The Wishing Tree

In this project, my team was tasked to develop a 'kit of parts' which gives an audience the freedom to communicate a message of their own choosing. The message that my team ultimately wanted to communicate was the shattered snapshots of the thoughts and emotions of an anonymous crowd that inhabits a specific time and space. We chose the Sam Fox School Art, Design, and Architecture Students as our crowd, a week before finals where stress levels were high as our specific time, and Studios/Etta’s (The café at Sam Fox) as our space. We created a collection box where students were asked to answer a question, 'What are you bored of?' or 'What would you hate to lose?'. Once they had thought of this response they wrote it down on a piece of paper colored according to the question, 'Do you feel positive, neutral, or negative emotions at this very moment?'. Then they placed their answer in a slot that corresponded to their answer to the question, 'How strongly do you feel this way from a scale of one (mildly) to nine (passionately)?'.

After the responses were recorded onto a spreadsheet I created laser-cut files of the responses that would be cut into colored plexiglass corresponding to whether or not the participants felt positive, neutral, or negative when they wrote their responses. I first divided the plexiglass into multiple shard-like pieces and placed a single response on each shard. I then facilitated the laser cutting by placing the illustrator file into AutoCAD and then laser-cutting all 161 responses. After the pieces were cut our team placed each piece on a fishing line corresponding to how strongly the participant was feeling when they recorded their response. We then hung the fishing lines up in a space on campus and watched as students and professors walked by and interacted with the installation.  

Process Documentation

Collection Method 

Laser Cut Files