As if looking through a misty rearview mirror while maneuvering straight ahead, the Situationist Drawing Device reverses your perception, guiding you through an entirely different experience over what once could have been familiar ground. Worn like a backpack with the addition of an optical refractor up front, this navigational costume makes a spectacle of the relationship between architecture, technology and the body.Designed by Ji Soo Han and Paul Ornsby, the project’s concept echoes the ideology of the Situationist International(SI), a group of Marxist intellectual revolutionaries founded in the mid-20th century.Riding on the SI’s manifesto, which pursues the critical analysis of everyday life in order to reach true desires with calculated intention, the Situationist Drawing Device reconceptualizes perception, renders critical alertness, and manifests the results of intended movement in concrete form.
Han explains that it was “developed as a desire to extend the capacity of the body to act in the world. It is an extension to our body, we wear it to use the equipment, we navigate through space to experience a new perception of the environment. In connecting various parts of the body and operating by way of mirrors, the device records a journey taken in an altered state of perception through drawing.”When wearing the device, your left and right eye vision become reversed. So with each eye receiving different images, the perspective naturally blends into one, ever so slightly alternating and fading from one side to the other.And to record this reorientation, the device actually draws the experience for you. A seismological rendering of this sight-switched journey, the Situationist Drawing Device concludes with “a choreographic notation of vision and movement [that] is interpreted from the markings on the drawing board.”Check out more photos and design layouts from Han’s website here.[Photos/Film: Ji Soo Han]
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