Tuesday 31 March 2009

25 years....

Whilst i wait for some images to be uploaded to the website or sent to me through e-mail of the exhibition i have taken to thinking more about the project space that i want to initiate early next year to help the Design scene in Glasgow, which in my opinion is either very elite or does not exist in a healthy enough way comparable to London.



Yesterday my parents came to visit me on the way to fort william and its surrounding area for there 25th wedding anniversary (happy anniversary guys) for a short amount of time, just under 2 hours, and took me out to eat at the wee curry shop. If you are ever in Glasgow i really recommend that you go there the food is amazing and reasonably priced.

Friday 27 March 2009

Mezzanine



Today is the day of the exhibition i have submitted some work towards. For me this will be the first time i have ever created a piece for specifically for an exhibition outside of the work i have been doing for my course. To be honest i wish that i had a little longer to get the piece ready for the show but i didn't have enough time! damn damn damn!

Pictures of the exhibition will follow.



At the moment my favourite thing to draw is peoples shoulders and backs...i love the shapes that their clothes make and looking at how they hold themselves, although i do realise that it could be considered to be pervy.



Monday 23 March 2009

The third issue

Today i uploaded issue 3 of mammogram magazine to scribd. For this issue we decided to change the format from A4 to A5 so that it felt a little more hand made reflecting the nature of the school as well as cutting the cost of printing down by around half helping us to print more, 500 copies this time! For me its really exciting to see the growth of demand for the magazine from the beginning of around 150 copies and being put together on publisher to what it is now!

Please have a little read and enjoy!

Mammogram 3

Sunday 22 March 2009

A night of Gram



Phew. What a intensely busy week i have had. My essay, although finished, is a little bit too...sparse than i would of liked to have made it but all of the different threads got the best of me and i ended up spiraling out of control and becoming something that im not sure makes a whole lot of sense. For the first time in ages someone helped me with my essay, my friend stephen, which was a really nice but slightly embarissing experience (because my grammar/spelling is terrible!)

Last night was the night of Gram! As i had been given the responsibility of creating a bigger presence of the night and trying to transform the vic into somewhere that well wasnt the vic! So i made some slides and some big M's to put up around the venue and i have to say i was really happy with the result. Im pretty excited for next time cause its going to look EVEN BETTER.


Sunday 15 March 2009

Under the floors

Its the last day in what has turned out to be a really busy week filled with organising things and avoiding doing my essay which has to be in on Thursday (oh no oh no). Yesterday i went to view an exhibition with my flatmate which we had been told we had to go to by alot of our friends. It was one of the most amazing exhibitions i have ever been too and certainly the most interesting in terms of exhibition space. Pieces by the artists were displayed beneath the floor in their flat and you had to literally crawl around looking through holes in the walls at the work.


Friday 13 March 2009

A Chinese exhibit



China is the theme of my next project. We have been asked to design an exhibition space within princes square to showcase some elements of Chinese design/history and promote Chinese tourism. When i first got this brief i didn't really understand the reasoning behind having this project and saw it as more of an experiment on my tutors behalf because of some similarities in how the students from china design. For the first project most of the Chinese students included some kind of Fish tank and or used bamboo as a material in there design. I think that my tutor kind of sees this as a test to see if we can (attempt to!) embrace a completely different culture, take into consideration its customs and create something that will speak of china's past whilst expressing its present.

As soon as i began research for this project i was careful to not to let things that i would not really be able to get a good understanding of in the time we have been given before the first crit. This was also a good way to help me avoid creating a pastiche of the china style and help me to try and understand at least part of the culture respectively without doing it in a condescending or patronising way.



At the moment a big chunk of my research has been around that of the concentrated nature of China's city's, i really like the way (Aesthetically) the buildings come together creating patterns of repetition and interesting collisions. I like the idea of trying to represent ALL periods of China's history unlike the Beijing opening ceremony that just focused on the wonder of the ancient and completely left out the Rule of Chairman Mao. I think i can do this by combining materials and by thinking about ways that there could be two structures intertwined with each other.



The image above is a good example of the kind of 'communist' style building that i could use to get inspiration for my exhibition display. There is quite alot of building works like this one but i liked the recesses in particular picture, somehow i could integrate the stands into a wall so that it would be able to be seen from both sides...likes a two way fireplace. Im not sure where this project will be going but, today i will be playing around with the floorplan a little so i can see how too fit my display cases etc into the space.


Wednesday 11 March 2009

Performing arts

Over the last week or so i have been helping out some friends with setting up a drama society for the GSA and we all decided (with some funding that the Student Association kindly gave us) to hold two events to start it all up. The first thing we talked about was that the name was very important, we didn't want people to come along with a pre conceived view of what performance is. To get the ball rolling we thought it would be a good idea to arrange to have some artists give people an idea of what kind of things we could do within the society. It went really well and we will be having a follow up event to talk more about what people want to do with the society.

