PROJECT #04 EXQUISITE CORPSE

CURVY LADY IN A BATHSUIT

Description

Brief: Design a human or non-human figure that has a head, an upper-body, and a lower-body drawn by different teammates.

Concept: This is Curvy Lady, a woman born out of the deep body dysmorphia that exists. They carry baldness, hairness, abnormal curves, legs that are too muscular, hairy face and every other feature labelled ugly by the wickedness in our minds.

Process and Reflections

Step 01 Get Drawings

Story of the Head [Aditi] : The Life of Mrs D'Moochi: Mrs D’Moochi was born after a frustratingly condescending conversation about what a beautiful Indian woman should look like. So while she has ‘traditionally’ Indian characteristics like the ‘bindi’ or the ‘nose ring’, she also has ‘traditionally’ masculine features like a moustache and she carries them with confidence!

Story of the Legs [Kaijie] : The story of an anonymous body: he used to love bodybuilding. he loves to go to gym almost everyday and he loves all kinds of sports. He likes watching body building videos and showing off his body in competitions. He was used as models for students to understand human body compositions. No one remembers his face or name even till his final death because everyone is only looking at his body.

Story of the Body [Reshma - self] : This corpse rejects being a sum of our curves and celebrates all its deformations. It is happy with the way its body changes over time. It does not believe in youth and aging, but in peace and mindfulness. It does not care about social rejection. This corpse is the confident soul we can only hope to be.

Step 02 Drawing

All the stories naturally inclined towards our perceptions and confidences surrounding our bodies, and I wanted the final corpse to carry the same.

I pieced all the drawings together on Figma to plan how to interpret the image.

Step 03 Coding

The hair made by Aditi looked really funky, and a lot of fun to draw by hand. At the same time, I was thinking of ways to make the curvy lady a more interactive experience. Drawing from a symmetry sketch that I had made in class, I thought it would a lot of fun to make users draw the hair instead (not just on the head, but anywhere, and thereby allow them to participate in the idea of baldness vs hairiness).

Challenges

I ran into a technical challenge that got me into how the draw() function in p5 really works

Placing background in setup() draws the background only once, so anything you draw on top of that in every loop of the draw function will remain on screen. Placing background inside draw(), draws the background over and over, essentially wiping what draw() had drawn in the previous iteration and drawing again.

Here I had to solve the unique challenge of maintaining both environments - one where the drawing persists - for the hair, and one where the drawing changes every loop, for the curvy body. It is interesting how this duality correlates with the duality in the narrative this code sketch is trying to weave - conforming to society and what others want us to look like (corresponding to the hair), and feeling comfortable in what we look like for ourselves (corresponding more to the erratic body curves).

I figured out how to make polygons and curved vectors but realised how tedious the process is. It took so much time. Later I learnt that there are automatic ways to do this online. In any case, it was a great way to understand how vectors are created.

Credits

This project used the typeface Nanum Gothic Coding by Sandoll licensed under Open Font License