Project Overview

The aim was simple — to examine the way visual information is processed by us mere humanoids. Memory, descriptive skills and illustration were all put to the test as we worked our way through over 150 participants.

To keep our experiments private from the prying eyes of the public we housed each test subject in an isolation hippo designed by ABGC Architects.

To keep things interesting we carried out 3 types of experiment:

Talk/Talk
Talk/Talk involved us showing Subject #01 an illustration, asking them to examine it for 60 seconds and then describe it back to camera from memory. Subject #02 then watches this description on a playback monitor and in turn recounts it back to camera. This process is repeated over 15 times with our final subject drawing the final description on camera. We then compare the first and last illustrations and watch in amazement at how much it has changed. Some people might call this Chinese Whispers, but not us. We’ve never heard of Chinese Whispers.

Look /Draw
Look/Draw involved us showing Subject #01 an illustration and asking them to redraw it from memory. Subject #02 is then shown Subject #01’s illustration and asked to redraw it again from memory. This process is repeated over 15 times after which we chart the how the illustration changed from subject to subject and who brought us to muddy waters.

Talk/Draw
Talk/Draw involved us showing Subject #01 an illustration and asking them to describe it to camera. Subject #02 then watches this description on a playback monitor and is asked to illustrate what they hear. Our third subject is then asked to describe this new illustration to camera which our 4th subject then illustrates. Sounds complicated but we promise it’s AOK. This process is then repeated over 15 times after which we compare where we started, where we finished and who got us lost.

With special thanks to all at Offset and ABGC Architects.

www.iloveoffset.com​
www.abgc.ie