Explorations go on.
The most difficult part of this project hasn't actually been the production. Sitting quietly for hours, watching these delicate, hand-built forms take shape is an wonderfully meditative process. They are built through intuition and patience; no rulers, no pulling measurements from AUTOCAD, no actual measuring at all. It is a process of creating problems for oneself; you begin by cutting two arbitrary shapes from a paperboard sheet and fastening them together at one edge. From there, all measurements are made by dropping the shape on to more paperboard, dotting the end points with a tiny mark. Then you cut another arbitrary shape from those two marks, creating more problems for yourself. But what results from this playful little exercise is these hyper-digital forms!
I was frustrated by how arbitrary the design process can afford to be through technology, so, in effect, I decided to poke fun at it.
This all started because I wanted to see how irrational a three-dimension object could be before the eye stopped believing it, interpreting it instead as planes of color. In our era of digital manipulation, it turns out, the boundary is pretty porous. Exposing the same sheet of film multiple times should allow the expression of the form in its entirety; similar to the way an architectural drafting will feature a south elevation, a west elevation, and so on. But these structures reject this sort of presentation; rotate the thing along one edge and it just wanders into some new unrelated position, rather than allowing the continued recognition of some distinguishing datum line or significant plane.
There's a bit of restlessness in this project. Some images are a simply a photograph of a single sheet of A4 paper (the second from the top). Some are an exploration of the blue-to-white-to-orange shift in sunlight over the course of the day (below). Everything comes back to this exploration of structure, though. Real things in real daylight. Corbusier's "play of masses in light."
Thanks for coming back to look. I promise I've been working hard. Got the scraps to prove it.
