Alina and Kien were the fifth couple to present they seminar. The title was Limitation of the Visible. It was really interesting because the took in analysis the use of different and unusual material and so rethinking the choice them for projects.
A diagram I find useful to keep in mind for context of a project is this below:
(screenshot took during the presentation)
It helped me to reflect on my project and where they stand, why they could be call "sculpture". I double that I always had while I was finding the way to decide what next kinetic sculpture work on was that I had a background in Industrial design so I am trained to design objects with a purpose or to solve a problem. Now instead my practice is changed: I use the media of sculpture to explore the movement that a regular polyhedron can adopt. So I am doing "kinetic sculptures" because I make them move and are art because reflect a definition given there too: "Art [...] questions our perception of the world". I feel better I had some references also in my peers seminar.
While I was listening about material made by animals, I remember of when I was at the Milan Design Week few years ago, during my undergraduate course, and I saw in a clear box some spiderwebs used as fabric. That made me recall a project I made for the Modeling workshop: a bridge made using only paper sheets and glue. To make the paper more resistant, my classmate and I rolled the paper sheets that were already thicker then the regular ones used for printing (120 gr.). In this way we got tubes, which we inserted one in the end of the other and got longer ones.
This was a turning point for the develop of my tests and practice because before the lockdown I had planned to keep using the aluminum tubes I got for my interim Summer Show the year before. That let me step out of the mindset of before and add new possibilities, as I could easily made others and test more structures and sizes. I had thought to use kitchen paper and toilet rolls because of their shapes and started collecting them already but their proportions, too wide and short, aren't suitable for my structure.
They launched an activity to carry on in groups within a week, where we needed to choose a material around us, consider the characteristics and design a project with it, recording the process. A way to keep us making, which is our major but also helped us stay on track in a difficult time like this.
Jacqueline, Esmond and Gabriele were the sixth couple to present their seminar. It was about symbols and visual languages, and the title was Symbolic representations: how do symbols replace reality, project intrinsic knowledge and standardise ideals; focusing on the subconscious decisions we make as designers and artists.
They opening the seminar making us drawing, with sound and music in background, in three different rounds, 5 minutes each.
At first we needed to use colour, abstract forms. No symbology
I had some problems to drew because I immediately started with a shape that could be a symbol. Does the abstraction need to not have a meaning as symbol?
The second round required to draw using 3 symbols, signs or icons only.
This was much easier because as soon as I heard a sound that recall a symbol or an object in my mind.
The third draw would have been a combination of colour, abstract forms, symbols, signs and icons.
This was a mix of all the elements before and I find it both more completed and crowded, much more like a painting.
The choice we made for the drawing were all different, with some elements in commons but developed in various way: in the way of drawing or for importance. They were evoked by the sound and the past experiences we had too, so it was a mix of improvisation and memories.
Linked to that, they talk about an interesting topic: machine learning used Artificial Intellicenge to let computer makes errors, trying to mimic the human mind. Are making tries and errors what make the difference between us and the computer? I guess so, but we "restart" ourselves after an error, we have that ability. Computer and Artificial Intelligence needed a programmer, someone who gives them instructions and said them to start again in a different way, randomly or by parameters. About that, I remember I watched a project on Bar Arduino, where a guys made a Banana Random Number Generator, which used the potassium of a banana to generate numbers in a. really random way, otherwise with the command "random" he noticed the random number will repeat themselves in the same way.
There is much more in the real world then what we can find in using the laptop.
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