Second semester

First semester I focused on the closet. I drew color separations of closets and read many definitions and literature based on this specific space.

I am interested in these small enclosed spaces that contain our things. Spaces that hide away things we don’t want others to see, things that are put away and can only be revealed when taken out of these containers.

I will illustrate different spaces that contain my possessions, such as closets, cupboards, drawers, etc. Normally these small enclosed spaces would contain my physical belongings but instead I will fill them with words. They will then become places that contain my thoughts, fears or worries.

Wizard Of Oz

 

"Wizard Of Oz"
I decided to try my seminar idea for the upcoming Wizard Of Oz show and here is the result. I'd like to get it printed on the downstairs Epson, though I'm not sure how to present this piece. I can either print it out and leave it as a strip to be hung on the wall, or make it into and accordion fold book. Any advice?

Tiffany

EL | Jan 31st

EL | Jan, 31st | Seminar Proposa

Fractal Typography.

For Senior Seminar, I would like to merge my interest in typography, and fractal geometry. A fractal is a curve or geometric figure, each part of which has the same statistical character as the whole. I would like to create letterforms and characters using both digital as well as hand-crafted materials, and then go in and create intricate designs inside of each letter (attached is a sketched example of this). I intend on using materials such as computer-based illustration programs, sharpies, X-acto knives, cut paper, vellum, etc. This Winter, I took a pop-up book making course that taught me different techniques to folding and displaying paper, as well as making books. I’ve always filled my sketchbooks with designs and doodles with mostly sharpie, and most have patterns. Many of the patterns that I create are similar to the fractals that are found in nature, such as the roots and branches of trees, mountains, waves, etc.

When people would see my doodles, they knew they were mine. I want people to walk into the gallery and know which work is mine. I want my personality to show through. I want something that I can be proud of, something that I am very passionate about. This is something that I am passionate about. Projects and ideas that I have previously worked on for Seminar in my independent study were things that I was interested in, but I lost interest very quickly. I didn’t feel passionate about it, and I didn’t feel fulfilled with it. I don’t want to spend the semester creating work for a show that is very important to me when I am not completely enthralled by it. I want it to be something that I want to work on any time I get a spare minute. What I am proposing is something that will do that for me. I know that I will want to spend time on it. I know that I will want to be working on it day and night to create a collection of work that is “me”, that is clearly “mine”.

As far as the technical aspect of my seminar work, I will be using programs such as Adobe InDesign and Illustrator to create the basic shapes such as letters and characters. I will then illustrate the fractal designs using both Illustrator and hand-crafted methods. I will be illustrating with Illustrator, markers, sculpting materials(possibly), as well as using paper itself. I intend on having final products be a varied collection of different mediums and sizes.

Spring semester update

For this semester of seminar, I am still very interested in China and freedom of expression. I spent nearly all of Fall semester educating myself on my topic and somewhat narrowing down my visual representations. 

This semester I am going to further explore pairing mudra (Buddhist and Hindu hand gestures) with excerpts from The Analects by Confucius and the Chinese constitution. I have been working my way through a large book of mudra picking out Buddhist gestures that will pair with certain excerpts I have already chosen. 

Soon I am going to start experimenting with screen printing mudra onto rice paper and letterpressing the text.

Updated proposal // Current process

Proposal

January 2012

I spent the first semester gathering and experimenting with information, thoughts, ideas, trying to find the one topic within my projects overarching theme that I want to focus on. Throughout my work in high school I focused on implementing programs that were designed to encourage acceptance of others by moving beyond differences.  Now I've been considering why this even necessary in the first place. What caused a societal "norm" that people are expected to adhere to and why is it still plaguing America? How did the societal "norms" transfer into stereotypes that have been used to degrade persons with specific affiliations. I want to start this semester by questioning these trends.

I've been exploring the relation between words, as well as their relationship to flesh. How does labeling flesh affect the way we see it, despite never really knowing the person within? I've been experimenting with the way vellum and transparencies affect the work I create, visually as well as intellectually. 

//

Current process

I've been considering stereotypes, where they stem from and the methods in which they grow and become ingrained in society. I think a large contributor to that is our language, specifically hate speech. I'm looking for a group of 4 dictionaries to explore the visual weight of derogatory or hateful words in our language - one I will black out every definition that falls under derogatory or hateful, the next I will cut the blocks out. With the other two dictionaries I will follow the same process but with words for acceptance and love. I'm looking to display these in a way that the weight of these words in our language becomes apparent and a comparison can be made.

