LUO STUDIO

In progress...

Outcome: The overall outcome wasn’t too great as I found the material and form lost some of its flexibility when completely filled with styrofoam. However, accidentally overfilling it and bursting the melted seams which inevitably created a huge pool of styrofoam was a wonderful mishap as I found that the styrofoam would often ‘stick’ to the latex of the balloon and the vinyl when electrically charged. I am still yet to figure out how to combine this interesting discovery into my final project.

Outcome: I did two trials, one with a complete ‘bead’ and one with two ‘beads’ joined together. I found that the one with two beads when inflated, the edges of the melted plastic in the interior would become a lot more vague, due to the air pressure forcing the merged plastic to separate. The trial that I did with the sole circular bead has maintained air quite well over the past 30hrs which will be important to consider for my final proposal. The basis of my installation is also the idea of a body landscape so my material and form has to display a sense of vulnerability and change when a human puts their body and weight on to the material and form. I feel as if this material executed this sense of moulding process to the human body well. 

Purpose: To bring a new facility to Middle Brighton Baths so that people who can’t swim are able to physically learn how to by staying afloat but slightly submerged in the water. Their bodies will be supported by expanded circular ‘bead’ shapes to imitate the neptune’s necklace form which will be simultaneously living and over time be breeding a colony underneath this installation. The installation is also a manifestation of a rock pool as that is the habitat that the neptune’s necklace are used to living in while allowing them to float up into the crevices to obtain sunlight. 

Taken at Middle Brighton Baths on the 18/09

Taken at Middle Brighton Baths on the 18/09

Making these photomontages really made me think about how a non-human (in this case, neptune’s necklace) would share the waters at Middle Brighton Baths with humans. For the first photomontage, I was thinking about using the characteristics from my protective cast; the netting and the see-through tubing and embedding it into the waters and dividing the waters with these netting and tubing materiality. I then continued to explore division, in the second photomontage, as a contrast to the ‘sharing’ aspect of our design brief and thought about how would the humans feel to sharing their relaxing/active space with these alien looking seaweed and vice-versa, the neptune’s necklace and other non humans would think that they have a more liable claim to the waters as it is their home. From this photomontage, I thought about the masses of humans in comparison to the masses of neptune’s necklace. Both species can completely swarm a space, so I came to the conclusion the Middle Brighton Baths may need some sort of regulation so that the masses of all species can share the waters peacefully. For the third and the fourth photomontage, I started to thinking of the humans and neptune’s necklace sharing the waters more intimately. If there was no visible sight of the neptune’s necklace and it touched a human underwater, would it induce fear? Or would a human voluntarily dive deep into a colony of neptune’s necklace? These questions probe the limits of the relationships between humans’ and non-humans and I am excited about having to solve these perhaps uncomfortable relationships in a spacial context. 

A speculative proposal/construction...

TEAM Nancy, Bec, Em, Erin