Study Task 2 - Figure/Ground Study Task

In response to understanding the figure/ground principles, we had to work in groups to use post it notes on a large scale to explore some of these principles by creating an ambiguous distribution of different coloured post it notes to fit in two words and explore which is figure and which is ground.

I chose to use the words true and false as they’re very commonly related words and direct opposites of each other which I found would be interesting to explore. We began by writing the word ‘TRUE’ then using that to figure out where false would go and continue from there. However, we did not think about our use of post it notes colours as we ended up using very different and complimentary colour so the clash made it very obvious to distinguish the words from each other, and ‘TRUE’ especially stood out which didn’t allow us to challenge figure/ground relationships as it wasn’t ambiguous enough. 

As there was no more post-it notes to use, we had to figure out a way to work around this and therefore decided to begin mixing the light blue we used to fill in the gaps with the orange used to create the letterforms for ‘FALSE’ however this didn’t solve the problem as the blue was still very juxtaposed and stood out too much as the figure whereas the orange and light blue was very obviously the ground. Our solution was to switch from the very contrasting dark blue to a more pale blue that was originally used to fill the gaps in, then changed the gaps to a pale blue/white to become more neutral. This muted the contrast between the orange and blue and the grid we created begin to look almost like a camouflage pattern which is very synonymous with the ambiguity we were trying to explore. 

This continued when creating our gifs where in one we completely rearrange every post-it note to completely have no obvious figure/ground and therefore is completely ambiguous however it could still be claimed that the blue and orange is the figure as there are enough post-it notes to occupy the grid and create the word again. 

Overall I am happy with the end result as we went beyond the basic task of occupying both words in the same space and challenged figure/ground relationships even more by distorting what may be assumed to be the figure (the words) with the ground (pale blue post it notes). Additionally, the task made it very clear how important colour is in the figure/ground relationship as the dark blue stopped us exploring ambiguous figure/ground relationships as it was a focal point.