after a really exciting few weeks of designing and working on the two mini projects, i pretty much choked at the presentation (which was frustrating for 3 big ways which i wont go into). this is what i meant:
Infinite Identity
this is the model i made of an experiment i devised that really fascinates me. its this idea that you can make an original sound wave travel forever, infinitely and perfectly, as long as you subscribe to a few (potentially impossible in the real world) physics rules. the atmosphere inside the cone would have to be the perfect temperature and humidity, the sound would have to be loud enough to travel at least half a kilometre to be the same volume as a voice would be at the microphone and then there is also the possibility it would have to be a vacuum as well. regardless, this was just one of the ways we could live forever and its more a metaphor of the idea than anything really.
i thought about doing it with visuals as well but the world is literally too small for that idea.
at the heart of this project is some peoples need to live on and leave behind a legacy. rev robert shields wrote a diary every 5 mins for 25 years, even leaving his nose hairs for DNA testing. on giving the 37.5 million-word document to Washington State University, he did so on the condition it wouldn’t be read or published for 50 years.
to me it seems under these rules and the way he wrote this piece in such detail lies a real arrogance and the assumption that people would even care. i suppose the point of a legacy is that it has.. well a point. assuming the conditions will be adhered to, we won’t know for half a century what is written inside the diary and after the small media whirlwind surrouding his announcement that the diary existed, will anyone even bother to read it?
i also examined Jamie Livingston’s photo of the day project (Link) where he took a polaroid everyday from 1979-1997. in this moving series of images, you get a real insight into his life, which ends with him losing a battle with cancer in a hospital bed.
Crane Vane
My other mini project was about the poetics of the mundane. A few friends of mine have this fascinantion with cranes and subscribe thoughts and feelings to them. check out Crane Party for some pretty interesting commentary on cranes “partying”.
A little research lead me to murderous cranes, retiring cranes and a crane lauded as a local hero. it seems that they are objects which have thoughts and private lives. i went on to think about how cranes are these devices that make us do the impossible; lift extremely heavy objects, move said objects, build skyscrapers. with all this responsibility i wanted to give them a way to help the person on the street, not just the men and women that operate them.
i was told on good authority that cranes have their brakes left off at the weekend so that the wind can move them and so not damage their parts or knock them over. with this in mind, i wanted to devise a way a crane could communicate with you where north, south, east or west was by a series of lights. now not only do they build the city around us, but help us when we are lost to navigate our way to our destination.
Future…
I need a bit more time to make sense of all of this.. I’m going to take the first project forward but need to understand the people involved more. also in terms of the sound model, what would one say into it? if you could say something that would last forever, what would you say?
2 Comments
November 24, 2008 at 4:51 pm
hey, every time I try to look at some images on your blogs it cause Safari to quit/crash, is it me or is it your blog?
… would you like to say a bit more about why the pecha kucha made you choke!
November 24, 2008 at 5:15 pm
hmm think its your safari.. i’ve looked at this on a few different browsers and its working fine.
in terms of choking at the pecha kucha, what i meant by that was this. i suppose i felt a lot of pressure at this presentation as it was the first time the new year would have seen my work and how i present. now, due to one of my slides being a film that was 15 seconds instead of 20, i changed that slide to 15 seconds long so it would advance smoothly. this then somehow changed all the slides to 15 seconds long so i loosing 5 seconds each slide. it turned into one great big rushed mess and i said alot of nothing. hurray for forgotten powerpoint skills!