Sentimentality

Inspiration

The inspiration for Sentimentality came from thinking about how to tangibility represent the uniqueness and complexity of one's own emotions. Parallelly, as someone that has been solving and collecting rubik's cubes for a long time, I was inspired to create this piece.

What it does

Sentimentality is built upon the foundation of the 6 basic emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Surprise, and Disgust. Each face of the rubik's cube (and each color) represented one of these emotions. Overlayed on each color is a radially symmetric abstract art that further depicts the emotion. The "solved" state represented an ideal, perfectly balanced, state of mind. While you may try to reach the solved state, this is not the purpose of Sentimentality. On the contrary, it is encouraged to scramble the cube until it "feels right" and becomes a true representation of your state of mind - a chaotic yet coherent mix between various emotions. Unbalanced, yet meaningful. Your final "scrambled" state of sentimentality is a whole new work of art: one that represents your true self. One that you created. The goal of Sentimentality is to educate the audience on self reflection about mental health - and more specifically understanding our true self rather than trying to reach some "ideal" mindset.

How we built it

First, the art was drawn using procreate. Each piece was designed to be radially symmetric, and connect with all other pieces to create a cohesive art form when the cube is scrambled.

Joy was themed around sunshine and flowers. Sadness was themed around continuity and monotony. Fear was themed around monsters and mystery. Anger was themed around violence and consequences. Surprise was themed around exclamation and confetti. Disgust was themed around slime and ick.

Next, 2x2x2 blocks were cut and sanded. Various strengths of magnets were fixed inside the block, focusing on polarity. Once the skeleton of the cube was assembled. It was painted by hand and the art was engraved using a laser cutter onto each face. Finally, a simple stand was create.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was aligning the magnets and their polarity. This took over 8 hours to complete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our overall concept. We believe it is educational, serving as a reflection tool for the audience to contemplate their true emotions.

Built With

• lasercutting
• procreate
• woodworking