DSGN - BY ETHAN DAYA

This weekend has been an almost horrific experience. The stress of the last few days has been incredible...almost manic even. Nick, Drake and I have been camped out at drakes for the last few days trying to get all of the building done. 

We spent hours waiting for glue to dry, painting, sanding, puttying, sleeping (barely), coding, stressing and just generally being exhausted but doing thins anyway. Im really excited to have it built and all the work we’ve done come to fruit. Ill let the photos below do alot the talking because I think our faces explain it all. 

The biggest hurdles we faced were the code...and time. Things took time to dry, to set, to sand and that really ate up our energy we were constantly working and when we weren't waiting for paint to dry we were coding. I think it really cemented for me how the length of time can dictate your outcome. The major problem I think studio 2 had was the length of time we spent on projects that counted for 0%; we could have used that to properly develop and work on these final asssigments. 

Its now week 3 and we’ve learnt a lot from all the different bits of feedback. Its hard to digest them all but we have tried to remain true to our original goals while taking feedback and revamping the things we believe we need too.

My blogging has been sparse as the time is just disappearing into projects and I’m really struggling to keep up with everything. I think I have 6 or 7 unfinished drafts in my blog and I need to get those sorted too soon.

Whats big this week is that construction of the Portal is beginning...well it has to begin or we’ll never finish. Its now wednesday and our last progress report has been posted and I believe it’ll be the one we do the best in. Our CNC work has been finally completed and we have all our circles cut, all thats left in terms of pieces is having all our laser cuts done which should hopefully happen tomorrow.

I’m excited with the fact that the cutting of our pieces is all almost finished and we can really get into building the piece.

Other things we've completed have been the illustrator designs which we were a bit of a headache for me. Ive never really done much work in illustrator let alone the accuracy needed for laser and CNC routing. Id never thought about bleeds, angles of cutting and I learn’t a lot. I was incredibly thankful for Zac, among others, who lent me a good bit of time explaining how to do things. We had our acrylic inner circles all cut out last Wednesday and they fit perfectly inside our plywood cuts which made me incredibly happy after all the stress I’d had.

Its nearing the end and our conceptual ideas haven’t really changed we just made sure they included all our thoughts and hadn’t swayed due to pressure from others. 

What was incredible was the opportunity we had last week to visit the artist Max Pattè’s exhibition at the Allures Studio (Pattè. M, 2015). This was amazing as we were able to see such a large amount of the original art that sparked the ideas in our heads. The original piece of his work “Cosmic Tango” was one of his many but we had never seen the others; but to be able to see so many was such a great experience. This culminated in the amazing chance Nick and Drake had to go and listen to a talk Max gave on Saturday where he talked about his previous works and his  inspirations. I unfortunately had work and so I wasn't able to make it. Nick and Drake gave me a full run down of what he said and showed me all the photos and notes they took which was great as I got some insight into what he said. Nick told me something he said which really summed up so perfectly what we wanted to achieve from our piece, “symmetry is inherently beautiful, I can’t explain it, you can’t explain it, but we are drawn to these things.” (Pattè. M, 2015) This was whilst describing his light works and it emulated for all of us “the why” of the effect these pieces had on us.

This week has been interesting with us being unable to do much despite our low previous grade really motivating us to work incredibly hard. Ive been pushing myself hard with research and design to try and make sure that next week when we need to build the Portal we will be able too.

Our biggest problems have been the inability to build at all. The laser and CNC machines are all booked up until next week and so we have no choice but to wait and do whatever little we can now. Our timeline had said we needed to have all if not most of our research done and so that what ive focused on this week.

Weve also finalised the majority of the design elements which was a little rushed but we had worked hard to try and get them as polished as possible. 

As you can see in the above designs the design for the piece is relatively complex and the laser machine needss the designs to be 100% accurate to get what we want. The design is also 1000mm x 1000mm so a small error could look huge.

The last week has disapeared…its week 2 already; but I’m confident in our project because were definitely on track and were plotting well against our timeline of things we felt we needed to have done in Week 1.

