Controlling Perfection.
Modern Thought Utopianism /
Moieties
Utopia An idealistic society possessing a perfect sociopolitical legal system.
Utopianism
The views and habits of a visionary or idealist sometimes beyond realization.
Moieties Functional groups are specific groups of atoms within molecules that are responsible for the characteristic chemical reactions of those molecules.
Cooking Pot. - Our Ingredients
1.
Replicating a system of understanding, to show an idea “perfection”.
2.
“Achieving Perfection”
Separated in parts brought together creating a harmony.
3.
A complete work of fiction, ultimately an illusion of perfection. A realization of ideals.
Interview Dr. Mark Taylor.
Going into this co-design project, with my partner and my subject’s being Utopianism and Moieties, I had a brief knowledge of Utopia, from previous reading and research. On the other hand with absolutely no knowledge of moieties at all or what they are, my main task at the start of this project was to discover what a moiety is, and then to develop my knowledge to a stage that I can comfortably talk about them within my modern thought project to others. Then once my knowledge on both subjects was furthered I could then contribute and move forward with developing our project within visual research and then ideas. I chose my interviewee on the reasons being, having a vast knowledge on organic chemistry which with some surface level research on moieties I had discovered covered the subject. Also I knew that he would be able to explain and breakdown the subject to a understandable level for my to quickly be able to respond with questions to build a wide idea on them, knowing him from 4 years ago as he taught me chemistry & biology when I was at Kings College, when he was just head of science. A great teacher, and a man with a great knowledge of his subject. Dr. Mark Taylor, is the Assistant Principal at Kings College Guildford an academy specialising in the arts and technology. Also holds positions Head of Science and responsible for the running of the Sixth Form. Mark studied chemical engineering at Surrey University, and a doctorate in chemical engineering.
The core subject of his Phd, was establishing methods of creating more environmentally friendly processes, focusing on making beer in as he describes, “Making beer in a cleaner, lighter, brighter way”. Starting his professional career as a chemical weapons inspector, which involved Mark spending 6 months in Baghdad looking for weapons of mass destruction. After this travelling to Africa working on a sustainable technology project in North Kenya, extracting essential oils from the local flora using steam, such as a plant called “Leleshwa”, which the local habitants have been using for years for rubbing on wounds as a pain & healing relief, working alongside Bodyshop to develop the properties of this plant. When this project came to an end, with his close links with Surrey University he spent some time teaching undergraduates which is were he says “I got the teaching bug!” Explaining further that he felt, “If you really want to do this, there’s only one place to do it at the business end, and I saw secondary as real business end. And that’s were it happens, that’s were you make a difference!” So after a short qualification conversion course he started working at Kings College Guildford, “And that was 10 years ago, and I’m still here, and you’re back interviewing me!” I knew off some of the things Mark had done over his career, and on what I did know is how I based my decision on selecting a candidate to best suit my options for the interview on moieties.
Interview Dr. Mark Taylor.
It worked out better than I could of thought, he really had a great deal to talk about on the subject, and he broke down the subject so well for me to understand everything. Organising the meeting, he was at first confused on what I was asking him about, and he had good cause to as I was completely off the mark and heading in the wrong direction with my research on functional groups. Once we met and talked about the subject before starting the full interview he quickly steered me in the right direction. After finding out more about Mark, and affirming further why I chose to ask him for his help. I took the interview into the scientific direction asking about his preference, “I can teach all the subjects, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, I think my preference is to teach chemistry, I think that its accessible to young people, it gives them some of the answers to some of there questions.” An affirming statement to hear heading into a interview based on chemistry and seeking information on moieties of which I needed many answers. Describing my project to him without giving away to much to inform his answers in anyway, during the interview the clarity of finding a joining part between the two subjects starting to become clear in my head. “All molecules, particularly organic molecules like those that make up you and I and the world around us, have a function. And that function is defined by what’s called the functional group of the molecule, so that functional group will define what that molecule does.
And moiety is another word for that functional group.” This quick and easy explanation he gave me at the very beginning of the interview, really instantly described what a moiety was perfectly for me, but I still wanted him to simplify it further. Although the main outcome from this interview was to gather knowledge on moieties I also really wanted it to help my partner and I find the bridge between the two subjects to be able to use our collaboration of thoughts to create a great final piece. I tried to develop my interview as it went on, although I had all my questions written down to ask Mark, I found my self asking more about things that would pop into my head as we talked. After the interview I was telling him some initial ideas we were had on combining the two subjects, talking about the coming together of various parts, for example both subjects are made up of strict systems, with various levels, components and rules, and if any part of the system fails, the entire system fails. He explained the simplicity of this when he was talking about ester’s “If we take one molecule, and its functional groups or moieties are top left and bottom right, and this molecule creates an orange smell, if we switch these two around then this creates a lemon smell.” In terms of scale, this describes perfectly how such a subtle change can create such a large difference to the whole.
