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Cultural Event #1

For my first cultural event, I went to the soldering workshop hosted by Kristen on January 31 in the EDP building. First she explained how soldering worked and used the whiteboard to draw out what good and bad soldering would look like. Then she gave a demonstration before letting us try it. 

This was a really fun event! I hadn't ever had the opportunity to solder before. It was much easier than I expected it would be, and surprisingly easy to learn. I think it’s a super important skill and I feel like now I have the ability to make more complex electrical components/ circuits when needed. 

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Cultural Event #2

My second cultural event was the Fieldworks: Creative Research exhibit in the Vicki Myhren Gallery in Shwayder. While I wasn't able to make it to any of the Thursday night artist talks, I was able to look at the gallery on my own between classes. 

I thought it was a really cool opportunity to see so many professors' artworks all in one place. Kristen’s 3D printed fabric was really inspiring and made me super excited for wearables next quarter. I also really enjoyed looking at Scott’s video- it’s really interesting to see the professional artist side of people that I’m more familiar with as peers. 

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Cultural Event #3

My last cultural event was Katie Caron's Cross Sections (2017) at the downtown branch of the Denver Public Library. It's made of acrylic, silicone, LEDs, mixed media. This was the most interesting piece I found at that gallery. It actually was really beautiful, but it honestly came across better in my pictures better than it did in person. 

I wasn't sure of the intended meaning until I looked at her website afterwards. It’s part of a larger exhibit featuring three 11′ tall styrofoam pieces and video projection mapping. These five “cross sections” mean a lot more in context of the larger piece. It’s a bit ironic that her installation examined “unchecked capitalism” but the individual pieces themselves have been dismembered so they can go up for sale. 

http://katiecaron.com/The-Middle-Landscape

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Week 10: Reflection

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2830198

It’s pretty difficult to see in the pictures, but I ended up using a highlighter to trace along the connecting ridges. In person, it really helped to visually connect all of the pieces and show the height of the wrinkles. 

All in all, I think this was a very successful piece and I definitely learned a lot and improved over the course of this quarter. 

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Week 10: Progress

I thought about stacking the pieces on top of each other to show off the differences in dimensionality. I thought the repetition was cool but it was ultimately a little underwhelming and felt lazy. I also tried arranging them in a square with all of the tall edges in the center, but that felt super basic so I scrapped that pretty quickly.

Then I decided that I really wanted to make the creases the center of attention. I tried lining them up in several different ways until I really figured out the arrangement that made the most sense. I still had to think about painting techniques, but I felt super finalized on the positioning. 

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Week 10: Inspiration

To cut out the vacuforms, I placed them back on the wood block and followed along the bottom edge with an xacto knife. It was a surprisingly fast method- I had them all cut out in just a few minutes. 

At first, I had tried lining up the empty forms with the edge of the table or taping along the bottom to match the heights more perfectly, but I ended up going with the quick and dirty method. I think the cuts actually turned out cleaner that way because I didn’t have any hesitation marks, just clean lines. 

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Week Nine: Reflection

I tore off the excess border with a boxcutter because I haven’t taken the engineering wood shop certification class yet and I live in a dorm. It was probably not the best safety practice, but it was effective. Once I shaved the edges as closely as I could, I hand sanded the edges with 100 grit until they were flush. I also knocked down the random line in the middle of the piece. Then I used 120 over the entire surface to get rid of the tear-out from the bit and really make sure the edges were flush. I finished with some 150, then wiped the block down and applied three coats of Danish oil to the whole thing. 

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Week Nine: Progress

I spent a solid 15 minutes vacuuming sawdust before I was able to see the final product. I thought it turned out really nicely! I still ended up with a border even though I used the new machine settings we discussed in class. It’s possible that I set my zeros too far inside the block. 

