Month: September 2024

Link to the Slide

In this assignment, Jacenia and I learned how to use cardboard, paper towels, cornstarch, flour, and water to create a new kind of material. We find that it is crucial to control the proportion of water and starch to make the mixture feel sticky but not too moist. To dry it, we put them into the oven and set the temperature around 50 degrees. But I feel that we need about 2-3 days to make it completely dry. 

We are supposed to use these materials to replace the rock, eggshell and foamed plastic pedestal in our current installations.

1st installation: softness vs hardness

2nd installation: entanglement

3rd installation: universe

Land Art intervention

In this assignment, I choose NewBund Small Huangpu River Park and Leaf Park as my site. (They’re very close together, just across the street)

In order to guide my walk, I choose the dice as my parameter: I decide the number of steps based on the number that I rolled and  look around for possible materials. But soon I realize that this setting is not very reasonable to find suitable material, so I modify it to walking ten times the number rolled.

Along the way, I picked up some fallen leaves, flowers and small peaches. Perhaps because it’s about to rain, the ants have become very active (or more likely, of course, there’s fallen food on the ground) I’ve also observed ant activity. This inspired me: people can be as small as ants in front of a huge landscape. So what if we magnify the tiny scenes in nature?

Thus, based on the idea that I want people to pay attention to the natural things they don’t care about in their daily life, and at the same time realize the insignificance of human beings in front of the nature, I envisioned this playground as a playful way for people to have an immersive experience of the natural scenery.        

One of the Suggested Route   

Effect of people in the playground

Luckily, one little ant volunteered to be the first visitor to this playground while I was building it, and apparently it got a little lost. This will be the effect I hope humans can experience when the park is scaled up several times: a view of the world from the perspective of tiny animals. I envision this facility becoming part of the park, a combination of the man-made landscape and the natural world. Perhaps after experiencing this sense of insignificance, people will re-examine the grandeur and subtlety of nature and realize the importance of protecting the environment.

Assignment 1

Conceptual Framework 1:

I want to show the concept of isolation in this set of arrangement. So I placed three chairs around the table to show that they belong to the same group. And the other chair is alone facing the corner while its back is to the camera to show that it is lonely and isolated from the union.

I also try to maintain the setup of three chairs in a group, while allowing the separate chair to have a separate table. Perhaps because of the other items on the table, rather than isolation, it delivers a sense that  “it is not bad for one person”. 

Conceptual Framework 2:

In this framework, I would like to present the idea of unfairness. I placed the four chairs evenly facing the window, but the curtains in front of them were lowered to different degrees, interfering with their view of the scenery out the window.

Conceptual Framework 3:

In the framework 3, I want to show the theme of fairness. So I maintained the placement in framework2 and pulled the curtains all the way down. Now the chairs are looking at the view with the same degree of sight obstruction.