer and the random selection of the fortunes to be most exciting. I am having problems making a solid connection to the capacitive sensor. I initially wanted the shape of a hand cutout in copper to be the physical switch to the sensor, then i decided i wanted to use a "lucky" because it made more sense to the concept to have a symbolic idol. I couldn’t get either one to work well. Given more time I feel like I may explore using other types of sensors to interact with the printer; maybe open up the dispensing mechanism to movement or light in other iterations. I wanted this version to be portable, so the shoe box casing worked well to work out the design without feeling monetarily strapped if anything went wrong. Since the design is also a prototype, the materials chosen don’t have much of a personality but are being used while i get a better grip on the device’s functions. I still, in this case, need to make a stable physical connection from the capacitive sensor to the printer.

This is a mess of fortunes on my table

this is the box when i was trying to get the penny to work

this was the one time i got it working