RESEARCH / DEVELOPMENT

Very early on last week we had begun brainstorming ideas and ways we could create something that would convey our ideas and also create a train of thought, or sense of mood in our viewers. We ended puttung a much larger amount of time into research then we’d ever imagined. A chat with Ricardo definitely sparked a change in us. We stopped thinking as just designers…but pretty much as philosphers too. We wanted to make sure that with whatever we created we would make sure that we had a thesis that put our thoughts down in a ways that would be a constant reminder as we worked to reflect on whether we were designing a piece of work from plans, or if our process was organic in that it flowed from one idea to another instead of just being a blank plan. 

Weve accomplished a lot on this front but we have a bit more to do and Id proably say that were 7/10 completed on ths front. Yet to do would probably be the final design as we are trying to work in a new way and let our creative process help us define what our final submision looks like. We are still highly inspired by the previous works that we cited as they were the pieces that actually inspired us to look further into sacred geometry and design. 

MATERIAL / PRODUCT SOURCING

We knew that as much as this was a creative “flow” time was highly critical and creating the sort of piece weve brainstormed about meant we had to work efficiently and make sure that we would be able to order parts and account for shipping time, costs, construction/design time, etc. Were doing quite well and have a large amount of parts we can use for both prototypes and our final piece. 

Were 9/10 completed on this front…for now. We have yet to see what changes as we continue this project but now we definitely have a very solid footing to begin our work. 

DESIGN

As I’ve mentioned in our previous posts weve done a large amount of research into the sort of design we are aiming to embark on. Less resaerch into how but more why. Weve been drawn to the metatron cube because of a number of reasons but dont really understand as much as we’d to “pick” it as the design we begin to create with.

Something that Ive taken note of after taking to Ricardo about the proposal submssions is the misunderstanding a lot of us have had in the form of the DIY proposal. Some people have taken in to mean creating an eventual object/game/artefact/etc by creating a new or already exisitng object ourselves. 

I myself had sort of felt that this was the impression but I did know that there would have to be a conceptual basis to whatever final product Nick, Drake and I created. After we had a chat to Ricardo we did realise that as much as we believed we’d had great ideas about the reason behind our installation we hadn’t really immersed ourselves in the history and the thesis for which we were aiming to base our work upon. 

My personal ideas around our the project were around the design itself; I had some prior knowledge surrounding the geometric ratios that can be found in both ancient design, our numbering systems, and also the way in which we understand the construction of cells in organisms. But apart from surface knowledge didnt understand exactly how intricate and integral these geomteric ratios were to the world around us.

We began our research as any wise and experienced university student would…Wikipedia and from there our scope and understanding grew exponentially. We read up on discoveries of Da Vinci, Vitruvius (ancient roman architect), as well as the use of these geometric designs in ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek architecture. 

Going back to the purported beginnings of our intelligent civilisation philosophers such as Plato and Plutarch attributed the world and its design to geometric ratios and proportions designed and created by a singular, omnipresent and perfect God. We discovered that these ratios and geometric principles were first discovered in nature and are therefore associated with the work of God and could be the reason why we as humanity associate it with perfection. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSmdSw9eEIA

The above video about spirit science has a huge amount of content (some of it somewhat irrelevant and steeped in alternative science) was a really interesting resource. It was definitely a very helpful in understanding why people hold sacred geometry in such high esteem. The idea that every shape is created from the shapes in the “metatron cube” and the “fruit of life”. 

This really got me thinking about what our installation could actually mean as a piece. What sense of satisfaction, or conviction would it portray to the viewer. How would we design our piece in such a way that it takes all these new learnings and understadings and combine them in an innovative and interesting way. 

Our design at first was influenced a lot by what we thought was “cool” or “fitted” with our original impressions of the DIY project and what wed want to get out of it. I think that now as a group we’ve moved to a point of being able to try and convey how intricate and beautifully simplistic the design of our humanity is. 

Whether its our civilisations, our cells, our patterns of speech, our system of numeracy, our perceptions of attractiveness; they all seem to correlate in an intricate design that we are almost oblivious to everyday.

