The start of the final projectThe development of the final projectThe final piece
To create my final piece, I have used the software of Meshmixer. This final piece is my own version of John Seward Johnson II sculpture, The AWAKENING. This culture’s about how humans are drowning in their success as the earth solos the human being as the human being don’t realize with what they create they also destroying. As the result of human behaviour towards the earth, they are being drowned to the earth’s floor. The face and the hands represent the human, the green floor shows the earth’s surface, and the grey blocks show the buildings and construction. The sculpture is a message to us as we ignore the problems around the world while we live our lives normally.
John Seward Johnson II is an American artist who has created over 450 sculptures that are now based worldwide. I wanted to pick John Seward Johnson II as my artist model because of his fantastic sculpting talent. In all of his work, he primarily uses different types of metal substances to create sculptures. He uses metal to form humans beings. He uses the human figures to sculptor events of the daily life of a human being. he inspires me to create my own versions of his work as it is iconic. The pictures above are some of his work. They are all human beings made out of different types of metal. John Seward Johnson II tries to show a message throughout this work as it leads to humans being not being fragile; it is to be strong like metal, which I embrace so much.
Here John Seward Johnson II shows his work and describes his meaning of them and connects his work to us.
A sunflower tends to grow through an unhabitable place. On the piece here, I wanted to create an atmosphere of self-growth as we grow through so many problems in our life. Sunflower grows through a hole of a brick, Which is lying down on a concrete floor, a place where flowers normally don’t grow. It is a metaphor for people in the world who weren’t born into riches or wealth, the people who must live and survive with what they have and what they can find. The image I created targets the primary capital system of today that is running in the world.The couch over here has taken the form of a human being in its dresses and wears clothes as a human would. What is it like to be a human? Is it to dress up? Or Is it to be surrounded by meaningless objects, or is there more meaning? In the world that we live in, we are the superior, and we create and destroy.
In the piece here, my actions of holding the couch create an alternative universe where couches are portraying humans and humans portraying couches. The couch in this universe now sits on humans. I wanted to create this piece because I wanted to show what’s it is like to be on the other side where non-life becomes human.I wanted to connect the human body as part of the earth by becoming a tree in the piece here. As I’m standing still in the form of a tree, my whole body is not standing straight; it is bending down in some state of a tree. The connection expands more between the tree and the human as my hair blows in the wind like a leaf of a tree would. My hands are the branches of a tree which is positioned at two different angles. On a tree, all the branches are positioned differently when none of them would look similar. On the piece here, I wanted to capture the moment of growth and stillness of a tree sitting on top of the earth’s surface as it is a massive part of the world and how the world works. A single tree carries an enormous responsibility as we to the planet as well.In the piece over here, I wanted to capture the meaning of uncomfortable. I sat on top of this chair uncomfortably to show that people would react in a harsh way as their faces would turn into a form of an awkward state as they see me sitting in this position. This shows that people follow a normal routine of things as this simple action would trigger and change the actions of humans beings of today in a viewing point and a physical matter.
To start my paint print project, I wanted to use unattractive, unpleasant and disgusting colours to bring them justice. These colours are continuously viewed differently without understanding the meaning behind them. I want to show that these colours have a deep story and give the colours a new light towards the eyes. I took four different colours tubs with my first artwork, poured them into a plastic container, and mixed it all up. The mixture contained a large amount of green, a bit of black, red and blue, which I ended up with an unappealing green colour. The dripping was created by dipping a large paintbrush into the green mixture, and then the brush is forced roughly against the paper for the paint to flow down slowly.On the artwork here, I have used a variety of darker volumed colours. I have drawn a picture of a field filled with trees using these colours. To create this painting, I used the same brush techniques from the previous piece, and also I’ve sprayed some of the colours using a spraying bottle—the use of these colours creates a darker vibrant scene. The dripping effect shows the picture is fading and becoming slowly unclear. As it disappears, the colours slowly start to fade away as it was just like a memory.For this artwork, I have used darker tone colours. I have tried to reimagine and create an emotional weather disaster inside the human mind. The techniques I have used, such as scratching, spraying and dipping, brings out the tragedy of a storm onto the paper.I took a bottle of black paint for this art piece and scraped it all over with the scraper, then spread it with light blue coloured paint.All of the equipment I have used to create all these artworks
In week two the final of the project, we wanted to reflect, learn and take ideas from the issues we had from last week. So started to develop the concepts of music and vibration—the most significant problem we had from last week was that the material we used would slip down to the speaker’s sides. Also, we had issues keeping the materials inside the speaker because the materials would bounce out of the speaker into the floor to improve and develop. For those two big problems, we came up with different ways to fix them during this week. We also started developing and experimenting with various materials, plus we bought more speakers to test on.
