Author: Emily

Kevin Mack

While looking through the museum of other realities I was particularly taken with the work of Kevin Mack. Kevin Mack is an immersive digital artist whose work engages the imagination and speaks to the inner wellbeing of the viewer. Mack is heavily celebrated and has won numerous awards for his work in the film industry. Mack’s work is inspired by visions that he has experienced since childhood, nature, and science. He has been artistic his whole life but started working in a digital medium in 1986. In 2006, Mack received the title of Honorary Neuroscientist from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine for his talks there on perception and visualization. In 2007 he received an honorary Doctorate of Science degree from Art Center College of Design for his contributions to the field of motion picture visual effects. In 2012, Mack worked with physicists at CERN on the visualization of recent discoveries in particle physics. Using VR headsets, Mack has focused his efforts on developing his virtual reality artworks. His work Blort from 2017 was particularly interesting to me. I love the way that the color reflects the form and it sort of undulates and pulses. I love the soothing nature of it.

Matthew Plummer Fernandez

British Colombian artist, Matthew Plummer Fernandez’s work is very intriguing to me. Fernandez has been exhibited across the world. His investigations seek to find different ways that we relate to the digital world and how that world is still evolving. It is a playful interpretation of the imperfection of the digital world as a way to discuss the ethical problems surrounding the policing of the online. For his work Shiv Integer in 2016, Fernandez created a bot that would generate assemblages from the Thingiverse. The process follows a lineage of readymade and chance art, but also performs an archiving of an Internet subculture, taking cross-database snapshots of 3D-Print culture.

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I tried to find a variety of objects too download but some of these didn’t end up working in my Meshmixer.

Introduction

Verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real. But what dictates what real is? We can often think that real is something that we all agree on, but what we understand as true and real is very based around the context of the time and place that we reside in. Artists of the early 13th Century, such as Jacob Van Maerlant, had a very different reality than us in the present and their interpretations of the real can often be dismissed. But what makes their reality less than ours?

Provocation

For this brief we are asking you to investigate the following questions. How does language and understanding form a barrier to what is real and imagined? How do our perspectives factor into what is real? Does bringing things that are “imagined” into 3d space make them real or do these things exist independent of the physical form?

Materials

For this brief, select some examples of art that could be considered not real, and bring these interpretations into physical space, further investigating the realness of their forms. Carefully reflect on your materials and select materials that speak specifically to what the brief is posing.

Presentation

Present your brief next to a photo of the artwork from which it is inspired. 

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My interpretation of this brief was to look at the ways in which our imaginations and reality are intertwined and intersect. I decided to use stuffed animals because I thought it would reflect the reference images that I was using in an interesting way. These images were made to make these texts more easily relatable to the public who couldn’t read at the time. I think that it was a fun way to sort of modernize it as the majority of the public can read now to apply to the people that cant, young children. I think that understanding and perspective can have a big affect on what is considered real. I think that reality on a personal level is a perception. If you perceive something to be real then it is. If these drawings were your only exposure to these kinds of animals then suddenly they are real. That’s how that animal exists to a plethora of people. I think its very important that we understand that peoples interpretations of the world can forever effect the ways in which other people see things. I also think that its important to emphasize that when we are not able to seek education our selves and don’t understand the world around us, we are very impressionable. I think that the real is always going to be objective and that the line between real and imaginary is sometimes non existent.

I started today just experimenting and trying to figure out how to use the software. I found it pretty fun to work with and watched a few videos to try and get the hang of it. I like the potential that there is to work digital especially in lockdown, even though I’ve never worked digitally in the past.

The first assemblage I did I started with a bunny and was just exploring. It was very fun and I started to see that it was resembling a mythical creature that’s name slipped my mind. I tested out importing different objects from within meshmixer and from other sources. Also tried out using different tools to warp the object.

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From there I moved on to an otter. I was testing a few of my 3d objects as there were a few that didn’t work. I started adding other shapes to them and deleting body parts. I like the very alien look of the product.

After that creation I decided to start with a plain sphere abd see how I could change it. I imported a rose that I had found elsewhere and used tge drag tool to draw it out. I added a potted plant to the bottom and a human head to the front and used the expand tool to make it bumpy. I think it looked quite gross but I like it. Im excited to continue.

It started to bother me that I couldnt remember the name of the cryptid that my first work reminded me of, so i started a googling journey. That lead me to the wolpertinger of germany that was exactly what I was looking for but there was a particular taxidermy that spoke to my soul

From here I started a hunt for more taxidermy of mythical creatures. I started to think about how really a lot of mythical creatures are described as sort of assemblages. “It had the head of a lion the feet of an eagle and the tail of a snake” and they are made real by our speaking them into existense.

This lead me to think about the ways in which we describe things that are beyond our comprehension. A lot of mythical creatures came from the descriptions of foreign animals. I then remembered a thread I saw a while ago that was making fun of the art of medieval monks.

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I was thinking about how a lot of these things that have taken hold in our imagination as monsters are actually real animals that have been misinterpreted through the years and in turn we have made the descriptions real in their own right.

Artsteps

Unfortunately I wasn’t able allowed to access Artsteps. I talked to James about it and he said to just make sure that I write a note on my blog. If I was to do an installation I would probably want to play with size and scaling and also repetition of objects.

I decided to go back to solid colours today, and took some advice that James gave me to only use things within the room to widen my scope of material possibilities. I did quite enjoy this and the vibrancy of it. Some colours were much easier than others. I really enjoy the relationships between the different materials and the ways in which they fit together. I think this could be fun to do in multiple other rooms to see how the colours vary. I do hate the cleanup aspect though.

