For the Conditional Designers, their process in creating art was that each of the four contributors would use their choice of tool to take turn in creating a piece of art. They each have a set a rules that they must obey by. Similarly, artist Bernard Frize’s creations also involve the steps of meeting specific conditions and parameters. Before starting a work, Frize would first choose a way of working and follow his choices throughout his creation period until he gets a result. Hence, Frize’s end results are unpredictable as he himself does not set a goal in that. Moreover, as the article suggests, there exists a difference in the meaning of process for the artist and the designers. As stated in the text, “Process itself, then, is only for Frize, and to a greater extent his assistants, the almost passive execution of a plan where chance has a role to play” (Estèves 3). In other words, while Frize is strict about how his process of creating art should come through, he does not see a significance in the process itself. It is merely just a way of execution and effort that will guide him to a result. On the other hand, for the Conditional Designers, process “is a time for ‘relationship and change’” (Estèves 3). Unlike Frize, the Designers give more significance and importance to the process of their creations over the final result. They see process as not just the effort taken to make art but they treasure the change and the relationships created and shared during the process more than the final art. Nonetheless, their approach in creating art is one that I have never heard of nor tried myself during my creations. Most people like myself have a picture in mind when we start to sketch, draw, or create something. We never set up conditions for which we need to meet as we move towards the end goal that we already have an idea of. However, in their case, they do not have an idea of what their final result should look like. Rather they emphasize on how they should create their final product. As a result, the final appearance of the final product is usually random and unpredictable as there were no prior expectations set for the product. Hence, in this way, I think it is safe to say that since there were no expectations for how the result should look like these artists would not suffer from having results that never met their expectations.
Rules for creation:
- Gather 3 people to create the art
- Each person takes a marker of any color (they can all take different or same colors)
- Each person can only draw one shape (the whole time of the creation process) out of the three in the following list : circle, triangle, square (Ex. person 1 only draws square, person 2 only circles, person 3 only triangles)
- Each person takes 1 minute drawing on the paper
- Take turns drawing until you have a city drawn on the paper
When devising my rules I first came up with the number of people who should contribute. In class we did a similar concept where we each drew lines with markers of different colors. Building off of that activity I decided to have my independent variables to be the shapes that each person can draw rather than marker color. The shapes I assigned are typical shapes used in architectures so I am looking forward to see how the artists would create the cities and infrastructures. In my mind I can sort of imagine what shapes can be used for what objects in the city but if I actually execute my process I am sure it would be different than what I have in mind because of the unpredictable factor of the other two partners needed for the task. The part of restricting one person to only draw one shape really makes the end result unpredictable.
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