For this first experiment, we bought glitter, a transparent plastic bucket and a more prominent speaker. We got the materials from the everything two dollar shop in the city. We wanted to put the glitter inside the speaker with the material we got and use the bucket to cover it over. We found a bit of success during the experiment due to how the sliver glitter bounced in rhythmic flow in tune with the music. The group and I found out some issues during the experiment as the use of the radio was a bit difficult to work because we didn’t have control of playing our choice of music due to the machine having no aux input. The power of having no control of the type of music we wanted to play set us back a bit because we wanted to play bass based music that works well with the speaker; another problem was that the speaker was too loud as we got complaints from people in the room. We need the speaker to play at a high volume to create more significant bounces from the materials on the speaker’s top. The last issue was that the plastic bucket on the top would fall as the music got loud due to the air pressure building up inside. Having to discover issues with the experiment was a significant setback because we invested so much into the project, and having to repeat those mistakes was stressful.With the experiment here, we wanted to explore liquid and its state on the speaker. We didn’t want to distribute anyone this time, so we bought smaller speakers due to problems with the last experiment being too loud, which we all agreed and decided on. We purchased a plastic transparent water bottle, glue gun, transparent paper, and a small speaker to assemble the new machine. We started adding one-quarter a cup of water into the bottle by sealing the water inside with transparent paper glued on top of the bottle where the lid goes, which helps the water from spilling out. Then we attached the speaker under the transparent paper by using the hot glue gun. Soon as the speaker was turned on, the water wasn’t moving due to too much water, which the water’s density absorbed the airflow and the pressure released from the speaker. We were not happy about that at all, so we decided to move out most of the water from the bottle. Now we are trying the experiment with a lot of water removed. When the speaker turned on, the water was bouncing and splashing everywhere inside the bottle. We were stoked with the experiment results as the machine displayed the concept of music and sound shown through a physical form. We noticed that we kept going around in circles and finding it hard to develop the speaker idea further as we kept finding issues and problems. We all wanted to move on away from the speaker concept and start on something new, so we decided to look back and relate to our project’s beginnings.When going back to our project’s beginning, we went back to the vibrating wind-up teeth toy idea. When the toy releases from its winding up position, vibration forms due to the clock motor inside the toy getting top and bottom of the teeth to hit each other repeatedly. The toy project relates to the concept of sound shown through a physical form because when the wind-up toy is released, it creates sounds as the top and bottom of the teeth tend to hit each other. The new plan of the project is to show and record vibration into a piece of paper whin creates artwork. To record the sound and vibration, we attached different types of materials to the wind-up toy. We attached paintbrushes, paper clips, curtain clips, pins, giant eyeballs and toy eyeballs that move. The moving eye bowls were to show vibration as the eye would move; we could see that the vibration from the toy was moving it. After attaching all the materials onto the wind-up toys, we winded up the toy then dipped the toys in black ink after releasing it on top of the white paper to record the sound and vibration from the wind-up toys. When released onto the paper, the toys recorded and created an interesting art piece. We were all happy with the new idea as a group, and we will further develop on it.In the image here, we have finished creating all the wacky wind-up teeth toys. The toys are for the audience to use and play around with during our presentation. For the audience to use the toys, they have to go through a process flowing three steps. The first step is to pick a wind up toy and dip the end parts of the variety of materials that are attached to the wind-up toy into the black ink. Secondly, they need to wind up the toy to its very end of the clock motor. Lastly, place the toy on top of the paper after release and let go of the toy. They just have created an artwork using a wind-up toy that they can take home.The final set-up for the Presentation. In conclusion, as a group, we all went through a big rollercoaster. We started with the idea of using a skateboard to create art, then decided to pursue using wind-up toys to develop artwork forming sound and vibration. Surly after, we changed to using music through speakers to generate vibration and sound to make artwork and then changing back to using wind-up toys to form sound and vibration to create a painting as we found it challenging to work with the speakers. Through all the struggles and issues we had to deal with, we kept working ahead to create a machine that could generate a painting or an artwork. I found the wacky process of the device fascinating as I have never seen a wacky artwork create another artwork. As a member of my group, I’m happy with the work we have done, but I could have done better and developed more on the project.
On the first day of studio class, The visual art factuality introduced us to the art machine assessment. The assessment was about creating a machine with a creative process function to produce a work of art—the assignment needed to be done in a group of 3 to 5 students. I decided to partner up with Toby and Joon. I chose to work with Toby and Joon because they created wonderful and exciting pieces of work in semester one that caught my eye. Their work truly interested me as I think they will push me to work hard and reach my goals for this assessment.
