Yuan Ma
Full Circle: The Dark Side of the Moon
Prompt: Students were asked to create a total of 100 circles—50 on paper, 50 in Photoshop. Employing knowledge of Gestalt Principles and Layer Masks in Photoshop, find ways to build an image that interfaced both the digital and analogue. Keep all circles in some form.
The composition of my work is a moon—not for any profound reason or anything… simply because the moon is a circle. The moon also has craters, which are also circular; that’s essentially the origin of this piece’s composition. While designing various intricate circles, I heavily employed Gestalt principles like closure and continuation… When placing these hundred circles onto this enormous moon, I first divided them into three categories—hand-drawn circles, circles from photographs, and non-planar circles. Among these, I frequently used inversion—though it depended on the situation. Most non-three-dimensional circles retained their original white background to maintain overall harmony in the image. I don’t like circles that are completely filled—they feel too crowded and deliberate—so I intentionally left white spaces on this “lunar surface,” even though it’s a black moon. These three groups of circles allow the audience to perceive this categorization through proximity and similarity. I was initially worried whether the final effect would be clear enough, but it seems my classmates noticed these patterns. I also employed some identical techniques in both analog and digital circles and intentionally arranged them close to each other, so that everyone could grasp the difference between realizing an idea digitally and physically.