Emma Loewen

Warped Connection

Class of: 2025

Major: Interior Design BFA

Medium: Sharpie Pen on Paper

Faculty: Baris Gokturk

Prompt: "This project is an exercise in collecting information visually, turning them into drawings, reshaping by creative processes and reorganizing them in a distinct narrative system. From your collection of observational drawings of the past few weeks, identify an overarching theme, and a motif. Then design your own narrative system that combines all your drawing in one big whole."

After creating a series of observational drawings of my desk environment, I noticed how many of my sketches dealt with two overarching ideas. The first being sensory touch, and the second being human connection to technology. In class we were dealing with operational elements of cropping, combining, and translating images. Therefore, the warped phone is a product of combining two different observational drawings I had done, as seen below. From there, I chose particular drawings that I thought evoked the most universal and prominent sensory feelings when touched. It’s ambiguous to the viewer if these objects are within the screen or are popping out of the phone as real objects. Are the hands actually feeling the smoothness of the brushes? Is the finger really being pierced by the pencil point? Maybe these are just moments of false human connection that the warped cell phone facilitates.