Our group shared and talked about some ideas that we could come up with for our project. Some of those ideas were to use a skateboard to create a piece of art. We chose the stake board because we all love skateboarding, and we want to relate that to our project. Another idea was to use the sun as a heat source to create a painting. Lastly, we talked about getting a human body or an object to create artwork; we thought we could attach a canvas to a human body and trace the journey and travel onto the canvas. When discussing our ideas with Dieneke at our meeting, she said that the skateboard idea was a great path to take, and she talked to us about how we could develop and experiment further on the concept. After the meeting, Toby, Joon, and I decided to pursue a different idea; We lost interest in the previous idea. The new idea was about exploring and experimenting with vibrations and music. We chose to explore vibrations because they seemed more interesting to us. The concept of bringing music into a physical form and state caught our eyes immediately.
Day 2
Starting on our project, we bought a plastic container, black sand, and a plastic wind-up teeth toy to bring music to physical form using vibration. When the clockwork motor activates on the wind-up toy, it moves up and down where the top and bottom of the teeth meet and hit each other repeatedly fast, creating vibration. We put black sand inside the plastic container and tapped the wind-up toy on the bottom of the container. Then we rolled up and released the clockwork motor on the toy. The vibration from the toy travelled onto the container then moved to the black sand, causing black sand to move up and down.After the first attempt, we moved on to using a speaker. The inside of the speaker creates an up and down movement which captures air inside, creating pressure. When the pressure comes out, vibration forms at the top of the speaker. Here we have used a lid of a container full of black and green sand on the speaker’s top in the video clip. The sand bounces up and down while the music is playing due to vibration. The speaker we have used here has a more prominent bass creating more vibration and movement, allowing the sand to move much higher. We observed when the music patterns change, also the sand movement changes. The changing of the pattern shows us that the sand is manipulating the music, which lets sand creates and presents music physically.
Day 3
On our final day of week one, we attended James class on hack it, where he allowed us to borrow one of his radio speakers. The radio speaker was much larger than our previous speaker, allowing us to develop our idea further. This week we wanted to develop and experiment on our concept. In this video clip, we had made a cardboard boundary around the speaker’s top so the sand won’t fall out. When the music played, the sand was moving up and down, ideally in tune with the music.We experimented with a different material instead of sand from what you see in this video clip, so we used coloured pattern coins instead. The coins had much weight different to the sand as it created less movement. The coins were flipping when moving up, creating a different flow pattern to the sand. The coins were making its own way of manipulating the music, which we all found interesting. What we all found out after the week was that we need to make improvements as the sand and coins would always move to the side of the circle, and it wouldn’t stay in the middle was it couldn’t reach the main part of the vibration allowing it to remain stationary which we didn’t like. To improve on that, we will make a dome instead of the circle boundary where the sand and coins will flow down to the middle of the speaker to reach the central part of the vibration.
On the first day of studio class, we got give some tasks to do in under one hour, on the second day we got given a task book called “Grapefruit” written by Yoko ono and with the book we had to do some of the sayings that Yoko ono had written in the book. On the third day, we had to create 2D and 3d lines on CV Automatism software. Here are some of those tasks I have done.
TASK: Draw 1000 lines. For this task, I have chosen an A1 size card paper to draw the lines on. When completing the task I used a ruler to finish the lines. The long lines across the paper weren’t 1000 lines so I thought, what if the smaller lines that are connected to the bigger lines counted as one line which would actually complete the task. TASK: Make three identical drawings of the same ‘weight ‘ using different materials. For this task, I first used a blue tracing paper to go over with a pen into the white paper, then for the second one I used a pencil to make the rectangular shape and lastly I used a light yellow colour tape to create the rectangular shape. Grapefruit: Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street. For this task I took a piece of my canvas with was unfinished painting and I left it outside on the floor of a street outside my house. I have created linear lines on negative space using the AUT CV Automatism software. The negative space acting the linear line brings out a various shapes. There are triangular and usual shapes created by the software. I printed out the image above and played around with the image on the printing scanner to create usual bend of shapes. Here is the linear lines acting on the positive space. Again it makes triangular and usual shapes. Here I’m again playing around with the printing scanner to create bending forms of shapes using the image from above.
