Opening reception went really well, and I even heard from a professor who went to see it the Friday it was open! I documented the installation fully as well as some people interacting with my exhibit. I also promoted my project on social media (Instagram and LinkedIn).
Anddddd..... guess who got the runner-up award.... :D
Overall very proud of what I accomplished on my own and as a group with my peers. So so happy with everything!!
I uploaded my photos to the onedrive for the website crew and once they are done troubleshooting, I'll be able to edit my page. Currently it just has my artist statement on it.
And then of course, there was deinstall. Which was hectic but got done and is over with. I was fully prepared with means of transport from the gallery back to campus and my apartment and helped others during deinstall.
I installed everything of mine and helped manage the uhual situation for install. I also prepped some cards for people to take home, all fully made in the fablab.
Goals: Reflect after final crit, do a little more research in light of it, and make final changes, committee work
This week was a bit of a breather for me and mainly involved some light research and organizing my thoughts on critique- what to change and what to keep.
Beyond, I did a lot of work iterating different designs for the graphics committee, focusing mainly on potential flyers.
I took Nancy's advice and revisited Mark Dion's Field Station of the Melancholy Marina Biologist at Governor's Island on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, there was also a half marathon so that was mildly disturbing.
Very cool. Wish I had his budget but alas....
In line with this, I also revisited my visual research of late 90s desks so make sure i was being authentic towards the era.
All of these are dated between 1990 and 2000 and mostly come from people's uploads to reddit or flickr.
I also laser cut some facades for the models inside the model to add a little visual interest and detail to indicate what the objects are.
Beyond that, I got my amazon supplies and could put those in the relevant spots, like attaching the IDs to the lanyard, connecting the headphones, and arranging the cotton gloves.
I also obtained a few miscellaneous items, like VHS tapes (probably won't include), a filing cabinet, a corkboard, more books, and some items i attained while urban spelunking.
And I was Ready! Unfortunately I was too excited and took pictures after I dismantled everything day of.... just put it together in your minds eye.
Most of the work dealt with setting up the table and finalizing the model on a platform with functioning lights. Arrangement was a big thing too. I brought some little knickknacks to populate the desk and wall and printed photos, documents, and even made a fake voicemail!
You can call this number: (417) - 501 - 5829
Overall, felt pretty good about my progress and ability to have this all ready for final crit day!
Goals: do everything, get to 99% of the 99% for final crit
BIG THINGS:
Redid the blueprint (redrew digitally, printed, exposed)
Edited CD script, recorded audio, and burned onto said CD
Obtained several items for the desk, both functional and some just as knickknacks/aesthetics (books, cd player, glasses, camera, cassette player, letter opener, pens, pin display case, frames)
Scoured old albums and public domain sources for period appropriate photos that I can doctor combined with my own film photos that are vague enough to not be out of place
Modelled a simple 3D version of the building to use in these photographs
Doctored several photos
Made some personal ephemera for the archivist's desk, including a riso'd rave poster, personal notes, and knickknacks
Found roughly 100 pages of period apprpaitoe gov't docs, of which some will remained unchanged and the others will be doctored
Trimmed a base for the arch. model
Started arranging the items to their final positions and experimenting with layout
Goals: Redraw the diagram for the blueprints, and make new id cards, obtain a table
GALLERY VISITS
I'll start with my least favourite exhibit, which was the ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’. This was I supposed my least favorite primarily because it felt the least relevant to what I was doing and also the least engaging. It was the most typical display of paintings in a gallery and did not take away from the work, but didn't necessarily add anything. I did however really appreciate the natural lighting from the skylight; it made the space feel way more vibrant and open as opposed the empty.
I found of the Chelsea galleries Camille Henrot's "A Number of Things" to be most applicable for the work I was doing, mainly in the arrangement of these medium-sized objects. It was a more engaging and gave the feel of a quirky mini themepark for adults. And there was a 2x2 foot cube. That was so me and my cube.
