Steeeve's Documentations

1. nice, imagine someone wearing this set of makeup on the street or some big makeup company make an actual set that is the same color.

 

2. the “in case of emergency” gang: it’s pretty amazing though how much better good/junk food can make people feel sometimes.

 

3. how does this work so well???: the cold white color of the light definitely helps with the color contrast of the background but later in the video warmer light works well too. didn’t expect beer cans to look this good at all but they do.

4. cyberpunk 2020?

5. texture of the week:

 

1. effective advertisement: and also the perfect places to place them……

2. gotta praise the Japanese humor: the colors are spot on, and the fact that its a Pepsi ad for Halloween adds so much power in terms of destroying coca cola… 

3. but why pink?????: I will make this the real color of the tree bark and have a real log in the place of the painter roll, as if I was painting the tree bark onto the wall.

4. now this is a whiskey glass and a half……

5. texture of the week: Venom?

 

1. messing with the textures: pics like this really messes with my brain and tricks me into thinking that the cement is as soft as sponges…… And it gives me a feeling of being strangled with a piece of string, which I think is really interesting because there is nothing to relate to visually to the concrete. Also I feel like I just have to have something that is about textures each week.

2. the 3d abstract painting: I especially love the second one and I wonder how it would look with cubes rather than squares. It’s interesting how the artist created the style of abstract painting in a 3d space.

3. this came out of nowhere and it almost scared me. the feeling of a sudden abruption literally knocked me out of my chair when I was scrolling through pinterest and saw this. the shape of the hollow part is so straight and ‘on your face’, and there seemed no reason whatsoever to put such a hollow on a wardrobe. I thought this experience was very interesting and worth noting down.

4. smart! reflection and symmetry: I have been looking at the pic for a good minute and didn’t figure out how the thing wors and what is actually in the middle, but it could very well be just a regular stool, in which case it would be pretty boring. but in the recommended pins under this link there was a pin of three mirrors placed to form a corner of a wall while being placed at the corner of a wall, there was definitely something in the middle which I thought was very interesting and gosh I wish I pinned it.

5. design to fit human body, not to dictate it: I’ve used enough poorly-designed tools and gadgets that were really difficult and uncomfortable to use and just won’t fit in my hand that I’m so satisfied looking at how this series of ideas focus on how human body is shaped.

1. bend the tool, not the hand continued: this is rather an idea than an actual art piece. but I keep seeing horribly designed tools especially kitchen gadgets that this idea never escaped my mind that tools are designed to help with problems rather than reflecting the designer’s idea on how to solve the problem……

2. life, whale peace and serenity: resin art is something I have always wanted to try out myself. This piece captures the oceanic life very well. the color, the scenes inside the whales, the lighting and reflection, everything is so natural and smooth, even if there isn’t actually sea creatures inside the scenes. this reminded me why I like whales and ocean life so much.

3. random, but very strong: the contrast of colors, the puking skull. very fun and satisfying to look at.

4. 隔墙有耳 (ear through the wall, meaning someone is eavesdropping): very literal, might not be intentional since the uploader is clearly not Chinese.

5. texture of the week: 

1. textures continued:

p1: tea pot melting as if it was chocolate, it really made me think that the base is a pile of liquid but in reality it might very well be hard clay.

p2: I really can’t tell why this is but it looks light as fabric, and it looked like it is floating with the wind blowing from down below, and also the contrast of the black top and the colorful bottom, it is really a beautiful piece to look at.

p3: eggs! who would have thought??? this almost looks like a landscape with endless mountains, almost like Chinese ink painting. the light really did the trick here.

 

2. KNIVES!

as a kid who accidentally cut my tongue when I was little, P1 game me immense anxiety, because when I’m enjoying my popsicle, I don’t want to end up licking onto a blade. however it would be scarier if the top part is not transparent, with a tractable blade. P2 has similar effects.

 

3. the chair joke:

 

Project Overview

This project is set out to convey a sense of life and warmth and serenity. The shape of the main body uses a 3d modeled whale, which was divided into 45 individual sections which are hung from a mechanism that is fixed on the ceiling, through the rotation of which, each one of the whale pieces moves up and down individually with a slight variation of phase and amplitude of the rotation, together creating the motion of the whale swimming slowly. 

