back to work

Between half term, being ill and working I have taken a little break and to be honest it is a good thing, I was worried about getting too obsessed and perhaps a bit overloaded which can happen to me, so a concious step back at this point was necessary. Today I will mostly spend reviewing what I have so far, tidying up some ideas and continuing on a fun new line of reseach into drawing machines. I found a fun video of a turntable spirograph and thought about how fun a drawing machine could be so this is my research and testing for today. It makes sense for this project to be about making images and not just viewing them, I suppose it is the natural progression of the idea.  What I found so far  
Happy to back into it and excited for what I may create. Stay tuned for more contraptions!

.. later that same day....

So I think I would like to definitely use non circular gears for this, oval ones which have variable phasing so all pens move at at different speeds, this could yield some interesting results and these gifs I found ( courtesy of http://stirlingengineforum )  show  how a mechanism could come out looking

I wonder which shapes will work better, although that said they would all work perfectly well just yield different results.
I hope to get at least one working cardboard maquette finished tomorrow, with arms and pencils.
I think this is a much better idea tha a contraption that does not do a great deal of anything, as fun as that would be.. does it really fit the ideas I am working with, I wonder.

contraption number 1

Today I was able to get a first maquette done so am now more easily able to plan out my gadgets and contraptions, these hopefully will be done on the laser cutter with wood and painted. I'd like to make it look a little funky so the cogs are like rotary phone dials and you intuitively go up and start dialling it.. now I am still undecided as to whether or not it will serve a purpose, I think this one I think will not though. It is a combo of inspirations from Metropollis and Duchamp's Disks Bearing Spirals, I want the whimsical side, the piece for the sake of it, if it makes you smile it has worked. I enjoy watching the cogs go round and am really looking forward to building the real deals. I also feel a lot better about the brief in general, less stuck, floating and wandering, more focused so full steam ahead eh...there is  plenty of design work to go but at least the ideas will work, stay tuned for more mad machinery and weird artwork!

Time to get started

I am still a little up in the air as to what direction I would like to go with this project, a possibility is to continue with some of the more interesting and interactive elements from the visual languages brief and work out some exciting analog and digital outcomes, although this feels a bit lazy because it is a continuation, however there was and is so much in that brief that I had not had time to explore that it is a viable option. I really want to explore how we take visual cues, what we look at and why so this does fit.
I see so many people walking around who are not looking at anything but their phones, almost being run over, missing out on wonderful things that are there or are going on so I want to look at what it takes to capture people's attention, how to make them look up from the phones and either pay attention to the world around them or look at something specific. I am a person who is looking around at eveything all the time, I don't miss much so I find this fascinating.

I'd also like to really go to town with printing and go back to the idea of making my inks and papers for whatever I do, I want to look at different inks and in particular a conductive ink that makes a 2d work interactive. So these are all exciting ideas with a lot of scope. I am sure a few days with all my journals and sketchbooks will help bring it all together.

I want to really also look at the concept of art as a precious thing to be put behind glass and velvet ropes, not to touch and to be revered and almost afraid of, this came from a visit to Australia's national gallery in Canberra a few years ago where if a person got ever so slightly too close to anything, honking great alarms would go off and it really made me feel pretty crappy and not want to be there at all, it was and remains the single most unwelcoming experience I have ever had in a gallery or museum. As an Aussie it was also pretty embarassing that the visitors to my country were being greeted this way. So this has informed a lot of the shows I have put on and has been in my mind a long time. So I'd like to create an exhibit that is purely tactile, either in a darkend space or something similar.

So three ideas, I think the printing will have to keep for now, it is not really beefy enough for this brief so the looking one or the touching one are the way to go.. now to choose and refine the concept.