Project 3: Social Networking in Portugal

In my research for Social networking in Portugal, I was surprised by what I found. I am used to and grew up living in the internet age- We no longer have to wrack our brains to remember an obscure name of a movie character from our childhood, one of our friends just whips out their iphone and retrieves whatever answer in a few seconds. Similarly, maps, and even the more modern version mapquest, no longer are necessity because all of the new smart-phones have built in GPS...the information is at our fingertips. Most people my age can not imagine what life would be like without the internet.


In a survey taken in Portugal about internet use for any reason, more people answered that they did NOT use the internet than the ones that said they did; only 5,168,800 out of 10,735,765 answered yes, that they did use the internet for email or any other reason. I also found some statistics about facebook in Portugal: only about 30% of the population uses facebook, which is just unheard of for us. The most common forms of social media in Portugal include television, magazines and a different social networking website, OLX.

sources: http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/portugal, http://www.cies.iscte.pt/en/linhas/linha2/sociedade_rede/index.jsp

Color Week (project 2)

Light Box; First project of spring semester

The first assignment of the semester was to take a 12" x 12" x 18" cardboard/foamboard box and use only cut-outs and skewers to create 4 separate spaces within the box. Sounds simple right? No, actually it doesn't even sound simple because getting light to do what you actually intend for it to do is pretty challenging.

As an object aside from the purpose of the project I don't necessarily "like" this design. It was supposed to be simple and I imagined it as an extremely large and powerful space, maybe a grand train station or something public and massive.


I started this project by just jumping right in with my xacto knife and just making cuts and seeing what the light would do. I ended up with a first version that looked like a psycho had carved coded messages all over a box. Then I thought it would be really cool to just have one cut somehow because the most obvious solution had been to cut two lines intersecting or three parallel lines.
so, that is how I ended up with an S-shaped cut out. If I put the light in the perfect location, which maybe only happened once, you actually could see 4 sections along the floor and the back section extending up the wall some. I put 3 skewers in the middle-right because this is where the s shape met the wall and section off the first three areas. There are two up on the wall where the 4th is supposed to hit. The curving cut-out let the light move and guide you through the space.

Final Observational Drawings

This isn't necessarily my best drawing of the entire semester, but I really like it. It was done on the day that we had the drawing competition and it was a timed drawing, 10 minutes. I like it because, even though it is just the back of her head, Sarah recognized that it was a drawing of her. The scanned image is not the best quality, but I think I did a pretty good job showing the values in her hair, which I have never really been able to draw. I won the category of "best line weight". I also appreciate the fact that it is "unfinished" because it was a timed drawing and I think that is an important aspect.

This drawing is out of my observational sketchbook. It is a picture of Zooey Deschanel. I am still not the best at drawing realistic faces, but I am proud of the shading that I did on her lips and in her sunglasses. This is also a little hard to see, but her lips actually look a little glossy and I definitely spent the majority of the time on her sunglasses which I think look pretty good.

Luminaire

This is my final luminaire. The materials I used were trace paper twisted and braided, glue and some fishing line.

This is a view from underneath, looking up into it. The shadows that it casts in the far left corner are the best representation of the intended "light effect" and what it actually does on the wall. It was really hard to capture with a camera. The shadows are very organic, free-flowing mimicking how light dances on water. When the fixture moves and spins which it easily does, it shows this even better.

The previous two pictures don't quite show the quality of light honestly either. I took them in an otherwise dark room so the lighting is very low, but I actually used a very shockingly bright bulb. I wanted the shadows to be dramatic and for the light to be bright white and very strong.

These two are detail views of the twisted and braided paper.

Some process work...

 This is a previous version that I made, I experimented with using black paper as well as trace paper, but it was not what I wanted.
 As I constructed a sphere which turned out to be a huge challenge, I made two halves with openings at each end and then connected them.



I had initially thought of using mesh wire, the screening that goes in windows and doors and I was going to manipulate it like it was soft and lacy. I was toying with the idea of using the twisted and braided strips inside overlapping but it started to get very busy. It was a cool idea but it didn't work well with light and it just ended up not looking at all how I had imagined. This is a detail view of how I experimented with folding and overlapping of the wire.

Inspiration

When looking at light reflection in art/ interior spaces online I came across Kazue Taguchi, a Japanese artist who uses reflective materials and surfaces within spaces to play off of natural light. For my project that I'm in the process of making my goal is very similar, however I'm using paper as my main material to shadow places and let light through others. I thought about using mirrors or shiny surfaced material but I changed my mind. I love her work though it is really simple but powerful. Here are a few more examples:

These next two are just photos I liked that were taken underwater showing light coming through. They show how water starts to distort things in a beautiful way and the organic, ever-morphing shapes that have inspired my luminaire concept.

General inspiration "collage" of images I really enjoy right now...

Sources from top to bottom: Yayoi Kusama, "Infinity Mirror Room—Phalli's Field (Floor Show)" (1965-98),  The Jimi Hendrix Experience taken from last.fm, Inside Maximilla Lukacs and Guy Blakeslee's home from http://www.theselby.com/11_14_08_guy_maximilla/index.html, personal, and the last is from http://www.richardcolmanart.com/

Scale Figure Drawings