Project Objectives

My Art, Design, and Digital Culture course provided me an opportunity to further awareness of an increasing issue on US college campuses today - the rise of rape and sexual assault. Our challenge was to take data personal to us and transform it into visual art. At the time of the project, I was working with Women Against Abuse, the largest women’s shelter in Philadelphia, on a campaign to spread awareness about this escalating concern. My data centered around a study conducted by the U.S Department of Justice which illustrates the growing trend in the number of sexual assaults against females reported on college campuses over the past ten years. Using the statistics, I wrote code using Processing to produce a visualization of the data. I then developed the visualization using Adobe Illustrator into the pattern used in my wearable design. Using the data as inspiration, each artist had to construct an object or texture designed to interact with his/her body. I chose to convert my data visualization into bandaids to resemble the scars and bruises, both physical and emotional, that sexual assault victims are forced to hide. I also turned the data-driven image into fake nails and glued them to cover my own nails to symbolize how sexual assault survivors have to hide their experiences and live their normal lives. My classmates and I learned photography skills by photographing one another in our objects. The final spread was designed in Adobe Illustrator.