I've repeatedly seen the statistic of 1 in 10 persons do not identify as heterosexual. Therefore logically speaking, everyone would know someone who is queer, or even in their family. I've been thinking of ways to bring about this realization as a way to create cognitive dissonance and push a reconsideration of beliefs. I have a concept involving mirrors that I will explain further in class.

Fourth Translation

This is a rough draft of what the next step would be after the stringed canvas which I am still resolving. For this I traced the shapes of the shadows created by the strings. If you now take a look back and compare it to the cube I had done at the beginning of my process, you can see some of the mistranslations happening. These mishaps relate back to the fact maps can not give us the physical and emotional connect with have to our world.

This is a rough idea/draft of a way of cataloging my things. I have started with rings, and put it into a short quicktime film. I like the idea of doing this for all of my accessories: hats, shoes, jewelry etc. and if it all possible some of my clothes. As I said in class the other day I would still also like to make more tangible and 3D versions of some of my things, but this is the work I have started.

This Semester

This semester I am continuing with my project. 

I have went back in the project ‘The Moon’ full force at the beginning of classes again. I went back  into the storyboards from the previous semester and begin to make a few changes. Firstly, I decided to inflated the number of storyboards that will be produced back to a conservative number of 100 to 120 storyboards, (I stress this is a conservative guess, mostly likely I will exceed that number by mid March.) Secondly, I made the decision to keep the storyboards in black and white; not only for economic reasons but to push the idea of the dichotomy of light vs darkness, the known vs. the unknown,  fear vs curiosity. What better way to speak about these ideas than through the use of black and white, they are extremes yet strangely they are union that are never separated. They may shift and change in power yet they never mix. The shades of ‘gray’ are created by the actions of the people interacting with their environment producing feelings of ambivalence rather than apathy to the viewers. I want the piece to enter the foggy space between the worlds of love and hate.

Thirdly, after much debate with myself on the visuals of the ‘Hell Scene’ I went with creating hell not a place of fire and brimstone but a place of darkness and isolation. It is a depressing place that is devoid of life except for the lost souls wandering the underworld. It resembles the abyssal plains within earth oceans. The reason for a ‘watery hell’ opposed to the traditional one with fire and sulphur and Satan poking the damned with a pitchfork is that in the beginning of the piece, someone makes an offering of 3 silver coins and the moon is born from water and thus water it shall return, and to be reborn again. 

public words / facebook infographic progress

How we project our identity in social media through our choice of words: A study of the language and messages on our minds and in the public eye.
I compiled a list of the most commonly used words from the Montserrat newsfeed on Facebook, from the week of January 16th to 23rd, noon to noon.
The bottom piece is the designed chart, which might be cut into strips somehow to be placed on the wall.
I'm also thinking about doing a sister piece that explores our internalized (non-public) words and maybe having the pyramid shapes recessed into the paper. Both could be placed back to back in some sort of a box or light-box structure.
I also added a comments box to bring the users written words directly into the piece.
For the 3-D structures, I might buy red cardstock to fold so that I do not have to print on each individual sheet.

Map Translations

Last semester I started to work with the senses and how we use them to react to the world around us. I thought about the senses connecting to our language and how there is some forms of disconnect there. By the end of the semester, I was creating three-dimensional cubes that were based off maps of walks I took in different places/cities. Maps are a form of communication we use to show and understand our surroundings. They take our physical three- dimensional world and translate it to a two-dimensional form. Through my project I was to show the translations back and forth between the two and the abstraction that occurs.

Proposal:

Map Translations

The physical world around us has been taken from three-dimensional and transformed to two-dimensional forms for people to better understand our surroundings. Maps help us get from one place to another by creating negative and positive space that shows the ins and outs of the environment. I am interested in translating these maps back and forth between three-dimensional and two-dimensional. Through this I hope to gain an understanding of our relationship to our world by pulling away from the original context of the maps and moving towards abstractions. The visual experiments I go through in the process will work with positive and negative relationships to relate back to the maps.

This piece that I have started creating shown above was moving from the last pieces I had created last semester that were two-dimensional forms of the cubes. This piece is bringing it back to three-dimensional and playing with the positive and negative space of the shadows created by the strings. Some issues that have occurred with is that it is coming off looking too visually heavy. Some solutions that have come up are: removing the canvas, using smaller eye screws, using thicker string to balance the heaviness, just screwing the eye screws into the wall and stringing it on there. I will continue playing with this to see where it can go. The following step after would be finding the shapes the shadows create and translating it back to two-dimensional.

Previously in Design Seminar...

Just to show off my progress on my animation so far, here is video of my animatic (preliminary version) that I completed around the beginning of December, and what bits and pieces I have done of my final animation so far, as of last week: