Inspiration
When it came to looking for an inspiration, a couple of artists caught my attention. For example, the first piece above is called, “The Shapes Project” , by Allan McCollum. The second piece that caught my eye was, “Reverb” which was made by Jorge Pardo and Gilberto Zorio. Last but not least, Untitled by Felix Gonzalez Torrez also gave me an idea of what I wanted to do with my mixed media project.
To begin with, Felix had many pieces that looked like the one that I had picked for my inspiration. When he was asked, how he wanted the art piece to be displayed, he had answered with, “You decide”. Felix didn’t know how he wanted his piece displayed, he mentioned not having all the answers and how his piece wasnt meant to be some minimalist artwork. This artist wanted the final meaning to be up to the audience.
Next up, Reverb was a collaboration between two artists. The piece had microphones places in different areas where direct speech and ambient noise were both collected. The noises being collected were electronically mixed and fed back to the site which would change the expierence of the area. Pardo’s curtains tended to rearticulate the gallery.
Overall, for my piece I wanted to embrace the holographic side of a CD by putting it all over my walls and look at each different backside. I also wanted to incooperate some type of light were viewers can choose what type of light they want within the area if one were to view it. Which brings its back to my emotion theme, if one were to pick a red light color, the area could seem dark and scary where as if one were to pick blue, the area can seem sad and gloomy and so on, like Felix, I want to give the audience the freedom of choosing.
Sketches
As my first sketch, I had wanted to use the holographic of a CD to be the major attention grabbing point of my piece. Personally, I had thought the holographic side had aesthetic value and I wanted to bring those colors to life. I wanted to make a flowrr out of the CD’s and put a light in the middle as the center, but in the process of it, the CD’s were just to difficult to cut and would take so much time. |
As my second sketched, I wanted to do something beyond than what I would’ve originally done. My room is orginally white and I wanted to use it as my advantage, so I had used the empty area of my room and wanted to create a holographic area where one could embrace the colors of the backside of a CD. I wanted to experiment how the CD’s would shine and different light colors, with regular sunlight, darkness, christmas lights, flashlight and so on. |
Process
After deciding what I wanted to do, I had to get CD’s I found laying aroubd my house. As a surprise, I had came across a CD case, which had tons of CD’s inside, to my benefit, it means I wouldn’t have to purchase so many if I still needed some later on in the process. This piece tends to be similar to Allans because he had many frames alligned but each one had a different shapes, where as with my piece, I have to many CD’s but each one tends to capture light differently and may have a different background.
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My first step was to create something similar to curtains as in Reverb. I had decided to aligned 4 x 10 CD’s. To create this, I used super glue and although it did come out a bit crooked, I plan on fixing it later on in the process because I want it to be precise. The whole point of this is for the viewer to be able to look up and look at the different angles of light that reflects on the CD’s because depending where the light is coming from, the holographic sides can portray many looks. Since I planned on hanging it up, I had to attach a little hook that would help it stay in the air and wont come crashing down.
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After I had made the CD curtain, I started to structure the CD's along the wall in the corner in my room. If one looks to the right, one could see I tried structuring my CD's straight along the wall, but it wasn't working well, especially since I was using tape to put them up. It was also difficult because I had a huge clothes cabinet below that was keeping me from keeping them straight. Along the way, I decided to move the cabinet away and took off all the CD's and started super gluing them on the wall from the bottom to the top. There's 12 CD's in each line. Overall, it started to look more clean and structured so I kept it that way instead. If one looks below, one would see what my piece looks like now.
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So far, if one looks below, this is what it looks like. I had the CD curtain hanging from the ceiling, and I have it facing the wall with the CD's. I did that because further on in my process, when I add in the lights, I want the reflection to pounce off each other along the CD's for it grab attention of the viewer.
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Afterwards, I wanted to see a glimpse of how the area would look like with a regular light bulb before finishing my piece. Therefore, I had grabbed a lamp and placed on the cabinet, depending on the angle one looks at, the glares on the CD's change. I took the picture from the corner of the area and one could see all glares on the holographic side of the CD. I really loved looking at it.