Week 3

Moving on from week 2

From page 123 of the reading “The Beautiful And The Nice” by philosopher, Vilém Flusser,

Every scientist is also an artist and a politician, every politician is also a scientist and an artist, and every artist is also a scientist and a politician.

I mean like…really? Are scientist, artist and politician all alike? This absolute statement seems to convince us into believing that artist have the power to do what scientists and politicians can do in the world we live today, which is obviously not true. If we read into the context of where this quote lies, we will see more than what we have already seen. Artist have the power to create like politician and scientist does. This ability to create differs as to what we propose to create. What do we as artist propose to create then? We propose to create a unique experience with beauty that appeals to human.

In short: every human communication is an aesthetic one, as it always transmits a model for concrete experience, and in this sense, we are all artists.

Week 3 Presentation

From Week 2, we decided to broaden on the idea of hidden vs noticeable from our Week 1 ideation. Our in-class presentation for week 3 can be visited in this link.

To elaborate on what we have presented on week 3, we have selected a few slides to talk about.

We start off creating a mood board from research on artists, designers and architects who experiment and explore different ways of incorporating materials and forms to convey their ideas and propose an experience. One example would be an uncanny way of using concrete to describe the form of a pillow. Another would be Kengo Kuma’s Chokkura Plaza which was constructed out of preserved stones from its original building.


Next we shared our conceptual direction which is the relationship between Personal and Shared space which we developed from Hidden vs Noticeable.

A mood board is not sufficient to give us an insight into what kind of installation we want to make, so we looked into a few existing installation that deals with the tension of personal and public space in the historical context of a real environment. “Crater Lake” by 24 degrees studio ties in most closely with our initial explorations into human and the act of sitting.

Cocoon concept

We further developed our concept of “sitting” along with an experience of a private space in a public space with a cocoon concept.

Some sketch iterations we did to describe the form of the installation
Styrofoam sketch models to explore movement produced by different forms of the cocoon

 

Reflection

After our presentation, constructive feedbacks were given to us. We decided to return to our initial point of juxtaposing what is hidden and noticeable in a space – creating a space that provides students privacy and a meeting place for social interaction at the same time using sustainable materials that speaks a narrative that is unique to NTU and the students’ life.

There are some other ideas we had yet to explore:

Rejecting our initial direction

We realised that we need an independent direction/ a significant characteristic of our installation that would allow it to stand on its own without a strong dependency on a function to bring out its true value. Function should not be the initial focus of our project. It should not spur our reason to create. Neither should we be focusing on how the object works nor how the form is designed to bring out the most effective utilitarian value. Our idea needs something more significant than a utilitarian value, a material representation and a beautiful form. It needs a reason, a story to tell, a narrative, a unique experience, a memory to speak on its own.

The interactive part of our installation should be anchored by an existing memory which we would look into for next week (week 4).