Studio Practice

Week 2 - Exaltation

"Take a single and very small detail of one work, and reproduce that detail in some appropriate form so that it is completely unrecognizable as the original."

I used my musical instrument from last semesters, Creative Technologies 'Sonic Unsensible' project to create my 'exaltation'. I took close up pictures of the instruments circuit board and created a simple line animation that cycled through while music I recorded from the instrument, which I slowed down, played in the background.

Above is the video I presented in class in Week 2. Below is the final video that I revised from the original.

Week 3&4 - Volumetric

"Take an aspect of the volume of F Block and interact with it in some way that defines that volume. You only have 2 weeks to do this so your work will have to be clever in achieving such a result without a month of full-time construction."

I was sorted into a group with Hana, Allyson and Gina (who was absent in the first week of this project).

After discussing the problem, we devised a plan for our solution which was to create long tubes of brown paper (a suitable, easy to manipulate material), decorated only on the inside with interesting artworks, and hung from the ceiling in the common space of F block in such a way that the viewer has to look up to able to see the otherwise hidden work. This would help draw people to look up and appreciate spaces of the building they would not normally notice.

We initially had some issues trying to devise a way to insure that the work kept its shape. We suggested using card instead of paper, or to reinforce the paper with card, but found that in did not bend as nicely into shape as we'd hoped so instead opted for stainless steel wire, which could be bent into supportive rings and taped onto the outside of the brown paper tubes.

Materials:

Brown Paper

Paint

String

Wire

Tape

Allyson, Hana and I painted what would become the insides of the tubes and also added pinprick holes to one of the tubes to add an interesting light effect.

The following week we were joined by Gina who had been sick, as well as Nick. Together we assembled our three tubes and hung them. Our position in F block also had to be revised to account for moved furniture and so we ended up displaying in the center of the space rather than by the doors to the courtyard area.

These images show us with the constructed tubes before we displayed them. The wire was not heavy enough to hold the tubes as we had hoped and they bulged in strange way. Hanging them did not help this effect, in fact it made it worse and bent the tubes further out of shape. However, the tubes were still cylindrical enough to see how the design should have functioned.

While the tubes lacked the desired shape, they still drew people to look up, as you can see by the people in the photograph's above, who were interested enough to be drawn to look up the tubes.

We also set the tubes and varying heights, with the lowest at a point where most people would have to duck under in to see. This encouraged people to stick there whole head in the tube for a unique experience and view.

Week 5-8 - Objects in Space

For this project, I was sorted into a group with Hana and Simon and we were later joined by Nick. We were also assigned our "problem that relates to the volume and scale of the central space of F Block, or alternatively, the Gallery corridor behind F Block", which was "Passage - Document in some innovative, alternative, and unobvious way, the passage of a person through the length of the space".

We spent our first session together brainstorming ideas and getting to grips with the problem.

Our ideas, spanned a 3D, mathematical chart of movement through the area to filming a blindfolded person being instructed through the space.

We eventually settled on an amalgamation of a couple of our original ideas, with a series of cubes showing each side of a person walking throughout the F-block common area on its respective sides, with the boxes following the path of the person .

We agreed to meet up on the coming Thursday to begin taking photos and mapping the path, however I could not help at this next meeting as I was sick and for this reason I had to miss the Friday class as well.

It was decided during those meetings that the boxes would be too difficult and time consuming to make, and the person walking was removed from the shots altogether. Instead, two shots (rather than the original four) were taken, one facing the wall at the workshop end of F block, and one taken facing the opposite end for every string in the journey sequence. The strings were included in the shots.

Here are some of Simon's sketches of this concept:

The pictures then had to be cut out and mounted on card, with the correct images on each side. This was a very confusing and difficult task, and we also discovered that some of the photos had gone missing as we began mounting them.

We decided to draw our impression of the perspective view from each string where a picture was missing, in place of those images but we were dissuaded by Peter, who told us we had to have the pictures.

In the end, we went through our images and reprinted the missing ones, ensuring that all of the strings had their two, corresponding photos.