The green floor added the childlike playground aspect that Henrot was playing upon and I think encouraged the engagement of the objects, walking around and under. The most impressive was the large abstract structures that made the viewer feel small. But the medium objects were more appropriate to what I wanted to achieve. Honestly, I think the exhibit was a little too fun for what I wanted to achieve, but was most helpful in thinking about how people will be walking around the physical space of the objects.
There was also a gallery with a large hand that was holding a cat inside of it.
What was more helpful was the American Artist: Shaper of God at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. This was a multipart exhibit focused on Octavia Butler's works, primarily Parable of the Sower. This featured more archival elements, including an archive in a chicken coop, and a large-scale reading room featuring memorabilia relevant to the time period Butler was writing in and what would have been present within Parable of the Sower. The reading room was a set for the single channel video screen playing some videos made by American Artist set within the world of the novel. The desk with accumlualted materials was very helpful in what to include to indicate a personal life while still remaining relevant to the research aspect.
These are the id cards I've updated/reworked.
I also reworked the script a little bit after reading it through with my music and tech friends. IT WILL BE RECORDED THIS THURSDAY. And then I can burn the cd when I get home.
Goals: Rework blueprint, create cut and assemble mini scale models from chipboard
Philip took this UNCHARMING image of me. Anyways here's my blueprints. I kinda failed on the big one again but I've developed a new strategy where I don't need the some, just some fancy maneuvering. In any case, I used some of the old documents I made for the Milestone Crit as tests and can use that as some filler material for underneath more substantive materials.
Above is, respectively, the starting cutouts for the chipboard models, and then some of them after being glued/assembled. I laser-cut over a thousand of the little guys and each model has a thickness of 10, so I have over hundred of these of these models.
This week was mostly a crap ton of iterating on the same thing until it was right.
In other important news, I've finally got the foamcore so I can start building my architectural model! Big things are coming.
Goals: Resituate after crit.1, continue making ephemera and models, visit some key places for additional research
My main takeaway from the Milestone 1 Critique was to make a LOT more ephemera and nail down a context for which the ephemera and model is being situated. My two main options lie between making this a functional exhibit (i.e. more "polished") or making this a workspace dedicated to the act of archiving this mass attempt at overhauling Western archiving. I'm currently leaning towards the latter as it is in line with the original vision I conceived of all the way back at the end of Creative Studio II. It can be. lot more "personalized" that way and include things in a manner that museums aren't often motivated to display. I think it is also more true to the worldbuilding aspect of the project.
For research, I visited the Franz Kafka exhibition at the Morgan and went to the Met (for originally unrelated reasons) and took a look at the Paul Rudolph exhibit.
For the Kafka exhibit, I saw some different means of displaying personal objects to provide more context to Kafka's life.
This felt helpful more so in replicating these artifacts like the notebooks or the redlined manuscripts.
For the Paul Rudolph exhibit, I looked to the architectural drawings and models for reference in making my own, as well as the reason behind Rudolph's brutalist constructions. I might want to add some complexity to the design of my model, but I'm debating that since there's an important aesthetic aspect to the "purity" of it.
I really liked the size the drawings were at and want to mimic the draftsmanship and size for an element in my own "Collection." I might even just use newsprint for these to add a quick layer "aging" to the material.
There was also another exhibit at the Met, Flight into Egypt, that I thought had an interesting element...
This reading room full of manuscripts you could read and hold (not that many people were) provided a nice departure from the usual "look, don't touch routine."
As for my work this week, I did some new tests with my blueprint, collected new materials, and am primed to re-make it (likely at some point today since the sun's out.
As I'm still waiting for my Blick materials, I can't make the outside of the model yet but I did draw out the miniatures I wanted inside of it on an illustrator document to be laser-cut on chipboard. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to do any of the cutting yet because the FabLab's been closed all week. They'll get cut on Thursday, godwilling.
Beyond that, I thought some more about the execution of the rpesentation and elements to include to encourge the transfer of touch between exhibit and audience. Also rethinking the architectural model as an attempted reconstruction made by the "unseen archiver." I think I might include things like a chair or cottons gloves for people to use. I've been mainly looking to Mark Dion again for relevant inspiration since a lot of his work mimics the original vision I had when starting to think about Capstone.
Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist, the artist’s first U.S. survey, examines 30 years of his pioneering inquiries into ho
I've also procured a digital copy of Dion's "The Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy" and will be reviewing that alongside "The Management of Archives" by T. R. Schellenberg, which is a 1965 print copy. I'm inclined to include the latter as part of the exhibition as well since the time period would be congruent with my own. Shoutout to Carrie for finding it off the street!(?).
Goals: Go to the model train store, purchase any extra model materials, create additional contextual materials (artifacts)
This week I was prepping materials that weren't in the supplies order. This meant mainly the additional contextual materials meant for worldbuilding: blueprints, fabricated documents, artifacts.
The bulk of the work came in form of completing the blueprint. I made this the traditional way using cyanotype. The first step was taking clear sheets and drafting what would be developed onto the watercolor paper.
Then came development. The final size was roughly 18 by 24 inches. It ultimately took two attempts. The second one is the one I went with since it developed correctly, but there was some warping. Ultimately, I think it works to age the document.
During this process, I visited Manhattan to go to the Red Caboose, a model train store. Very expensive hobby that I will not be uptaking in the near future.
Nevertheless, I was able to buy some of the lower-priced supplies, including trees, some lighting for inside the model, and small model people for scale. I think the size of the people is perfect for what I'm going for.
I also made some additional amazon purchases for cheaper model supplies, mainly for lighting and grass texture to surround my architectural model.
In addition, I drafted the rough copies for the fabricated documents and journal entries--finalized copies pending. I also made the graphics for the button pins I'm using; they're currently printed and later today I'm going to make them into pins during a particular club meeting since I don't normally have access to the equipment.
I feel good about my progress this week and I anticipate receiving my supplies to create the models.
Goals: List Purchase Requests, Weekly Schedule, plan/draft additional contextual materials
I've made my purchase requests, consisting of a large MDF panel, hinges, spray paint, and chipboard.
The first three materials are for the cuboidal speculative architectural model that will serve as the centerpiece. The latter material is for the interior models within the cube, mimicking the shapes of common (and uncommon) archival fixtures (e.g. shelves file cabinets, digital databases/servers). I've also drafted up my weekly schedule for the upcoming couple months with a huge chunk of working fixing to be finished for the First Milestone Crit. Epic.
In other news, I've drafted some rough roughs for the additional contextual materials I have planned to build the archive around the Cube. Blueprints (made the "traditional" way), fabricated "official" documents/journal entries, doctored photographs, and a secret fourth thing (I don't have a secret fourth thing).
Not much else for this week.
Also here's documentation for the protoyping for last week:
This week I took a trip to material reality archive central-- the American Museum of Natural History and made a backdrop for a potential diaroma.
RESEARCH
For my research, I took a trip to the Natural History Museum in New York, with a focus on the early human culture exhibits and the natural resources ones. In addition, I had a particular interest in seeing the dioramas and how they designed the hall of biodiversity.
During my trip there, I noticed a lot of upkeep issues, almost inclusively within the Asian diaspora and geography section, that weren't present in the North American or European ones. Cracked walls, chipped paint to name a few. Also! Less care for the presentation of the dioramas especially. Whereas the American and European ones had the lighting carefully suited (position, color) to match the diorama's depicted environment, the others were often neutral and from one spot above. But who cares. It's the American museum or whatever.
I found the miniature dioramas and the forced perspective ones in the tree section most useful to look at for reference for form and in some cases content.
The tree one especially has successful trompe-l'œil. I like the miniatures, but I think for my project... there's shouldn't be any people. I want there to be a sense of life abandoned, a haunting.
These two exhibits above better capture the element of haunting that permeates an archive. Tools no longer handled, cold on the ground. Domestication left to be undomesticated by time. So much you can infer and yet so much you can never know. What are we implying about these lives abandoned?
The museum does try to confront its past archiving measures and misrepresentations. But honestly this whole exercise falls a little flat when all you do is keep the scene unchanged with some text boxes. It's innocuous enough at a glance that a child can simply continue to have this image be the one embedded in their mind. The image is a lot more powerful here than the text will ever be with how its displayed. Better to scrap the scene entirely in my opinion, but these are major errors that exist in archival practice, especially at the institutional level.
