too long...

Somehow I managed to completely forget about blogging until now, so this is going to be a long one. I don’t want to leave you in the dark.

I’ll start with Ken’s class. For our measurement project I decided to utilize my time on the train. Within my seating area I measured all of the spaces I could think of. I made some ink drawings of this area and wrote in the measurements (in centimeters). Then, I added myself interacting with the space—sitting back in the seat, leaning into the window, and putting my bag on the overhead rack. I measured myself, also, and added these measurements into the drawing, however, here I used inches. The idea basically stemmed from the frustration of my not being able to grasp the metric system. Thus, the two sets of numbers in the drawings really don’t match up or make any sense with each other.

For my spectacle, after many other ideas passed through, I continued to work with the train. I started by filming a person next to a window on a train—looking out the window, reading a book while occasionally looking up, etc. I worked with these clips on my computer for a while—editing contrast and boosting color, fitting the pieces into an order to play in a loop. From the beginning I knew that this was not a movie to be projected, but rather I wanted to build a space around my computer for viewing. Since my train drawings had a nice sense of transparency I played around a lot with layering in this project. I cut out from a piece of cardboard a window that resembled the train’s and set it in front of by computer while I played the train movie. I filmed this set up, so I then had a two-layered movie. I played around with some other layers after this, but didn’t like how distorted the original train movie was becoming, so stopped with the two-layer version. Then I built a box around my computer and cut out a little peep hole. Inside the space of the box, I placed some cut out figures leftover from failed layering experimentation. Then I took this whole computer/box object and placed it in the studio on a shelf and covered the area with trash bags to make a giant black mass with my little peep hole of light (from the computer screen). The light draws you to look into the hole into the space which features the movie on a loop. You’re watching a person who’s looking out the window but you’re also blocked by another window, so you feel like you’re both inside and outside of the train, and then there’s the whole other space of the actual box, so you’re never really sure what you’re place is or exactly what the spectacle is, but it’s all a very intimate, quiet experience. Or at least, these were my intentions.

Still working out in my head what to do for the ritual project. I have a desire to paint objects and also to work with another system that I make up for myself (like the midterm handwriting project). I might make my system revolve around the act of reading, since that can be a ritual.

For Reagan’s final project, I’m working on a new sketchbook that I made with bigger, but fewer pages. I’ve chosen fourteen of the cities that I’ve been to this semester and from each of those a monument in the city. I’m currently drawing these monuments (black/white) on separate pieces of paper to be transferred into the sketchbook. On top of these transfers, I will be drawing birds from La Specola. After I chose my monuments I went to choose a bird that relates to each one (in form/texture/style). So each page of my sketchbook with represent a city using a large monument and a drawing of a bird using many materials and a little bit of color.

Ok, there it is, and I’ll put up some images of what I’ve finished and what I’m working on.