The image here shows the concept of exploring the emotions of the women in the picture. A dark yellow card paper is being traced over with the gardening net fence on it, and all the drawings are in a square crossed line like how the gardening net fence looks and the water tears running down her face creates a sad emotion, as the original image had a very emotional state of the face. It accomplishes an idea of sadness and despair—the idea of sadness and despair links around the concept of restriction. When we are restricted from what we want, it creates a sad emotion within ourselves, and that has to be what this piece of work is trying to show.This work has been faxed out from the previous piece, using fax paper to relate to the original work.The fax paper from the early piece looks to be stretched out and extended. The stretch of the image on the fax paper copies the movement of the tears.The sketched out work here shows the development of the image from 2D to 3D creating a realistic state of work. The women’s body is a traced out drawing of the gardening net fence drawn in straight square lines. The women’s face is a sketch of my friend Riko. The piece of work here is a copied out fax paper from the image above and been printed out of the fax machine. The blank white part of the fax paper outside the women’s body has been folded into creases. The folding technique was to show how things around you can be unclear and cloudy which kind of restricts your mind from the truth. The fax paper here has been extended and stretched further out to create a path for the tears. Creating the path of tears show how the tears have a story behind them before it comes out and the path shows the flow of the story to its end. The way the paper extended was when I held and swerved the paper during the printing of the fax paper in the fax machine. In the piece here I have used different materials and fax paper from my ideas and work before to bring back and relate to the idea of restriction. For the work here I have used different types of materials such as paint, ink, tracing paper, glue and fax paper. The works here is a fax paper copy of the image above. I have used yellow, orange and red paints to create fire. The paint was applied to the fax paper by using a palette knife. The fire was added on to show that the fax paper is being burnt up and to began the next development stage. The fire also shows the raging emotion of the women as she can’t escape from the state she is in. The next development stage was to make the work more realistic and to bring the materials out of the page. Here I have painted a real face on canvas paper with varieties of paints. The black paint from the top is moving down. I have used a palette knife to make the black paint come down and I added too much black paint to make it thicker so that it comes and stands out of the painting. On the piece of work here I explored the techniques and flow of water. Firstly I painted the white piece of paper with black painting creating an image of a tornado. I made the tornado to show the idea of roughness to relate it back to my past work. The rough scenes of the tornado are that it destroys humans properties with gives people sad feelings of emotions and the blue watercolour shows peoples tears over the destruction. The blue watercolour portraits the tears. In the piece here I have used different types of materials such as dark blue water paint, black paint, palette knife and gardening net fence. The same ideas and concept from the above piece are being shown here. I painted a form of a tornado again with black paint to develop the idea. The object at the end of the paper is black paint being painted over the gardening net fence into the white paper. I want the object to look like a building as the tornado tries to destroy it. As the tornado slowly disappears at the end of the piece, the tears slowly disappears. The second to last Finial piece. ‘TORNADO’This the first part of my final work. To create this I used various colours of paint and a palette knife to shape the white colour hands. The face has no tears left since the tears have disappeared. The hands were made of white paint and laid out by the palette knife. The image here was created by black paint and I wanted to that the mid-evil age prison gate is about to disappear showing that the restriction of space is leaving as she is set free. The disappearing effect was done by pouring water into the piece of work. Now she is sent free with her soul being free of more restriction, travelling around the world as the thick black paint represent the clouds where the water takes the form of wind and the blank white on the back showing the sky. The finial piece. ‘IMPRISONED WIDOW’ALL PIECES AND WORK. THE FINAL
On week 3 of palimpsest, I have decided to stick with this picture to develop further, explore, and experiment. I want to further expand on this image because of the idea of restriction that it shows. The concept of restriction owns many theories and ideas around it, which I’m interested and excited to work on, leading it to make it easier for me to work on and understand.I’m playing around with different ideas in this next image using the gardening net fence on top of the faxed paper extended and widened up by the fax machine. I have used the gardening net fence in curled up tube sized position right top of the fax paper to create an imprisoned atmosphere to show that the women have been captured by the net and the effect of the fax machine creating a long dropping sad face from the women.From the previous image I have trace the gardening net fence using a ruler onto the fax paper this way the idea of restriction has been put onto the image as the crossing lines create a block barrier of a dark age prison gate. The prison gate concepts the meaning of being behind a prison room where you are not available to have much space to move around you limiting your movement where the idea of restriction is shown.This is the same image as before but has been through the fax machine and has been extended and widened with. Using the image here I wanted to experiment on the lines of the prison gate.With the image here, I further explored the extending style of the fax paper and the fax machine effect on the lines and the image. I have taken a close-up look at the woman’s face to review that she creates an emotion of sadness behind the prison bars as she is restricted to say in one zone.
The same image from before but have been crunched up in a ball of paper and then undone. The crunched-up effect creates an idea of roughness. The shape of the crunched-up piece of paper shows a landscape of earth like mountains and land. From a human perspective, the mountain can be rough and windy to deal with as you’re climbing up. Also, when climbing up big and higher mountains, we are restricted to oxygen and heat.I have used the previous image and have taken it through the fax machine again. This time I made the image longer. Then I took the image and traced the paper with a 4B pencil over the drying metal gripped surface under the sink. After I took the paper over the fax machine again, creating a different outcome which I was thrilled with at the end on how it turned out. The tracing of the material shows the other side of the prison gate.I’m so proud of how this piece came together. For this image, I scanned it through the fax machine. While scanning the paper through the machine, I tried expanding and twisting the paper, which made a long and starched out piece of work. After I crumbled up the paper into a ball of paper, then spread back out into the before position. The aftereffect turned the paper into a rough and delicate state.
