PHOBIA GALLERY
INTERACTIVE ART
Phobia Gallery is a conceptual interactive art piece designed by a team of 4 students using Procreate, Adobe Illustrator, Google Docs, and Elementor in May 2020. The goal is to encourage exploration within the stigma of phobias and build sympathy towards people with phobias.
Concept
Phobia is a topic that people do not pay enough attention to. There are a lot of people with extreme irrational fears of certain subjects, but others tend to detach and shrug off the phobias they do not relate to. Therefore, my teammates and I decided to create this installation to challenge individuals’ opinions, to encourage exploration within the stigma of phobias, and to create an understanding of irrational fear.
Moving Online
During the preparation for the installation, the project was forced to change direction due to the arrival of COVID-19. We returned the materials we had purchased for building the physical models and proposed an online adaptation of our original idea.
Online Gallery
We created a webpage that is dedicated to our installation. Each of us from the team presented a phobia that we have in an art form we were familiar with. There was also a fifth mystery box. At the first glance, the viewer is welcomed with a potential physical arrangement of the Phobia Gallery.
Right below the gallery arrangement on the page, 5 phobia boxes are presented and available to be opened.
Each of the first 4 boxes will lead the viewer to a new window displaying the box with an object relating to the phobia, as well as a QR code that discloses how the object makes the creator of the box feel in an art form of the creator’s choosing.
The 5th box will only have a QR code that leads to a page where anyone can write or upload photos. It provides the viewer a platform to share freely about their own phobia and/or how it makes them feel in a way they are comfortable with.
Back to the front page, there is a crafting process below the 5 boxes explaining how we would have created the physical installation for any viewer interested.
Takeaways
Although it is unfortunate that we could not present our artwork in a physical form, provide a platform for people to share their experience with each other, and better raise awareness of phobias, we were pleased with how we adapted to the situation and what we accomplished in such a short time. Good communication and fair distribution of the workload were the keys to the achievement.