Co-Design Case Study.
Co-Design Case Study.
Our collaboration hit a brick wall before we could even start, seen as anyone in the class had a choice of one subject which they had to then research on there own, but then we had our names pulled out of a hat to create the partnerships. Myself and Karen were partnered up, only to discover we had both researched utopianism. We quickly resolved the situation easily, by deciding to research another one of the subjects together, which was moieties. And we both found that it was a subject we neither had any idea about, which was a good thing within project like this. We had no preconceptions or prior knowledge so we could completely jump into the subject and find out everything we could from a fresh. We both combined our research on utopianism, reading Thomas Moore’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, watching movies like Gattaca and Logan’s Run. Was first port of call when beginning the research stage of Utopia, then furthering research we started looking at William Morris and his work, his ideals, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Within such a wealth of research its hard to pinpoint certain parts that you want to focus on when you have to much material, but we both found similar parts fascinating and quickly whittled our research down into condensed and diverse sections. Starting with the utopian ideas from Thomas Moore, the use of strict laws and rules that the Utopian’s have to live by in order for Utopia to be the way it is, this idea of perfect harmony between people,created by order, and complete control creating a community working together like a well oiled machine.
Another from Moore’s Utopia was his description of the landscape and dwelling of the people, they all live in almost identical housing all the same shape, positioned in certain ways, all in a greater plan for the working of the city, town or village. This description of structure, gave us vivid inspiration towards image making, representing a shape coming together perfectly creating a harmony together and becoming a system of its own. This brings us to the main focus we extracted from Utopianism, the ‘system’ everywhere we look within the Utopianism ideals; writing, film production, theories, everything boils down to one thing and thats a system. Each take on Utopia varies from a little to a lot, but one theme run’s throughout and the system is recognisable within them all, so this is what we decided to further investigate. So that brings us to moieties, we both started by trying to get some sort of grip on what this alien word meant, starting with the internet to try and gather somewhere to go forward with the research but not finding much to go on, we found it tough at first to really get into any depth with the subject. This is how the interview I conducted, played a great role for me in developing an understanding of what a Moiety is and how it worked, when I was arranging to meet Dr. Taylor was quite hard to do as he had little free time. Being assistant principal at a high school, also being head of his department and overlooking sixth form, combined with three little girls at home, he was very hard to get pinned down for a conversation.
Co-Design Case Study.
But after a bit of organising he managed to find a spare hour that we could come in to visit him. Unfortunately Karen, couldn’t make the interview, which didn’t harm that much as I filmed everything it would have been great for her to have met him and speak with him on moieties. Karen was trying to find someone to interview on Utopianism, but as far as I know she never seemed to find anyone. We then did try to find someone together, as we had originally split the task each finding one person from each subject. I started looking sending emails to various Utopian communities, websites, writers that I could locate, find addresses or numbers for. But I also was unsuccessful with emails being unresponsive or no longer in use, and the same for phone numbers. So I decided to focus on finding someone to talk to about Moieties. As we had so much research together on Utopia and many others in the class had also chose the subject everyone was sharing what they had found out. This is where the research on the Moiety really turned around and we found direction. The only problem I think thinking back, was that we had pulled so much focus from our Utopianism research that it heavily influenced our research and thought process on moieties, it’s hard to pull yourselves backwards when you have already found direction. This is probably why the ‘Modern Thought’ project is laid out in this way, that both people research different subjects and then combine there findings. Even though that being a negative there is a great positive in that we had a solid foundation for an idea and we were ready to develop with the next part of the research. So after researching as much as possible about moieties within the parameters of the Internet and the library,
there didn’t seem to be a great wealth of information around us on them. This is were again the interview played a pivotal role, as most of what we thought we knew about them was not exactly right, wether this is because of how we had interpreted everything or if we were looking at unreliable sources I’m not sure, one thing is for certain that the wikipedia page on the Moiety can be easily misconstrued, so we made sure to steer clear of it after Dr. Taylor had told me in polite terms, most of what I thought I knew about them wasn’t right at all. We know had pretty much gained enough knowledge to push forward our ideas and fuse them together, and we stuck pretty much from the off, with the idea of systems, and structure. With the Moiety being a molecule made up of atoms’ and with what Mark had told us, we thought a lot about how if one part of the Moiety is shifted of changes, the whole system then changes or breaks down. In which is exactly the same within Utopianism, if one part of this grand system falls out of shape the entire thing then ceases to work, if one person doesn’t work as part of the system it all fails. And again we found similarities between the two with the visualisation of structure, looking at moieties although physically everything around us is made up of molecules and atoms which each contain a moiety, the scientific diagrams we found of various functional groups with moieties were all illustrated with hexagons, and octagons, joining together creating a representation of the atom’s coming together working as a ‘system’ and creating a ‘structure’. Which we thought just fitted so well with the Utopian ideals of each part coming together creating a working system, surrounded and living within a perfect structured habitat.
