Part of the challenge for me in completing projects such as this is deciding how to limit the scope of my explorations. Given the written assignment, and some intuition about what our instructor wants, I am still left with a huge number of approaches. Should I interpret the rules creatively? There is something to be said for this; however, there is also something to be said for exploring the material specified by the rules. Should I make one module which carries the ball at one speed, one at another speed, another to change direction, and so forth? Should the exercises follow each other or depart radically?
It is easy to get overwhelmed by even the initial explorations. In class, I learned that the paper could be crumpled to give it more structure. However, I soon learned that this structure is not very useful - it gives a small amount of stiffness in all directions at the expense of really useful stiffness in one direction.
Joining paper leaves you with a lot of options as well. Paper can be woven and interlocked and affected in multivarious ways to create a lot of formal effects, but which of these really serve a small kinetic figure? Again, the explorations need some sort of evaluation, even a very vague one, to make them meaningful.
I was caught between doing a million things with paper and trying to apply them to a million types of marble movement, but my limiting both ends of the equation I have developed a palette of paper operations, excuse the language, which allows me to make the movements I want to make with perhaps less flair but a little more elegance. I look forward to seeing everyone else's work.
There are certainly many questions that arise during the creative process. I've been trying to address all of the challenges with each model. And then I try to use whatever worked best in the previous model in the succeeding models. After rolling the marble time and time again especially on an elongated path it will do everything the assignment requires...as long as it stops. So my method has been for one model to follow the next and not so much the movement type. That will come.
ReplyDeleteYou and some others were weaving the paper during class last week. I thought that was a very effective use of the paper to create forms that could resist the the weight and movement of the marble. I am very interested to see your palette of paper operations. And I encourage you to try to envision a route or path you want the marble to travel along and use your learned operations to make it happen. Good luck.