ITP Classes (old posts, page 8)

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner (b: 1942) is an American artist and one of the founders of the conceptual art movement. His most notable works are short statements that describe things that could potentially be constructed but need not be actually built. The first time I saw Weiner’s work almost seven years ago I didn’t understand or appreciate it and was confused why it was on display in a museum. After learning more about conceptual art and researching Weiner’s life and work, I now understand his artistic intent and understand why he is an important artist.

Lawrence Weiner at the MoMA

My first exposure to Lawrence Weiner’s work was on November 5th, 2011. I was attending one of MoMA’s “Modern Member Nights” for contributing members shortly after I bought a membership to the museum. I was there on a date with someone I had met a few weeks prior. We walked through the museum’s galleries and came upon Weiner’s “language art.” We were perplexed by what we saw. He seemed to make up titles for works of art but not actually create anything, leaving the task of constructing a piece that matched the title to curators and other museum employees.

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Origami Experiments

For our final project we need to design and build something to present in the next and final class. This is a half semester class so the final project is due the same time as other midterms.

I'm interested in origami and want to learn how to fold interesting designs. For the final I am going to design my own origami model, document it, and present it next week.

To prepare for this I need to get a lot better at folding origami. I started by following Youtube tutorials. My first was a crane:

origami crane, with two wide wings a neck and head in the front and a long thin tail in the back.

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Joint Experiment

Our second CNC assignment is to create a wooden joint. We needed to mill the wood carefully so the result provides a solid connection between the two pieces.

I designed and milled a Blind finger tenon joint. I am pleased with the final result:

Two pieces of 0.5 inch wood. One has two small protrusions and the other has two identically sized and shaped holes.

Two pieces of 0.5 inch wood joined together. The wood with the protrusions is inserted into the one with the holes. The view is from the side.

Two pieces of 0.5 inch wood joined together. The wood with the protrusions is inserted into the one with the holes. The view is from the top.

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Data Assembly

Milestone #2: Data Assembly

The second step of this project is to access the Google Street View data and organize it in a suitable format. In my project plan my target was to reach this goal by February 21st (last Wednesday). Although I have accomplished a lot, I have not achieved all of the things I wanted to achieve for this milestone. I expect to hit it by next week at the latest.

Here's what I have achieved.

First, I can download all of the relevant data from Google. This includes all of the panorama image data and meta data. I can also access the panorama ids for the neighboring locations. All of the metadata is stored in a database.

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Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci was a poet, performance artist, installation artist, designer, and literature editor. His work defies classification. In his words:

If I specialize in a medium, I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another - so, then, instead of turning toward “ground” I would shift my attention and turn to “instrument,” I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on whatever ground was, from time to time, available.

Vito Acconci - Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art

I created a short 10 minute presentation on Vito Acconci to share with the class.

Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works

Anthony McCall (b: 1946) is a British born artist based in New York City. He is well known for his solid light installations that challenge the traditional model of films by bringing attention to the light and projector by discarding any kind of story or plot shown on a projector screen.

McCall studied graphic design and photography at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in England from 1964 to 1968. After graduation he was active in a London film-makers cooperative and made films documenting outdoor performances, often involving fire.

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Larger Paper Car

Based on feedback from last week's visit at a school, I improved my car design and made it twice as big. See photos below:

Two images of a paper car. The car is a traditional sedan and is made from heavy white cardstock paper.

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CNC and Me

Our next machine is the CNC. CNC stands for Computer Networked Control, and works kind of like the Hand Router except it is controlled by a computer and not my hands. Our assignment was to build something with this using 'pockets' and 'contours'. The computer aided machining (CAM) software calls a carved out hole a 'pocket' and a cut line a 'contour'.

This was a challenging task. I had to go back and forth between the shop's CAM station and the CNC several times. The first trip back was because I forgot to set the depth levels to a negative number. Without that the CNC will mill the air above my wood. After I got that corrected I had some difficulty setting up the machine. John and Shreiya helped me turn the machine on and attach my wood to the CNC bed.

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The Woman's Building

The Woman's Building was a center for female education in the arts that operated from 1973 to 1991. The goal of the center was to develop new art practices and an artistic community that supported the needs of women.

“It was an opportunity to be empowered. We could learn skills that we never learned before, and more important, that we could just create our place in the world, which is really what the Women’s Building represented. It’s a public center for women’s culture. That we live in a world that is very male dominated, and the art world was certainly not serving us as women artists. We were very invisible and that we could carve out this little space that would be our space, and not just our space privately, but our space publicly. To say, ‘Here’s what we are making as women artists. Come see.’” - Cheri Gaulke

I created a short 10 minute presentation on the Woman's Building to share with the class.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

Gordon Matta-Clark was an artist who was famous for cutting holes into existing buildings to create art. Defining his artistic practice “Anarchitecture,” Matta-Clark directly addressed the social conditions of his day and presented them in a way that made people pay attention to something they would otherwise ignore.

Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell from 1962 to 1968 but did not practice architecture in a conventional manner. After college when he returned to his native New York (1969), he was disturbed by the conditions of his day and wanted to address the social problems. At the time there were a lot of decrepit and vacant apartments. There was a large homeless population and garbage littered the streets. In Matta-Clark’s words, “I have chosen not isolation from the social conditions, but to deal directly with social conditions whether by physical implication, as in most of my building works, or through more direct community involvement. [2]”

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