|
|
||
|
The Softness of Things
I feel full of Buckminster this week. Jean-Marc in Spatial Design also launched into a discussion of Fuller's work and its meaning for this century. Rather than focusing on his world uniting message, we looked at his dome structures, the first of their kind. Indeed, these domes mimic structures much smaller than their macro-manifestations. We see their beautiful structure in the atom, the bee hive and so on. I wouldn't say these structures represent energy, but they provide a common language for the physical elements to interact. So what is energy? The first thing which comes to mind is light. The sun is the largest energy generator of our galaxy, and it bombards us with photons, which enriches our lives by providing the color spectrum and, of course: the color pink. Energy to me is also synonymous to productivity and creativity. The exertion of effort represents the expenditure of energy from our organic bodies, and the fruit of our labors results in a work which embodies that effort. Why not make a light, with a single source, almost like a nucleus? And so I did. I decided to encase it in a Buckminster like base geometric structure to act as its protocol to interact with surrounding structures. That alone was not charged enough, so I encased it in luscious purple fabric which has a translucent, almost reflective effect, especially when layered. The light is hung from the ceiling, close to the floor. It is hung by conductive thread, two leads, power and ground. A battery in the middle is connected to the thread to provide power to the LED and the structure; by powering the LED you are energizing the structure from top to bottom. The switch is built into a geometric structure, a triangle, to which the LED is attached. Am I satisfied with the outcome? Yes and no. I remember in the first week how critical I was of my work, since then I am more concerned with actual creation than the details of good and bad.
I am very pleased with the switching mechanism, which if refined, I think has potential. The conductive thread tended to fray much easier than I expected, leading to poor contact or short circuits. Despina suggests: - fray-check or magna-tac (maybe not aesthetically pleasing) to coat it - using x-static, or silver (anti-bacteria) based thread which is stronger instead - twine the thread with another, non-conductive thread for strength As to keeping the thread on the battery, Despina suggested using batteries with solder leads, and potentially attaching hooks to those. Excellent ideas. Thank you! Continuing on with the critique. While I loved the fabric, I didn't wrap it to the desired effect. My goal was a transposition between base geometric structure and softness. What I got was a ... purple blob. Maybe a layer, done larger and more expressively would've been better. A brighter incandescent light would have also been great. The overall shape, particularly the two strings symbolic of power and ground, yin and yang, was close to target. I think I may step back and continue to work with the thread and geometric shapes.
-- Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:59 -0400
Copyright © 1996-2009 Alexander Reeder |
