Pause!!

Leaving for Nicaragua first thing in the morning.  Thesis, its time for a little break.  Helping design the layout for an addition to La Mariposa in Nicaragua, let the fun begin.  New places, new people, new language, new way to think about design and architecture. Whats better than that?

Test for Thesis Presentation Idea

I am thinking about creating a short documentary about my design process to demonstrate edges that are creating between digital media and hand graphics or "pen and paper thinking".  This was just a test of speeding up video.  I normally would have created a model out of some material, photographed it, then projected in onto a white board and continue sketching at a much larger scale.

Progress

ITERATION, ITERATION, ITERATION, its a process.  Unfortunately in architecture there is no way to test whether something works or not without creating it. I am moving into model form to push through the bad iterations and hopefully end up with a decent result for the mid review on Monday.  I have a building theory, now its down to the technicalities of requirement.

Quick Entry

Hopefully this entry will be the start of my recordings for the rest of the semester.  In the next couple months I will document my experience in the Latin American "cluster course" I am currently taking that will travel to Nicaragua at the end of March and is focusing around the theme of Revolution.  The cluster consists of a literature course, a history course, and a humanities course.  While in Nicaragua, I will be a partner in designing a conceptual addition to a language immersion school name, La Mariposa. (More explanation and information to come)  Aside from the cluster and trip abroad I will discuss my senior studio design project and how the two courses may or may not coincide with one another.

Color:

Black and White

ONE SONG- TWO DESIGNS (color/ black and white)

            When the assignment was given my idea for song choice was to find something that included a lot of instruments so there would be a large selections of points to take from.  Rather then finding music that I had never heard before I started thinking about what I had heard before and would like to spend some time with.  Through the process of finding instrumentals I could not settle on anything so I took a step back and decided to go with a simplified song.  The song that I finally chose was AIR TAP by Erik Mongrain.  After picking this song I had doubts as to how I would translate it into two compositions because I was not immediately inspired graphically when I decided.

My immediate thought for interpreting music in graphic form was to create some sort of composition done by hand.  I created a series of sketches and images of what I thought the final result could be.  I found throughout the process that I kept going back to the idea of pointillism or stippling because of the music’s rhythm.  The songs quick picking of the guitar and the two parts that Mongrain creates also made me think of a gradient.  My idea was to blend the two so it would resemble the chords and the quick notes simultaneously.  As I began to finalize my ideas and get ready to paint we had discussions in class about how no one in the class was attempting a computer generated series.  Thinking about this more and more I decided that since the majority of this class was based around technology and learning about how the art world has become a media revolution I would attempt to create use the computer as my tool. After the iterative process I finally settled on two compositions that I believe are successful and meet the requirements. 

Starting with the color composition I used the gradient technique starting from the top of the piece vanishing toward the middle of the piece.  From the gradient I then created a stippled gradient in order to accomplish the idea of notes on a point.  Starting from the base I used an image of a raindrop, which to me the ripples of the drop resemble the sounds waves created by the guitar.  From this image I again created a stippled effect to blend the gradient and the drop together in order to confirm my idea of the smaller pieces blending together in order to create the larger piece.  The final element to the color composition is the altered color of the raindrop itself, which is the highlighted representation of the point where the musicians finger strikes the string therefore resulting in another addition to the overall composition.      

This project being the final project, which in essence is the culmination of what we have created throughout the semester, I wanted my two compositions to coincide.  For the black and white piece I decided to break down a piece of the color composition.  This composition is supposed to be an abstract magnification of each stippled element.  My concept for this piece is that each one of the stipples is broken down to a molecular level.  This idea again confirms the gestalt idea within the two compositions as well as the pieces that can be broken down in the song that I chose.  This piece can work on its own because of the concept that I have created, but is as strong if not stronger as a two part composition with the color piece.