One morning Farah reaches the college by bus and comes up with this brilliant idea of how we use umbrella to protect ourselves from rain and maybe we could use that idea in our dress performance. Where the participant could be given some form of aid as a protection against misinformation and how it actually protects them. We visualized water being drizzled over the participants and provided with different types of umbrellas

There arose too many questions at this stage:

Is it a narrated performance or an experience?

Is it going to be a single participant or multiple or no participants at all?

Is it going to be a dress or an installation?

We were almost at the end of the 5 week project and we were a little low in our confidence level. Not that we didn’t have any good ideas but that there were too many ideas that we had went through and couldn’t finalize on one.

Since the concept of umbrella could directly be tied into the narrative of using them as a protection against misinformation, we agreed to it. We directly got into prototyping and conceptual visualization.

Instead of representing the different layers as a dress, we decided to represent it as different umbrellas that has different visual and texture properties.

The question at this point was is it going to be different umbrellas or different layers within a stack of multiple umbrellas

The idea that we initially fixed on was to have 4 separate umbrellas that will be used by the user to protect themselves from water drizzled from the top. Depending on the texture and porosity of the umbrella, the amount of shelter that the umbrella provides varies.

To take it one step further, the water would be dissolved in ‘glow-in -the dark’ paint and poured. Thus, once the drizzling section is over, we planned to shut the lights out and visually show how much the rain stains the person without them realizing.

Thinking about the structural feasibility of drizzling water over the umbrella.

This required a place where were could/allowed to pour water in large quantities. This aspect had a lot of restrictions regarding the safety and feasibility of this model

We soon realized that we need to start looking for alternatives of water. Pranjal suggested that we try out to incorporate the rain in digital format projected onto the viewers. Even though it wont be the same as actual water, we decided what was best for the given timeframe and started working on the umbrellas.

The water drizzling was now replaced with lights, and how much the umbrellas filter down the light.

We chose to do 4 umbrellas. each one representing the various generalized source of information that this age group consumes

Umbrella 1:

This one is the most pop coloured ‘click-bait’ kind of source and the information (digital rain) goes right through it. Even though one might be skeptical and sometimes even dont believe in these type of sources, they still are very tempted. Yixi gracefully made the entire umbrella out of knitting yarn and jingle bells. This umbrella could represent the pop-up ads, short cut techniques to attain what one wants, food faddism advices on Tik-Tok, etc,.