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I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to do more works today as I was very busy but I thought I’d reflect on the ones I did do.

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So today I started with looking at colour. I was going to stick to singular colours and I’m not sure if I will go back to them but I was drawn in by complimentary colours. I really liked the process of looking for these colours it’s really interesting to sort of switch into a new lense and be able to see materials so differently

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With this work I realised that hot glue would work well as an adhesive because it would give me that plasticky messy look that I wanted. I do think this work is a bit too figural but it was very fun to work at such a small scale especially since my other assemblages were so large.

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This is probably my least favourite of my works. I realised how much I liked the melting of this though. I saw a few people while going through blogs yesterday, that had used candle wax as an adhesive and I was really engaged with that, so I thought I would try it with a few works. I obviously went a bit overkill with this one. I wish that I could melt the plastic but I don’t think it would be very safe or good for the environment.

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While making this one I didn’t really like it but upon reflection it has really grown on me. I like the size of it and the sort of neon colours. I would really like to do more of these really small works so that I could put them all together. I need to do some research into some of the artists on James’s PowerPoint but I do like the direction that I’m going.

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This work isn’t finished but I thought I’d include it anyway. I like the way that the beads sit inside the cup and the colour that the wax came out as. I like the neon of the cup and that it almost glows. I will have to come up with some more things to do with this.

For this part of the brief I started with the first thing that came to mind. I flipped my table and arranged my chair and a few other things on top of them. I tried to focus on separating the the form from the function of the objects.

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With this next one I wanted to go a little bigger and use some of the junk in my backyard. I think that it didn’t really worked as well for my because it doesn’t feel connected enough. I feel like it just looks like a mess.

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This one has a lot of color. I feel like this would be a good one to continue with because I would like to work more with color. It would be a cool process to select materials on purely their colors and seeing how their forms work together.

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This was an assemblage that I quite liked because I think you cant really tell what the things are you just see how they look. I also like the symmetry of it though. I would like to look further at how I would go about joining these aspects.

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With this one I took the approach of looking around a certain site and creating something based on that. I looked through the lakeweed that had washed up for whatever litter I could find. I quite liked working on such a small scale and I think I would like to continue with that, but combine it with another work possibly.

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This work I didn’t really like, I just didn’t really connect to it. I did like the tension of the spoons though, and the balance of them. Other than that I don’t think I would continue with this one.

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Coco-pops

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We are going into some new works this weekend. I decided to start with something small just to get myself started and get the ball rolling. It started by digging a hole and putting a bowl of Cocopops in so that it was level with the dirt. I don’t exactly know what I was looking for but it was hard to photograph in the way that sort of captured the work what I wanted it to look like. The hole that was left was particularly interesting though. I think that it hits what I was trying to get to. I like those shapes that are too unnatural in a natural space. And I thought about investigating that further. I also liked this very white bowl and something that is a very indoor object being placed into a space that it shouldn’t be.

Moss

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After this space, I wanted to further look at making these unnatural shapes. I found a particularly mossy part of the driveway and cut into the shapes of the bricks. After doing one, I decided it would look better as a pattern and cut multiple different rectangles out of the moss. I think this looked really cool but I didn’t think that it was big enough. I wanted to push myself to go bigger.

Tea Party

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This next work I wanted to explore putting things into unfamiliar spaces again in a bigger way so I put a table in the water in the lake and put part of my nanas tea set out there. I think that this was really cool. Its feels a little bit eerie or ghostly. I like that it looks inviting but in an odd way. It gives a very supernatural vibe.

Ivy Window

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This work is currently not finished. I started it intending to leave it as a singular circle cut out, but upon further reflection I think that it would be very cool to do the whole fence in these polka dot window type of things. I think it will look really cool and fulfill that longing to do something a bit bigger. It will break one one of the rules as I wont be able to return it to its original state. But I’m sure my mother will be happy for me to get rid of the ivy she’s been meaning to deal with.

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Todays task was to look at the spaces that our bodies inhabit. I started inside my own room, trying to think about the spaces that I hadn’t been before. The fist space I wanted to occupy was my cupboard underneath the TV. I sat there for around 15 minutes and played around with the doors and position. While inside I was focused on an old scribble that one of us had probably drawn as kids on the inside of the wall. I decided that my intervention would be to turn this scribble into a picture of some sort. I ended up with a cat in a suit hunched over eating soup. The cramped space was interesting to be in. I also realized that the back panel of the cupboard was gone so that I could move around the other side. This didn’t do much to let light in though as it was still quite dark if I closed the doors.

The next space I chose was the mop cupboard in our laundry. I started by pushing myself inside with the mops and sponges still inside just to see if I could fit. It was interesting seeing the way that my body was able to move within that space. I could move my head but not much anything else. My intervention was removing the mops from the cupboard and being left with an empty space. I could move much easier in this space and could almost turn around. I did feel a lot less claustrophobic than the other space that I had occupied.

The next space I wanted to experience was inside our old washing machine. I was thinking about what it means to be inside something. Do I have to fully get my body inside the middle of the washing machine, or does it count to simply sit with my legs inside the center. I was interested in the movements I could make as this place was a lot less constricting as the other places that I had found myself in. the center of the washing machine could move so I tested that with my feet. I then started to pull clothes out of the washer to intervene with the space. It was interesting that my legs felt fairly free but as soon as I lent down to grab a piece of clothing it suddenly made the space feel a lot smaller.

It was interesting to see the places that I am in all the time in a new light. Things that I am so familiar with I was suddenly seeing in a new perspective. I really enjoyed looking around the house for appropriate spaces as well. It felt a bit like looking for spots in hide and seek, where suddenly all these places have new opportunities.