week 1.
Virtual Environments Semester Two, 2013 India McKenzie Studnet no. 639234
Task 1.1
To create my measured drawings of the object, I first spent a few minutes in direct contact with the object, feeling the weight of it, its center of gravity, testing its flex, its resistance to pressure etc. I attempted to emulate the intimacy of being near my object and drawing precisely not from observation, but from analysis, as seen through the passionate descriptions of “making” Jenson’s book. The next stage was to select an appropriate scale for my drawings as it was too large to fit on the page and I selected a 1:5 scale based on the recommendations of my tutor. This proved to be sufficient. I then dimensioned the real-life object and translated it into the scale and transferred the outlines to the page. From here, it was simply a process of filling in the gaps and adding as much detail as was possible with this simple structure. I chose to draw a subset of the intersection of the span and spline as it is in this central core of the structure that the stability lies. This system of compression with the crossed wire holding the rods in place seemed at odds with the tensile structure of the skin + bone system that is the kite. However, whilst this joining seemed at odds with the system of observation, the stretching of the canvas from the apex of the diamond shape illustrated with fine simplicity the power of tension and aerodynamics in simulating flight with just a strip of canvas, 2 wooden rods and some sticky tape.
Whether it was the linguistic variations that did it, I found this tsk more difficult than I thought it would and I found myself no longer seeing an object, but a series of lines and shpes. Yet this confusion lead me to the conclusion that it was simply the abstraction of a whole into individual parts- folds of a piece of paper or pastry- that when seen collectively produce the magnificent folds of a croissant. The transition from the smooth and irregular lashings of the originnal image, the refinement into the geometry of 3 triangles with the central apex showed a process of reductive simplification that illustrated meticulous method to create such a dynamic form. To bring the entire formation of the croissant down to the apex intersection of the 3 triangles illustrated the starting point. Yet in order to reach this point, we were given a complete object and told to go backwards towards the origin. When thinking about this in relation to the semester task, it is opposite yet paradoxially the same. We begin with a concept and work backwards from the sketch design to establish a geometric pattern and form- we find a method to fit the design. Yet whilst this plays out, the final outcome is not fully realised until we reach the origin of the process which is both the start and the end. It is rather fitting that I spontaneously started drawing on the page in the bottom right and corner and worked bck towards the origin.
Task 1.2
week 1. summary Task 1.1: Included Task 1.2: Included Task 1.3: Complete Task 1.4: Complete Task 1.5: Complete Task 1.6: Complete