I am not a fan of how the hall of biodiversity is designed. While it does exhibit the wide range of biological development on this planet, its hard to truly see and appreciate it since everything is so claustrophobic and at too high a level for the average visitor, and especially children, to take in.
I ended the visit by seeing the massive animal dioramas. They enthralled me as a child and still do. The trompe-l'œil is impressive and the backdrops are expressive without losing the naturalism that makes them convincing. These are what I used as a basis for my prototype.
PROTOTYPE
For this week's prototype, I painted a potential backdrop for a diorama on cardboard. The cardboard was already folded at the center and I wanted to very rudimentarily replicated the roundedness of the museum's backdrops.
I have the backdrop depict the environment for the architectural models that would hypothetically be placed before it, offering a view of natural and man-made organic structures in the distance. There are biometric domes, building from rock towers, and massive stalks meant to mimic prehistoric mushrooms.
Besides some technical details that can be remedied on future iterations, I'm uncertain about featuring such a backdrop in future iterations. The goal would this to be a relatively easier task for me to accomplish that can communicate a good deal of information and implication to the uninformed viewer.
This week I drafted up some posters and then printed them using the risograph.
But first, I spent some time familiarizing myself with some worldbuilding projects that have gained some notoriety online.
RESEARCH
Mystery Flesh Pit has been a staple reference point for the worldbuilding aspect of my capstone. This week I looked back at the fake advertisements and government-issued flyers the creator Trevor Roberts fabricated.
Lesle Kieu's "Recovered Documents" is a great source that stays true to its artistic style while still keeping in line with the found document style exposition. It includes some gnarly illustrations serving as photographs and realistic communications. It's very tactical and served as a major stylistic inspiration for a personal comic I've been cooking on the back burner.
ANALOG HORROR AT 476 MHz. Unsettling shorts in the found footage/VHS aesthetic from Kris Straub (Candle Cove, Broodhollow, Ichor Falls).
Local58 was one of the first of its kind in the genre now known as Analog Horror (in fact, it was what coined the term). While the vast majority of this content is videographic, it is still a strong example of worldbuilding through limited channels of media.
The Hookland Guide run by David Southwell is a semificitonal exploration of the lost county of Hookland, England. It emphasizes word over visual medium, although it does semi-regularly employ black-and-white photography in the posts/entries. The author describes it as "the psychogeography of a place that doesn’t exist built around the real myth circuits, Albionic shadows and actual places of a 1970s childhood."
My biggest takeaway from these projects is the grounding in reality and knowing when to exaggerate and when to pull from our own cultural reality.
PROTOTYPING
All images included are either my own or free to use from pexels.com. I think using the risograph was apt since it does use soy-based ink and rice-paper in its process. Very biological.
Get Connected is like this world's version of Got Milk? except it's a government program encouraging people to tap into the Mycelliac Network. It's highspeed and a great solution to the growing power deficit caused by too high demand for traditional biological power agents. The fungi pictured here is Physarum polycephalum, the single-celled slime mold that can efficiently navigate a maze. It's also yellow and ended up dictating the color palette for this first batch of prints.
Who doesn't love the saints? Except for the protestants, I guess.
This is exploring some deeply ecologically ingrained spirituality that still poses an authority as an organized religion/ideology. I reused the Physarum and overlayed it behind the icon of the Madonna.
Might redo this one with an original illustration and change the name to Anthropocene... or maybe there will be multiple saint figures!
Tourism is alive and thriving in Our Beautiful Country! You should totally Come Visit. I just photoshopped some mushrooms into this one. Honestly, it's quite comical and definitely warrants a redo since I couldn't find open-source images of the fungi I was imagining in my head (the giant stalk-like prehistoric phototaxis).
And finally one risograph in "full" color (approx. CMYK) at 8.5''x11''. I made this design a day or so after the others and after Wednesday's group critique. I was advised to continue iterating and include more advertisement images since "capitalism has us all in a chokehold." I'm still considering what the economic system of this world I'm archiving will look like, but the image and consumption exist both in and outside of systems of consumption.