The really tall corner doesn’t have any excuse to look like that. There’s literally no reason why that happened. Bizarre. The machine started at that corner, so there was nowhere to go but down after that. The last picture is how scary close I came to destroying the jig. All in all: a really short print time (less than an hour for the whole thing) and a pretty cool piece. 

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Week Nine: Inspiration

This is the final design I landed on. I was feeling really unsure about it and was planning to scrap it and start over, but my classmates had really positive feedback for the design so I decided to keep it. It ended up printing out a bit differently than I designed it to, but I’m still very happy with how it turned out. 

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Week Eight: Reflection

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Week Eight: Progress

I started out by making a vector image to try in blender. I didn’t really like it. I moved on and started playing with photos. The results were definitely more dynamic, but they didn’t feel like anything original, just basic landscapes. 

I went back to Affinity to try my hand at vectors again. I made one piece using gradients which felt like progress in the right direction. Then, I decided that I wanted a bit more control over the gradients. So I made a shape and copied that shape within itself, making each layer a bit lighter and adjusting nodes as necessary, until it came to a peak. I pasted the final shape around a few times, then pulled the whole thing into Photo and blurred it. 

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Week Eight: Inspiration

I was really inspired by Laleh and Chris’s Transitional Fragments piece. I love that you can see the step-over, and the rainbow reflections on the aluminum is stunning. 

I also love Ralf Bawcker’s “Nowhere” pieces. Using the CNC on foam is something I’m dying to explore. 

Last, I really like Daniel Widrig’s Drapery. I didn’t think of it during the designing process, but I think it influenced my final piece. I certainly was aiming for a fabric-like texture and I think he does that really well here. 

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Week Seven: Reflection

In the end, I think this was a successful project. I learned a lot in a short amount of time and I made something I’m proud of. During critique, people speculated that the grey piece was everything from a rose or antlers, to intestines, worms, or the poop emoji. A few people said the exact words I was attempting to convey: stretch vs shrink and deconstructed. 

I think the final presentation would have been stronger if I had been able to work at a larger scale, but that would have meant exceeding the four hour time constraint. I think the shapes work really well together to form a cohesive piece. 

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Week Seven: Progress

I decided that I wanted the model to expand in every direction, but I still wanted it to be simple. My original plan was to attempt to mold the final print by submerging it in hot water and compressing it between two bowls to give it a nice curvature. I thought that this would really sell the stretch vs shrink concept.

The tubes were surprisingly strong, but the intersections were not. It was admittedly my fault- one of the small arms broke off when I was testing the rigidity. That was a bummer, but I figured I could superglue it back together. But when I tried to do that, I broke an entire section of the model. It didn’t look half bad with only two arms, so I decided it was time to stop messing with it and just planned to nix the molding idea and focus on keeping the model whole until presentations. 

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Week Seven: Inspiration

I had my generative piece, but I still needed a second piece to connect with it. As much as I enjoyed sculpting in Meshmixer, I decided that I would probably end up with a more polished final piece if I combined models from Thingiverse. 

My generative piece focused on compounding within oneself, so a natural pairing would be concerned with expanding outwardly. I found a really nice hollow tube on Thingiverse that was intended to be a ballpoint pen body. I did a quick test print to make sure it could print without support material. Then I started the early phase of thinking about how I wanted to turn the tube into a companion piece. 

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Week 6: Reflection

I think this print was really successful. I really like it’s hollow through the middle and I like how the top spiral comes across as tangled. I wish I had picked a different color, but I only had 4 hours on the sign up sheet so I didn’t think that I had time to changed the filament. 

The dissolvable material didn’t really dissolve for me. I placed it in the water bucket, swishing it around every minute or so. After 15 minutes, it was definitely goopy but it was really stuck on in a few places. I took it home and placed it in a bowl of water at home but even soaking it overnight didn’t help remove the last few pieces. 

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Week Six: Progress

After 5 more iterations of the antlers, I chose this model. I pulled it into Z-Suite and scaled it up as big as I could while keeping the print time under 4 hours.