 

Inspiration and Ideation

The inspiration for this project comes from the artist U-ram Choe, some of whose works (‘HYUNDAI X ELEKTRA – METAMORPHOSIS’) focuses on creating the feeling of life, he uses lots of small gears and mechanisms to make the ‘creature’ seem like it is breathing, the warm lighting around the whole piece made it look less metal-like and almost full of life. The clod and rigid and lifeless feeling of all the metal pieces and gears is massively reduced and covered by the overall feeling of warmth and the motion of breathing.

In my project I want to imitate this feeling and make a creature that is full of life. I ended up choosing whale as the main part of the sculpture, as for one I personally like sea creatures and I particularly like whales for their elegance despite the size and for another, the slow motion of whale swimming really speaks well to the feeling of serenity and thus makes me feel calm. Also the shape of the whale is round and smooth (rather than flat or sharp), which adds to the whole feeling by providing the element of comfort. 

For the warmth I was planning to have LED strips hanging inside the body of the whale, and have it emit a warm orange-yellow light, which brightens and dims with the motion of the whale as if the whale is breathing or having heart beats, which also adds onto the overall feeling.

The other reason that I want to use the shape of the whale rather than coming up with a new abstract creature is that, when I look at the creature made by Choe, I couldn’t help but felt a sense of unfamiliarity aside from the amazement that it was so full of life. Because the creature was an abstract one, it felt less closely relatable. But with a whale, we all are familiar with it, and it is easier for me to convey what I see on whales to my audiences.

 

Process and Difficulties in Engineering and Fabrication

I first created an animation using processing to visualize how I want the pieces to move, which also helped me decide exactly how should I design the mechanism that I will discuss down below.

The most challenging aspect of the whole piece is to make the mechanism that I could hang the whale pieces from, which also should have the function of moving the individual pieces up and down consecutively. I ended up with a design of alternating plates (for the rotation radius) and pillars (for hanging the string that connects the whale pieces)  as shown below. The biggest problem is that it is not stable, and despite all my effort to reinforce it (including drilling holes on the plate to fix the pillars and having a ring on the other side for the same purpose, and finally having four strings hanging from the top of the mechanism), it broke on me several times.  

(sketches placeholder)

And then all there is left is to fix this mechanism and the motor onto a beam that I could hang from the ceiling, which is another whole mess of engineer problems that I won’t go deep further since they are less unique than this one. I will nevertheless provide some of my sketches on this process.

The final step is to tie the whale pieces that I laser-cut onto the mechanism, but this is the final design flaw that I met which I was not able to solve due to the time limit. I will discuss it in the next section. 

 

The Result and My Comments

The results are a little different from what I imagined it to be, because for the whale pieces, it requires them to align perfectly with each other and not move horizontally or rotate, for them to form the shape of the whale. But since I used fishing strings, those problems became even more problematic because the strings are very flexible. Also it is extremely difficult to align the height of the pieces just by eye-balling. So the shape ended up looking pretty messy and was all stacked together due to the rotation.

Despite the fact that in the in-class critique my peers appreciated the fact that it is not a whale, and that personally I do think there is a whole new aesthetics to the new shape as well as room for new meaning to being applied to it, it is fairly far away from what I set out to do from the beginning. To be honest it is a pity that I didn’t notice this last engineering problem and failed to create what I wanted, but in the time constraint environment, I am confident to say that I did my absolute best. 

By the way, the mechanism broke again the next morning before the critique when I shoot my video.

Further Development Ideas and My Plan For the Future

For further development I would definitely add light in the main part since I think for my original idea it is an important part and also I already created a cavity for that. Also for stability I need more rigid material to hang the pieces and to prevent them from rotating.

In my mind I still want to finish what I set out to do, despite all the positive feedbacks I got for the current version. It is more of a thing that I feel like I should finish no matter how late I finish it, but before that I will have to take a break from it just so that I don’t stress myself out again on the same thing.