This is an ad for a hypothetical archival organization branching out to individual denizens seeking memory aid services. I imagine this is deeply associated with the government as this world has little privatization. The bottom text reads:
"Contact your government-appointed community representative at your local connection point for more information. MycellNet cannot be held liable for any damages sustained by consenting participants. MycellNet should not serve as a full replacement for your district’s community-sustained archive. MycellNet is filed under government license 536B and enjoys all powers litigated to 536B organizations."
I'm attempting to tap into some world concerns regarding the preservation of memory and data to decay, both on a community level and an individual level. The "Get Connected" mycelium will certainly help solve this issue.
Topics of Interest: Worldbuilding, Spaces of Memory, Ghost Towns
The first highlight of my research for this week is the worldbuilding exercise I did. I chose a specific practice/technology/development and tracked what would have needed to happen materially for it to occur at an earlier point in history than it did for our world, and what the implications of that would be. Because I am familiar with the process of cyanotypes, I chose this as my technology. I drew a conceptual map of just the material/chemical, geographic, and social implications of early cyanotype development.
The above one is the cleaned-up but simplified version. The original is a bit hard to parse, but I'll post it here anyway.
I started the process of mapping this out by finding out the chemicals used to create cyanotypes, then what chemicals/processes are needed to produce those, etc. Once the base chemicals needed are identified, in this case, mainly iron, chlorine, potassium, and alkaline substances (like baking soda), I did research into where these would naturally occur so that their proximity to this speculative culture would theoretically accelerate its discovery. There would need to be an abundance of salt mines as well as iron ore. From there I mapped out the implications of having these material abundances. Beyond the material, I also mapped out what the implications of the cyanotype as a practice would be culturally and socially, as well as what concerns this would indicate the society would have, and parallels to other aspects of their socio-political structure.
Here are some of the main sources I used, excluding my starting points of the Wikipedia page for Potassium ferricyanide and Ferric ammonium oxalate, the two chemicals necessary for cyanotypes.
Discover one of the oldest photographic printing processes in the history of photography.
In the 18th century, some Native Americans produced ‘soda ash’ to leaven their breads. They shared their methods for producing the chemical
Iron processing - Ores, Smelting, Refining: Iron ores occur in igneous, metamorphic (transformed), or sedimentary rocks in a variety of geol
Discover the uniqueness of the Wieliczka deposit, the history of its formation and the various types of salt hidden deep underground.
Since this was just a worldbuilding exercise, I didn't too too much in-depth research on each branch of the conceptual map.
Ghost Towns
I was interested in the concept of ghost towns if I am going to create an archive depicting a world. They're interesting preservation of the geographic/architectural structures of a society, often at its brink before decay forced the residents' hands. It might be worth recreating one as my or part of my capstone.
There are no shortage of examples in America, especially in the South and West.
Explore these desolate places and see how nearly 4,000 ghost towns are spread throughout the country.
JSTOR also has a good dialogue about treating cities as cities in and of themselves, and this helps me in understanding ghost towns as the skeletons of urban archives.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26168749
I also wondered if there was something to address with the idea of decay or determination within archives, which is a massive problem it attempts to solve while being threatened by it.
Urban explorers often speak of the rush and thrill of their craft but there is another side to their unusual hobby. “Exploring a ghost town
This article details some photographs documenting abandoned places to record these instances of decay. Honestly, a lot of the idea behind the work seems to be fetishizing the decay rather than purely documenting it, but it's something to think about nevertheless. I think photographer Gregory Crewdson documents suburban decay successfully without the pretense that it's pure documentation and therefor is able to capture the more metaphysical corners in the zeitgeist.
There are also the political implications needed to consider when crafting archives, and ghost towns are prime examples of fetishing nostalgia rather than purely documenting the past.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26710662
This lingering idea of city/town as an archive reminds me of some readings I did from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Each city the fictionalized Marco Polo visits and documents simply reminds him of his hometown of Venice; "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice." But he also fears the lost of memory through his documentation: "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little."
