Isobel Taylor

Once the output was set I looked back at my ideas for inputs, I narrowed them down to a few ideas. One I really like the idea of (and will certainly make) which is the top drawing, that I will go on in further detail. In this first image, the second was an idea based around the poetry of the out put, there is a Japanese legend tells that anyone who folds a thousand cranes will be granted a wish or as I believe the legend has adapted 100 are sometimes folded and hung together to wish good health to family members or close friends. The idea I had toward this was to have 100 or 1000 cranes each hung by a seperate strung (usualy they’d be strung together) so that the visitor could come along and take a crane, the string being pulled would signal to max to identify a certain quote, so if there were 100 cranes and 100 quotes no 2 people who take a crane would get the same quote. The third idea was to have a drawing input so perhaps you would have one screen where you could draw, taking a moment out of your day to sit and do soemthing perhaps that you would otherwise do or thing about doing, and then acording to your drawing you’d get a quote.

An addition could be that somehting generates a quote maybe the overall colour of your clothing or movement and from that quote you draw what you think of wether to do with the quote directly ro something that you have a connection with the quote from, this would then be attatched to the quote so the next person who sees the same quote would see what the last person drew in response and could add their own drawing.

The first of the ideas I am most keen on, I got the idea from listening to Beavis and Butthead talking on their CD about ‘braken stuff’ and I thought what a great excuse to smash somehting into fragments, originally I was thinking cheap plates and cups but somehow I got the idea of small gnomes you can get from pound stores. Something more pleaseing in the idea of smashing gnomes. I thought if I got a circular canvus, paint a bullseye, put a pressure sensor behind the middle so that when the gnome hits the sensor picks it up and sends a message to max which would pull up a quote so after you have the fun of breaking soemthing into a fragment you get given a fragment to think about in a calmer way. The idea of a good short break from whatever you usually do. However last minute I found that the pressure sensor I got wasnt working. So i shifted ideas back to drawing as I really love drawing and feel its quite missed part of life for so many people.

Within altering my patch where the numbers from the drawing programme met the quotes I encountered an issue. When you tap the mouse pad to start drawing all the numbers that come out are constantly changes which max finds difficult to prosess brining up all the images but there was a 1 when the mouse was down and a 0 when it stopped, so that works as a good switch. However Im not quite used to the language within max and as much as I knew I needed an ‘if’ equasion but I couldnt work out how to write it, so I spent a good few hours working on one fairly small equasion.

These 2 pages of A4 have some of the equasions I tried and failed with and writing out how I think it would work. In the end I did figure it out, and was very pleased as its certainly not how I thought it would look even after looking at the example equasions.

With these parts of max put together I then worked on the asethetics of how the viewer would see the piece in a way that if something went wrong(as you never know) I could quickly access the relevent parts.

Following the assignment ‘Fragmentation’ I started thingking about the various angles I could take. Initialy I was thinking about dreams and how, although I know not everyone remembers thier dreams, a number who remember them after waking up will only remember fragments and theres a common dream of running as you loose sight/ everything going black so I wondered if I could put soemthng together that could mean you could try and hold onto stories and stop them going black. This ended up seeming quite game like and i started wondering if this sort of game is already out. I re looked at the assignment, definitions from different dictionaries as im always interested in the ways definition differ. Focus then went to the idea of throwing soemthing, having a physical impact that would effect a digital outcome. I realised that max breaks down into the input and the output and these can be connected by a number, the input changing numbers for the output to put to use.

I decided that if I could get the output woring then I could choose an input that would just give that changing number. I think I went for something that seems to me quite obvious, fragments by Jean Baudrillard, only the book entitled fragments has quite large paragraphs and I wanted soemthing shorter. I turned to Cool Memories which is a 5 book series full of various stand alone thoughts and points. When looking back through the 4 books I have I always get caught on one particular comment and end up thinking for some time, yet the pages are so crowded. I decided this would be good to take quotes that could be interesting to all ages (that can read) and types of people, wether they think about it thourghly of for just a moment.

I scanned various pages where I saw a quote or few that suited the overall aesthetic I was going for. Got a demo of one of the adobe suits that had photoshop as everytime I went into uni the only computer free was the big one that dosnt have photoshop! but Im happy witht he demo, I also wanted to put the full reference at the bottom of each page so if anyone saw a quote they were particularly interested in they could find it within the book.

In the end from the pages I scanned I just happened to pick 100 quotes. A good number for the out put in max.

I photoshoped these all to the same size, square with the quote just above the middle. The quotes ended up having a poetry almost zen like feel.

After spending the last few weeks focused on the creative web deadline I have only given a bit of thought to the max deadline, however I really like the patches that came out of the creative web work so I would like to work on them and maybe incorporate and additional something, perhaps a more solid physical element, object of some kind, or a challenge viewers could do using the visualisation.

I have looked into a few pieces that involve swings and the silhouette from the visulisation reminds me of Anthony McCall’s work which after seeing in the Serpentine is one of my favourite pieces of art to date. Some of the reasons for this is that when I arrived it was packed and everyone who was there was in amazement and interacting with the solid light in their own ways, sitting and watching others, waving the mist around, lining their faces up in the light, looking at the waves on different angles and heights. Everything about it seemed to be inspected all at once by all ages, And everyone was having fun, smiling, laughing, talking to whoever else is playing in the light. http://www.anthonymccall.com/

Im not sure I could create something that could have such a fantastic reaction but I would like to try to look towards that direction.

The following are some photographs I took at the show I saw in the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2007.

On friday Berit showed me something she was working on using graphite, the laser cutter and current. I wonder if I could incorporate something from this, or if perhaps this is best saved for a future piece of work.