Co-Design Case Study.
We developed these ideas further, experimenting with the shapes and combination of levels to create a structure. This part of the project is where the use of having two people working together really came in, both of us bringing an array of different skills to the table, Karen prefers to work with her hands and create work with traditional methods, using a wide range of materials, and would rather not use a computer for anything as she says she doesn’t really know how to use the relevant programmes etc. Which I had no issue with although I also like to work in hands on approach also, I was happy to take control of creating anything that needed to be done using certain software within my knowledge of how to use them. This proved to be quite a successful method, and it carried through most of the development process, we would sit and work together I would help with modelling and constructing things when needed, as she would sit next to me when I creating images or animating, editing film or photos etc. So we could both help each other to make the best of our combined skills. In creating the work, and coming up with a final production we had pretty much come down too three final ideas. The first, we had both had combined two separate ideas really, in which Karen had suggested that she could make these hexagon shaped 3D boxes out of foam board or even thin plywood, which I made me think of using them to creating a Utopian like skyline of different sized hexagon shaped skyscrapers and buildings is how it would seem from the side but from a birds eye view it would then appear as a diagram for a molecule as part of the human body, this would all be incased within the abdomen of a mannequin, as quite a clear
representation of the ‘system’, the society and the ‘structure’ but we decided to move away from that idea, not because we didn’t necessarily like it just we thought the idea could be taken a lot further than what we had as it seemed very literal. So secondly, again we were incorporating these 3D hexagons that Karen had suggested, which I was starting to get a little frustrated with as I couldn’t really see past them as they were always being put into any sort of idea that emerged. Which although I did like the idea of them I was starting to go off, and attempt to take a new direction. This was until she showed up at our next meeting with about ten different shapes and sizes of these 3D hexagons made out of Perspex, some with cotton wool and painted backdrops of clouds, and other with fire effects, and multi- coloured hexagons cut out and all in a mountain inside, which all looked absolutely great together. I had also brought some things along to show, being three different version of animations, one being a series of hexagons coming together to create a outline of the fictional map of Utopia we had found, which was like her models flashing different colours of the moieties and chemical representation, the second was hexagons swallowing each other and multiplying rapidly and slowly going from colder to warmer colours again a representation of the continuous system. The final and the one we both agree was the best, was loose hexagons bouncing around within and around each other, showing the calm neutral side of the molecule, slowly as the animation plays on, a reaction begins to happen and the colours begin to become more vibrant and warm as does the action as the starting moving more aggressively.
Co-Design Case Study.
And which set us of on our third and final idea, which came about purely from our development and combination of work, which is exactly what this project was all about. We wanted to encapsulate our core ideas, of the ‘system’ and ‘structure’ in more than just a visual representation. So our final idea came about, in keeping with combining skills an using all our resources between us we decided on a combination of thoughts. The animation I had created would be projected on to a reflective surface, playing a loop of the hexagon reaction playing out in front of us. Mimicking that of a molecule come together and then reacting and starting over and replicating, this reflective surface would have the diagram of the Moiety cut out from it leaving the hexagons and entire outline of the make up of a functional group on it, free standing roughly a few feet in front of a wall. This would then just allow the light; hexagons, colour animating in the exact shape of a Moiety. The 3D transparent hexagons would sit on the surface of the reflective wall allowing light to bounce through them creating a structure. Each part of the installation has its own control, the cut out will be covered by a curtain, the reflective wall will need to be raised on a pulley, and the projector will have a switch needed held down to operate, this well then create a ‘system’ with each person needed for the system to work, and if one person fails to do so, the installation becomes in active. And so we made this on a smaller scale and we tested in various different ways.
Christian Boltanski
Scott Snibbe - Compliant
Lumigraph Film (c. 1969) by Elfriede Fischinger
- Initial Ideas Growth & Community • Building an Idea. • Becoming a whole. • Big wheel, lots of small cogs.
- Initial Ideas Purpose & Landscape • Every part has its purpose. • Fluently connecting for the whole to become completely operational. • Perfection is the ultimate, but a reaction can disrupt the system easily. • Relative to the entity.
- Initial Ideas Manipulating the outcome • A continuous link. • A succession of connections to achieve full potential.
- Developing Ideas Layers & Interaction • Creating the depth of a landscape, using three layers of light. • Layering light, with shadow and reflection. • Recreating core fundamentals, without all three working parts the whole cannot exist.