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Millennials, also known as Generation Y, refers to the age group from early 1980s to early 2000s, and its trend is commonly referred to by the popular media. This generation lives in the effect of postmodernism era where real and unreal, private and public, or natural and illusive cannot be easily distinguished. Harold Pinter, a postmodernist author once said, “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false.” The concept of postmodernism highly emphasizes on individual’s perception, which troubles the millennial generation to differentiate what is the ‘real’ reality. To express the cultural mutation that happens among millennials in the era, the hallucinating effect is introduced to elaborate on the self-reflex behaviour and dreamy, unsettled mindset of the millennials.

Self-reflex behaviour often relates to the keyword ‘playful’, ‘humorous’, ‘high’ and ‘irrelevant’ during the postmodern period. Thus, the designed pattern of this copper block traces the movement, anthropometry and body language of playful characters. The play in various scale and orientation imitates after-images, to express the inverted world of millennials where they exist within the time and dimension created by themselves.

To further enhance the concept of the hallucinating mindset of millennials, a setback of strokes is created from each body pattern while solid organic shapes that carries the characteristic of fluidity are add in to create more fluid motion as if each pattern are flowing from one to another. The intention is to deceive the human eye and to achieve the effect of hyperreality. Additionally, it can be further interpreted through reflection of each modular pattern in both axes, creating a glassy fluid perspective of new module pattern. Using asymmetric design technique, the pattern can be seen as efflorescing from both axes.

In the market of batik fabric in Indonesia, mystical, ritualistic and nature motifs are widely used in producing their country’s very own identity. Sawat motif is commonly used by Java people while in India, Garuda and nature motif can be commonly found throughout the country. In Malaysia, the popular motifs are floras instead of the faunas because Islam norms forbid animal images as decoration but in Africa, the motif usually feature people doing their routine activities. The design motif of my copper block, the hallucinating effect, was to represent the effect of a specific period of time, the postmodernism era, that has caused a sense of uncertainty and surrealness towards the millennials.

In promoting this motif both domestically and globally, the approach of combining hallucinating motifs using copper block technique can be acted as an incentive in promoting old crafting technique, which can convey the message of using retro way in generating neo art and culture. According to 2021 Spring /Summer Print Collection by Pattern Bank, optical patterns has been listed as one of the featured prints for the year of 2021. I believe that the design of my copper block motifs can fit in the flow of fashion world.