Why is symmetry so satisfactory, why does it make us happy, why are attractive people highly symmetrical, why, why why…

I intend to answer these questions in the coming days because why ask a question and then never answer it…wouldnt be very symmetrical of me; every question needs an answer

CITATIONS

Mastin, L. (2010). Plato - Greek Mathematics - The Story of Mathematics.  Retrieved 1 October 2015, from http://www.storyofmathematics.com/greek_plato.html

Pearce, Jordan (2014) Spirit Science - The Sacred Geometry Movie          Retrieved 4 October                                             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSmdSw9eEIA

The Portal is aiming to be an art installation intended to captivate its audience through the use of visual and oral practice.

Our current goals in the eventual installation will involve the use of a circular wooden frame; inlayed inside this frame would be frosted acrylic circles that will be lit up by 13 independent LED’s. These LED’s will independently change in reaction to an original soundscape. The Internal design is based off the thinking of DaVinci and the ancient science of sacred geometry as these designs allude to a sense of utopia and perfection in design.

Our goals in creating this installation are to try and see how the ancient forms of design and proportions can be recreated in modern design and the sort of satisfaction the use of this design causes. Why is it that we admire symmetry and reflected geometry. For some reason this is seen as “perfect” in design. For example the more attractive a human face; the more symmetrical it is. The geometries and designs explored in sacred geometry and other ancient geometric studies such as Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian man" are integral to most of our understanding of both biological and material design. We want to create a piece that explores those design principles and the how / why these ancient design languages and philosophies still hold so true today and why they haven’t faded into history like so many others.

PHOTO + VIDEO OF PHYSICAL COMPUTING ASSIGMENT 2

THE ARG INFLUX IS FINALLY OVER. Its been quite the ride…a huge amount of ups and downs; good and bad. 

  Overall I did enjoy this studio assignment. It was intriguing, interesting and above all informative to a new medium of content presentation. Id never really encountered or participated in an ARG before so this was my first experience and it was like being thrown into the deep end…but definitely with good intentions. 

Our team did work well together but we had a large amount of problems with involvement of team members; it seemed that there were 3 to 4 people doing worm at any one time out of the 9 people in our group. This was a massive disadvantage because all I could see was all the lost potential our ARG had because people didn’t engage or some did not even bother to turn up to a class at all. 

  I think that our idea was great in theory and our game development and planned implementation was great; from our tumblr/website as a hub page and the use of twitter and other social media to use as a platform to collate ideas would work very well in practice. We did very well as a team in coming up with concepts and a timeline as to when each part of the game would occur and how to link all that we did together. Theoretically great would be how I would describe our game. The use of real historic events like Voyager and the golden record was I think a very smart move. It made sure we could combine fact and fiction well; they were interdependent in that they backed each other up. But realistically I think our game itself actually failed quite miserably. We had not a single person play the game. That in my book is a complete fail. This is not a complaint but I do think that our brief and the limitations set on us are probably the reason why. Our briefs were incredibly broad with scope to do almost anything, except for the fact that we couldn’t try to get serious amount of people around as well as needing to be inside BCT itself. With the swamp of ARGs no one actually bothered to play anyone else game and that set us up for failure form the beginning. Another thing would be how long the project was set. I think we should have started and finished the ARG before the holidays; everyone seemed to stagnate and with the long length group members became bored and stopped contributing which had serious effects which I definitely noticed in our group. 

  The assignment itself was ok not incredibly inspiring to me and neither were the lectures; we got a large number of different ideas from lecturers and no one really cemented for me what they actually wanted. I really think that the multiple lectures for studio has not really been done so well for this assignment. Sometimes we'd play a game, other days wed listen to a lecture; nothing was cohesive throughout and that didn’t really inspire us to try and innovate because everything presented to us was so different and so it didn’t really give us a singular goal. It realistically just left us to try and interpret what the very broad brief told us. 

So our play test is over and essentially most of the game is now out and in the public arena per se and so I wanted to give a run down of our game mission and what we aimed to achieve.

Our game was centred around an alien species reply to the Golden Records sent out on the Voyager Spacecraft in 1977, hence the name Kontakt1977.tumblr.com. The “mission” of our game or the back story we gave to players was written by two fictitious AUT students who needed help decoding the message sent from the Alien species.