Calvino nevertheless highlights a connection between urban planning and social structuring with memory:
"The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. […] Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist"
In everything, it seems, there is a haunting taking place, be the place alive or abandoned.
Digital Spaces of Memory, Music and Hauntings
The democracy (in theory) of the internet has allowed people to upload their own personal archives, from curated Tumblr feeds to the candid Facebook albums of the 2010s. I'm interested in these curated music playlists/albums different users aggregate. Usually, these are denoted under certain aesthetics like "dark academic" "classical/bridgerton-esque" or, overwhelmingly, "1990s-2000s nostalgia/frutiger aero."
There's a deep omnipresent desire, longing even, for the past's vision of the future, something that speaks directly to the idea of Hauntology. Hauntology is, put simply, a haunting in the present from the past for a future that never was; broadly, a social/cultural ghost. These curated playlists operate as their own archives of longings and subjective documentation of the past as well as current desires. I think archives necessarily interact with the ideas of hauntology. The Caretaker is an artist who directly interacts with these ideas and makes music one could specifically categorize as "Hauntology Music." There's no doubt a haunting to the music, with its record-scratching and 40s-esque samples. The artist's albums portray the progression of Alzheimer's disease and use hauntology as an apt medium.
These layman-made archives and fetishitions of subjective memory/projections populate the internet and garner thousands, if not millions of views. The cultural memory has found its home in the digital and I don't know if that's a good thing...
Topics of Interest: The Museum (on a local scale), Cataloging History for Posterity, Material/Artifact as Historic Record
This week my main task was visiting the Hoboken Historical Museum down by shipyard. I figure visiting the local museum of the (relatively) small city I live in would be insightful in more, or at least different ways than necessarily one in, say, NYC. Plus Hoboken has a rich history and produced some cool artists.... who then moved out of Hoboken......shoutout STIEGLITZ <3
The first part of the museum I looked at was the current exhibition featuring Hoboken artist Darren Kall who had illustrated the streets and buildings of Hoboken in the 80s. The below drawing is an illustration of the entire of Washington Street! It was very interesting to compare this drawing with what I could remember around today and seeing where the constants were. What endures, what changes.
This is a very old-school means of documenting your surroundings/experience. Drawing what you could see was the standard before there was any form of "objective" documentation like photography. This is certainly one direction my foray into archiving can take.
Also the man working at the museum that day was very nice! We had an on-and-off conversation for the couple hours i was there and he showed me a bunch of books they had in their archives to look over. Most were photography-oriented although there was a "Chronological History of Hoboken" made from some traditional lithographs. I also overheard him talking with another man saying "Bob doesn't think I have an artistic side... that's because he doesn't recognize his often." Bob you've got some serious opps.
Also there was a cool lamp! That came from an old dentist's office!!
Just seeing these various relics completely outside of their original context caused a lot of dissonance and perplexities. These artifacts end up looking almost cosmic outside of their intended settings. I want to channel that dissonance when making my archive.
The next exhibit I saw was the one on civil rights movements. My biggest interest here was the pin display they had as a documentation of various political and social sentiments across urban America. I think something like this would be very striking and informative (in a show-not-tell way) as part of my own "exhibit."
I found the above photo just so striking. This was taken at a march in Central Park after MLK was assassinated.
I ended up making my own pin at the interactive part of the exhibit. I might consider some interactive aspects as I go forward.
The final exhibition I took to in the museum was the Frank Sinatra....shrine? Life size diorama? Immersive room dedicated to him? I'm weirdly intrigued by these forms of exhibits and means of archiving; it reminds me of the MoMA Fallout Shelter Work, except unironically, even uncritical, of its interest.
If I had the space and the budget something this immersive would be my ideal vision to implement. There are artifacts you can actually interact with, like the record-player cabinet, contemporary books, vinyls, fedora, and other memorabilia. The space was almost surreal in how obsessive and nostalgic its design was.
In response to this research, I sketched out a speculative schematic of what a house constructed to represent the life of a singular person would look like. As you gain height, the person's life progresses as does the era, seeking to fluidly represent their domestic ecosystem.