In all we had 4 performances. My friend James did a piece where he plugged in a wireless plug and continuated the end of the wire by drawing a line across the floor and encouraged people to follow him around, i think it worked really well but it too a while for people to realise that it was an interactive piece. He took the whole room (around 50 people) around Glasgow whilst following him drawing this line.

For me the performance by exchange student Marcel Spaarman was the highlight of the event. He started it by sitting down and making casual conversation with the audience/talking about himself and then revealed that he had just been improvising. He then started to repeat himself, saying 'I always repeat myself, i want to rebirth myself' and changing what he was saying but constantly repeating. I'd taken a sneaky peek at his blog before hand to look at his previous performances and noticed a similarity. He bought a mirror up infront of his face and reflected the audience whilst repeating himself, then suddenly he headbutted the mirror everyone was really shocked! It didn't break and he continued to repeat himself. He ended the piece by smashing the mirror over his head and walking out of the room, i loved how nobody knew what to do whether they should clap or just sit there contemplating what had happened.

This is a video of another piece he took part in which i came across on youtube.

Friday 6 March 2009

Office Project Conclusion

My office project is officially finished today. Although im kind of glad this is over i just started to get into it towards the last few hours...im not really sure how or why this happened but i guess i will just have to live with it for now. This time we presented the project on a projection screen in our studio that is normally used when we want to explore our designs through the use of 3d projection technology (cue the oos and ahhs).



As with every presentation i wrote a few notes beforehand to help me through the talking and so that i didn't forget any points that were essential to the delivery of my design idea.
For me, through research and thinking about office design in general, my main goal in this project was to fit between two different types of spaces. One being a stark boring work orientated place and the other being a completely over the top 'play scheme' esque environment. I felt that there was a need to address this paradox and try to resolve it!



So as you walk into the space you are welcomed with calm disguised lighting and natural raw materials that really set the mood of this office. The desk itself wraps around to include a bunch for seating and the wall dividing the kitchen from the entrance space. It took ages to put the recessed lighting into the bottom of the wooden structure but it looks pretty successful, im pretty happy with how it turned out.



This leads you into the hallway which is angled slightly so that your perspective of the space is warped making it seem longer than it actually is. This thoroughfare helps to divide up the space in to two different sections, Lu pening in my class had a similar idea where the space was divided up into 'work' and 'living' areas.



The kitchen speaks for itself, simple with room enough for the bin so that everything is tidied away, i really like the shadow the scoop light above is causing.



The meeting room has enough space for four people to sit around comfortably and has a tv on the back wall which you can't see in this rendering. I thought alot about the dividing wall between the bosses office and the meeting room and came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to echo the industrial feeling and also thinking construction wise, i wanted to accentuate the joins instead of hiding them. Thus resulting in a kind of greenhouse like design. The doors in the middle can be slid open to open up the space if it needs to be and it has one other feature.



Finally the bosses room, Completely with a terribly rendered Mac computer. The final feature of the dividing wall is also shown here. I was looking at dividing screens and suddenly thought to myself that it would be more interesting to include a device that would provide visual privacy for the boss or the people in the meeting room and that i should make a feature of it. I think my tutor thought it was a bit of a weird idea but in my opinion it is applicable to the style of this office and a great talking point. I talked a little bit more about how there would be natural light in every space (even the bathroom) and how too me this was very important in an working environment.

Monday 2 March 2009

Photography exhibtion

The Newbury tower at the art school hosts alot of exhibitions from students of different specialisms around the year, Today was the opening of an exhibition by second year students in Fine art Photography. I have always been interested in photography in particular its processes and this particular show, for me anyway, left me wondering about how some of the photographs had been produced.

One of my friends Jakub had some images in the show. They were pictures from a protest about coal production, in particular one image of a man in a coat looking really cold and slightly confused stuck in my mind. Below is his image on the website for this exhibition.



I decided to buy the catalogue for the show so that i could get to keep some of the pictures shown and came across an image that wasn't present in the exhibition.



I really like this image by Simon Kubik the colours are so rich! Although to be honest i haven't given much thought to the meaning behind it was its surface value that bought me too it.

Sunday 1 March 2009

Marcho

Today is the first day of march, and for my flat a tiny bit of a spring cleaning day. As part of this organisation fest i have taken some time to check through the blogroll, deleting dead links and updating some new gems i have stumbled across (so take a peek if you haven't already). I also had time to consider the graphic identity of the website so i think i will be playing around with some templates over the next couple of weeks or so depending on time scale.

I also discovered a weekly podcast on Monocle doing much the same thing as the magazine, giving an up to date 'briefing' on a range of subjects from economics to architecture. The latest one i listened too talked about Japans pitch for the 2016 Olympics and how they see it as a relatively compact affair. I really like this idea, especially as the London 2012 games will probably end up creating a gentrification of some areas that people were living happily in until the pitch was approved.



One of my favourite design firms Droog has opened a store in New York, Soho. From what i can tell they have kept the stores design to a minimalist style letting the products do all the talking and even using them to divide up the space. On Design scout (where i also found the image above) they talk a little more in depth about the reasons behind this, i suppose that is the perk of being in NY and having the chance to take a guided tour of the shop.