14 DAY TRIAL // What we are about to look at may not carry the same degree of bizarreness as the impossible triangle or a mobius strip, but it comes close. Claire Sauvaget definitely stepped outside the norm when she created her mind maps.
Urban alienation is a type of loneliness that people may start to feel when living in the big city. The paradoxical part of it is that this alienation tends to be made worse by a crowd instead of better.
If someone's day consists of getting up in the morning, traveling by train, climbing flights of stairs one after the other and then sitting at a desk or behind a console for hours, there isn't much time for socialization.
Yes, you might make friends among your coworkers, or at least acquaintances, but the feeling of urban alienation might not go away even because of that.
To illustrate the anxiety and near insurmountability of the sensation, French digital artist and sculptor Claire Sauvaget has created mental maps of how it's like to live in the big city.
The 3D printed Mental Maps
Claire Sauvaget commutes daily, so she is well acquainted with long treks from home to work and vice versa.
In her 3D printed models, the person and their thoughts are represented by the asterisks or starbursts, even one spiky globe in one instance.
But they are quite few and far between, compared to the geometrical, solid forms that account for the rest of the objects' volume.
Here is how her day goes: she wakes up in the morning, then goes down a flight of stairs, around some corners, into crowded train platforms, then through narrow corridors and the train car underneath the streets of Toulouse, France.
Then she leaves it, climbs another flight of stairs and finally reaches her destination, though she left the last paces of the trek out from what we see.
The art piece has already been honored as such
The Mental Map (that is the name she decided on), as far as metaphors go, is probably the most solid we have ever seen. Literally. Among those artists can create through their own means at least, at home.
There are three pieces in the Mental Map, all made from white ABS plastic. They were exhibited at Le festival d’Arts plastiques du Carla-Bayle, 20e édition (The 20th Annual Carla-Bayle Plastic Arts Festival) in Ariège, France.
All in all, it is a very appropriate project, seeing as how Sauvaget is quite intrigued by synesthesia, the phenomenon whereby a cognitive or sensory pathway leads to an involuntary, automatic experience in a second cognitive or sensory pathway.
