Reading #1: Conditional Design

From reading Conditional Drawing, Conditional Painting, and Conditional Design Manifesto, one can see that there are various different perspectives for different designers/artists, as for example, Bernard Frize thinks that the process of painting or creation doesn’t exist, but rather a path that the views will look upon at the resulting product to reflect back. One could interpret this quote as that creator like Frize wouldn’t bother with the process or the way that he chose to complete the art that he pictures in his mind, as they would all be shown and preserved in the resulting painting. On the other hand, Bernard Frize’s approach to the painting is more of a manufacturing process or execution based on previous experiences. He opted for a way of working, which he almost never changed, then comes the result. The approaches for the two creators have very different ideologies, but one cannot judge if one is any better than the other, because that is a personal relationship problem with no right or wrong answers. From Conditional Design Manifesto, it seems more closely related to the ideologies of Frize, which the process is the product, and the project shows its formation to the audience. From my own relation, I think there is a very huge difference in my creative process in comparison to them because I haven’t even come to the point where I could call myself a creator yet, in another word, I could only call myself a learner at this point. In my own work, I would have to re-draw, recreate a scene or a part of the drawing multiple times, and what I did is not to create something new out of the void but to draw out an image that is right in front of me physically. Although I am not qualified to say what should be the process of creation, if someone asks me, then I would probably answer that it all starts with a mental image in the head. Searching for visual references is the key in this portion, and one could finally move into the creation. Ideally, one should find the materials around them, or at least they could find in their daily lives to initiate at this point, and in a series of tests, a trail of error, then one could finally acquire the result they imagine. In the end, I should probably get a scrappy, shabby-looking junk that is the collection of everything around me or I could obtain in my house, or in the attempt of painting, it would probably be an object or a scene that is taken from an angle in my room. In my imagining, it surely won’t look like the images created by the paint machines shown in the Vitruvian Paint Machine article, because to me that is more towards the angle of abstraction, rather than reality.

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