Interaction - Bachelor
Through the Lens invites visitors to question how perspective shapes understanding. Inside a fortune teller cabinet, overlapping coloured words form a chaotic image. Handheld lenses bring different messages into focus, revealing how the same information can tell contrasting stories. An exploration of perception, empathy and looking beyond first impressions.
How much of what we understand about the world is shaped by the lens through which we view it? Our perspective, our experiences, our beliefs? Through the Lens is an interactive installation exploring how language, culture, history, and social structures influence the ways we perceive, categorise, and understand others.
Using historical and contemporary perspectives on queer identities as its subject, the project investigates how the same individuals and experiences can be interpreted in radically different ways. Across cultures and time periods, queerness has been understood through frameworks of spirituality, medicine, morality, identity, and social belonging. These classifications are neither universal nor neutral; they reflect the values, assumptions, and power structures of those who construct them.
Inspired by vintage celestial atlases and fortune-telling cabinets, the installation aims to intertwine the journey and mysticism these motifs illicit into each visitor’s experience. Instead of a crystal ball of prophecy or a record of one’s odessey through life, the visitors are invited to peer through coloured acrylic lenses at a chaotic display.
Each lens filters the visual information differently, revealing certain classifications while obscuring others. By physically changing lenses, visitors experience how a shift in perspective can fundamentally alter what becomes visible, meaningful, or overlooked.
The deliberately overwhelming display represents the complexity of competing interpretations, while the tactile interaction encourages curiosity, experimentation, and reflection.
Rather than presenting any single perspective as definitive, Through the Lens asks visitors to consider the limitations of their own understanding. Ultimately, the project challenges the assumption that classifications are objective truths, encouraging us to question not only what we see, but who determines the lens through which we see it.
Roman finds inspiration somewhere between the antique shop and the night sky, drawing on old furniture, historical curiosities and celestial motifs. Interested in blending IT skills with interaction design beyond the screen, Roman gravitates towards tactile, playful ideas that invite exploration and spark curiosity.
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