Thursday, February 18, 2010

Shiny

Boilin' it


The tin foil project ended up going really well. It was fun and easygoing to work with Sara, and I think we both got a lot out of it in addition to a few huge sheets of tin foil honeycomb. What was best was our ability to communicate and plan in the beginning stages. We went through a couple ideas together and worked them through on our own to find out that we didn't really want to realize them. Then Sara came up with this great pattern and we both discussed different ways to go about displaying them. For me, this was the most important part of the project - we worked through our creative process together, and we were able to communicate to each other our ideas the whole time. I think good communication is key for any collaboration.
The final product is pretty nice, though it could use a couple things here and there. Perhaps if we had more time, we could have checked out a couple different ways of hanging and spacing the sheets. Even in the short amount of time though, we produced something that I'm happy with.
Now onto furniture. I'm really psyched for this. I want to make something simple so I can get used to working with wood, the different saws and geometry again. I think this project will give me some aspirations for what I might do later with wood. I'm excited to get back down there tomorrow at 1.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Today's class was really helpful. Hearing about and seeing what the TAs are up to was pretty inspiring and it gave me ideas for things that I'd like to get out of this course. One is just to work with wood. I've always wanted to build things with wood, and I've only done a few things with it (a while ago), so it'd be nice to try and explore that material at some point. I'm particularly interested in building furniture, and I know there's a lot of experienced people in this class between the TAs and the professors, so I think this semester would be a good place to start.
So I definitely want the class to keep going on the building block trail. I think doing anything too ambitious (and I like how Pete called it ambiguous, because collaborative things I've done too early in the semester end up being ambiguous and too loose) wouldn't really help me toward realizing my many goals in this class (ie. to work with new materials - namely wood, among others, to push myself in understanding my own creative process, to collaborate in this process.... many others). And the trajectory of the semester just sounds good - moving from material to material, getting deeper conceptually and more challenging and perhaps more experimental as we go. I'm getting more and more excited for what this class has to offer this semester...

Monday, February 8, 2010

It was hard to think of new ways to deal with aluminum foil...
I decided first to try and make tin foil copies of certain household objects. I used a bowl, and I thought it was interesting how you can use tin foil to steal the shape of another object, to form the foil according to another objects form, and then do what you want to with the rest of the foil. What happened was that I just let the foil flare out from the edges of the bowl shape. I thought this was interesting as a way of extrapolating from the form of a household object.
But this got a little boring. And I decided to just do textural things from then on. I lay the tin foil on a brick wall and made imprints, or rolled the tin foil out with an edge to flatten it. I also tried crumpling the foil and then stretching it back out over and over again until it became much more malleable and less delicate than it is in its original state. The textures that came out are pretty cool, even though they were a sort of last resort.
Arlando gave me more ideas about cutting the foil in new ways. He offered me a razor blade, and that came in handy for my last little experiment where I made a wrist band sort of thing with different horizontal cuts.
I'm excited to see what other people brought in, and if any other people had the same trouble I had with the material .

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Dough Day II

The momentum from the first day carried over nicely into yesterday's dough exercise. It felt like everyone knew what their first move was going to be with the dough and they went from there. It was interesting to see everyone rolling the dough out. I began to think that rolling it out was one of the few ways to get beyond it's rubbery, elastic properties. When it was flatter and spread thin, it was easier to control.
I particularly liked talking at the beginning of class about what pieces interested us most and why (and whether or not we don't like dough...). I began to see how the vocabulary can be as elastic as the dough itself, and I think that's an important concept to grasp - that the vocabulary or language of one piece can be very different than the next piece, though they might use the same materials or techniques.
I'm excited to get to work with tin foil. I'm really interested in pushing the boundaries of the material, and the idea of "let's make tin foil look like else."

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

1st Day FOOD / Dough - February 2

At work

My favorite creation!





First thoughts:
I've always rejected different exercises for cultivating creativity and new creative perspectives, but this made it clear that playing around a bit can be necessary for the creative process. It challenged me to think about the medium and my relationship to it - how I was holding it, how it felt in my hands, what my intuition told me to do with it...
That aside, I really like dough. It's as if it has a mind of its own - it never conforms how you want it to. I would stretch it and then it would immediately retract. I'd put a piece of metal in it and let it sit. Seconds later the original shape was gone. It took a little while to understand the dough's limitations, but after that things became more clear. I really liked what other people were doing, particularly with rolling the dough out and seeing what shapes it could fall or stretch or retract into. I liked the one where the dough draped over strings or dowels to look like a thick towel or garment. In the end, looking around at other people's work turned out to be a really helpful technique for ideas.
Tim Brown's speech was interesting too. I like a lot of what he said, but I thought what was most helpful was what he said about rules - when kids play productively, there are finite rules that these kids follow. In many of my other production classes, the free-for-all prompts have been both inhibiting to my creative process and just bothersome. I thought this first project with the dough, although very open ended, established an important rule - that we must make things with dough. Other rules certainly existed (make things in this time frame, with these other materials, using other peoples' ideas, etc.), but the rule that limited our material I thought was the most helpful for my creative process. If I have rules, I must figure out how to work with them - there are challenges and goals. If there are no rules, it's hard to figure out where to start.