This was the story we wanted people to start with and give them enough information to get involved but still have a good aura of mystery around it.

We had our game “out” for quite some time. We had posters and a “hive” design on the Studio wall long before anyone else had branding or posters up. 

From the beginning we knew what direciton we were headed in and we began working towards that goal. After the adjustment in our direction to incorporate a deeper meaning we got right along and started designing ciphers, graphics, videos and set up a range of social media. 

Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook profiles all for use in the game. We’ve been quite clever in what were doing to try and conceal some ideas about the game. We’re not deliberately keeping it all quiet, it just seems that by giving away informaiton about who we are and which game were running people seem to be keeping to themselves and working on their game. 

No ones really asked too much about our game and if I’m honest I havent asked anyone about theirs. We all seem to be so busy working on our own games that we arent paying any attention to anyone elses. 

This was incredibly evident during our playtesting. We set up our entire game and ran the entire game from start to finish over a 24 hour period…Lets just say that the engagement was probably about 1…maybe.

The biggest problem and I think every group is going to find this. If they try and run their ARG they are not going to get a huge amount of people doing. People have been play testing parts of their games and theyve asked people to participate. Trying to get people to voluntarily play the game has been incredibly hard. We’ve posted on social media, put up posters, talked/mentioned our game, had Nick and Drake share our tumblr on their radio show twice…but to no real avail. 

I had a very clear feeling that this would happen; the fact we were given the restriction that the game should be played inside BCT almost kills the ARG before it has even begun. We tried our best to try and do someting different outside the borders by putting clues in different locations around the city to try and get some interest. 

Its now week 2 into our ARG and its becoming more complicated; still feasible but more complicated… 

Weve been encouraged to try and meet the criteria that is based inside BCT’s walls and also to have a deeper meaning or message we want to convey. Now this has made out task a little harder. This is because no longer is it feasible for us to just create a game; it need to essentially market to the players an important lesson or idea.

If im honest this idea seems a bit lofty and not really that great of an addition to our ARG. Sure its important to try and make it have more meaning than just a fun experieince but by having this need put on the game it adds another requirement which makes it harder to just be creative and come up with something new. 

We’ve now started rethinking our ideas for this project especially in our game mechanics and the storyline. Its also made it harder to create a single design language. Tim and I designed two different sets of logos for the game which worked well together but now it looks like we will need to change the look of these logos to relate more to the new plot line. 

So far Intergrative Practice has been filled with miss steps and missed deadlines and a number of large setbacks due to the fact I had been ill from the beginning of this project. This was quite disappointing for me as the original interrogation and the six degrees of separation seemed incredibly interesting and I really wished I would have been able to actually action my ideas and see if my message could get to James Charlton whilst he was in Berlin.

One thing I did realise is from reading everyones blogs was that almost everyone seemed to immediately gravitate to conventional techniques of connecting with people; email, Facebook, physical letters. We were encouraged to try different things and not worry about failure; but instead think about our process and what it accomplished.

Right after reading the assignment I had a few ideas to accomplish the task. Some were the traditional message to a friend or a letter like the documentary we were encouraged to watch. Others where ideas like starting a viral video campaign like KONY2012 and it was this idea that I felt the most strongly would be an interesting way to connect with James.

The plan was to follow in the footsteps of the KONY2012 campaign and create a viral video which if became highly popularised would be seen by him somewhere whether by word of mouth or due to him actually seeing it on a blog or website he followed. Hashtags and social media popularisation would spread a further web to try and pass the message of my interrogation on to him

But it was this first excerpt from the KONY2012 Wikipedia page that really made me think that this was a great way to reach James.

“Kony 2012 is a short film produced by Invisible Children…It was released on March 5, 2012. The film's purpose was to promote the charity's "Stop Kony" movement to make African cult and militia leader, indicted war criminal and the International Criminal Court fugitive Joseph Kony globally known in order to have him arrested by the end of 2012″  

I wanted the film to strike a chord with people from all walks of life to make them become heightened the purported ideas and share it in order to spread the message. I wanted people to think about how they could find James and somehow get him to see it. If I could have made it become personal for people I believed it could  actually work.