Final Major Project – Page 2

Feb 27

First Looks

First Footage from the ‘Balance of Power’ Mobile It feels like it has been a long journey to get to this point, but at last the mobile is up and running. It stands around 3m tall and is by far one of the largest structures that I have ever made all by myself. Although, I haven’t kept an hourly diary of how long the mobile has taken to complete, I know that it has taken many weeks. At the moment the balance of the mobile is quite precarious and this is quite a threat to the project so I need to ensure that it is really secure going forward. I already had one mishap this morning while trying to hang it up. All of the pieces ended up on the floor, so this is far from ideal if it is to be transported then hung. My intention is to ensure that all of the mobile elements are secured so that if the balance does tip then everything will be relatively contained. In many ways hanging the mobile is just the very start of the journey as there is so much more hidden in the whole structure. However, I will begin […]

Feb 19

by Karyn in 3d, Final Major Project, My Work, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: 3d, Final Major Project, my work, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs

Process

Another Full Day of Working – When I first began making my mobiles, I honestly hadn’t realised how much time each element would take to make. However, I am enjoying the process and I’m looking forward to seeing the end result. Today was another full day of making. My plan is to finish my second mobile by the end of this weekend so I can work out my next steps. During this process I have shot a number of time-lapse videos so I thought it would be nice to add some process stills. Process Stills

Feb 16

by Karyn in 3d, Final Major Project, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: 3d, Final Major Project, Unit 3 Blogs

Weekend of Work

Moving on to Prototype #3 – Now that the physical side of my first prototype is finished, I am beginning work on a more refined and larger version. The design is more robust and I’ve added eyelets to add strength to the cardboard whilst hanging. One of the issues I faced was ensuring that all of the code was on a level and could be read as an actual line of binary. After numerous attempts I realised that the quickest and easiest way to do it was to change my arrangements of keyrings and clips. This worked out to be a pretty effective way to balance everything out.

Jan 29

by Karyn in Final Major Project, Ideas, My Learning, My Work, Problem Solving, Risk Taking, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos 0 comments tags: Final Major Project, Ideas, My Learning, my work, Problem Solving, Risk Taking, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos

The Concept

Hidden Depths – I have decided to call my mobile ‘The Balance of Power – Unity in Bits’. My mobile represents a ‘balance’ of power play between the major players in the AI art generation industries, versus the millions of voiceless, hidden artists who had their images used (often without permission) to feed machine learning algorithms. The mobile is based on binary code and the lines of code spell out the words ‘Unity in Bits’. Why ‘Unity in Bits’? This is an ambiguous play on words. The rise of the digital age coupled with social media and AI has led to a fragmentation of our society – namely, our ‘unity in bits’. For example we have divided communities, surveillance capitalism and lack of free speech. However, I hope that through interaction with my mobile ‘unity can be found in bits’ only this time ‘bits’ refers to the ‘bits’ and ‘bytes’ of binary code. My mobile project poses the question can that which has sought to divide us, actually bring us closer together?

Jan 22

by Karyn in Experimentation, Final Major Project, My Learning, My Work, Timelapse, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Final Major Project, My Learning, my work, Timelapse, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos

Blogpost 200

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – After working solidly for two days over the weekend, I finally finished the first prototype for the mobile. I felt on the whole it was pretty good. However, the sheer weight of the project even at this scale was pretty bad. Balancing the elements was also an absolute ‘nightmare’. This meant that some of the spacing between the mobile elements was pretty ugly. The short time-lapse video below shows roughly how many elements went into making three quarters of the mobile (some elements were already strung). I always imagined cardboard to be quite light but after this project I’ve come to revise my view. On the whole I do think that the prototype was a success – not because it was perfect or anything like that, but because of what I had learned during the whole process. First Looks Below is a very short video of the mobile. As I was concentrating on the movement of the video there is nothing to show scale. The mobile turned out to be around 6ft tall in the end! I had envisioned something much smaller and lighter. Alternative Music […]

Jan 16

by Karyn in Experimentation, Final Major Project, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Final Major Project, Unit 3 Blogs

Stringing Along

The Mobile Hanging Process – Today a number of items arrived that I identified as being useful for my mobile. I felt that black elastic bands might secure the pieces in place better than tape. I also ordered some phone charm strings and some swivel head keychain clasps. Below is a picture of my ‘haul’. New Hanging Items The items shown below contain tiny black eyelets sat on top of the box they came in. There are also some swivel head clasps and some phone charm strings. I have threaded together the swivel clasps using a phone charm string to illustrate how each bar of the mobile will be held in place. The large circular key rings will be used to suspend the zero elements of the mobile. I tried stringing one line of the mobile this evening using the new items. It has made an immeasurable difference. It will now be so much easier to standardise the thread lengths because the phone strings are already a uniform length. Also with the zero elements now secured using the tiny eyelets everything will now stay in place. I was extremely hard trying to balance everything when many of […]

Hanging Around

Choosing a Suitable Stringing Method – Choosing suitable materials and a hanging method for my mobile has to be one of the most challenging aspects so far. I’m way beyond my comfort zone with this! Noah one of my fellow students shared a link by the creative force that once was, namely David Bowie. Im going to put what he said here so that when I struggle I’ve got a point of reference to start things moving again. Today, having produced enough mobile elements to explore hanging and stringing I started running into multiple problems. Some of these included: 1). What kind of stringing method would I like to use 2). How do I arrange the elements neatly enough so that the viewer understands them as binary. 3). What materials should I use to actually string and hang the mobile? 4). Will a smaller prototype actually translate into a much larger one? The problems above were to name only a few. I spent the evening trying to source suitable hanging materials. I managed to source a very good older pdf on the subject of mobile making which helped a lot! How to Make Mobiles How to […]

Jan 13

by Karyn in 3d, Final Major Project, Timelapse, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: 3d, Final Major Project, Timelapse, Unit 3 Blogs

Mini Mobile

A Day of Mini Mobile Making – In order to help add some weight to my intended proposal for college, I felt I needed to produce something to scale. Today I had a really enjoyable session making some mobile elements with my mum to produce a mini mobile. She was chief cardboard cutter and sticker and I was designer in chief. Between us we managed to produce 16 small mobile units (i.e. pieces for the mobile). Below is a time-lapse video of my activity. The main reason for producing a smaller scale mobile was to decide exactly how I would like to string/hang the larger version. I have been really struggling with the concept of actually hanging my mobile. For example do I take an Alexander Calder approach and have the pieces more rigidly fixed? Or do I suspend them so they are more free to move, or, do I opt for a mix of both? I felt that the only way to answer these questions was to actually make a small prototype. I also decided in the interest of speed, I would only use circles as they were easier to cut. The suspended shapes didn’t really matter, for me […]

Jan 10

by Karyn in Final Major Project, Planning, Proposals, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Final Major Project, Planning, Proposals, Unit 3 Blogs

Proposals and Planning

A Space for Planning and Proposal Writing – I decided that I needed a place on my blog where I could jot down ideas relating to my final major project and any related proposal writing. I would love to collaborate with my college. However, I also feel that it is important to write a clear and concise proposal detailing exactly what I would like to do. I have already spoken with my boss about whether or not displaying my mobile on the college campus might be a viable proposition. In principle he felt this was probably achievable. However, I would like to produce a formal proposal for senior management and estates. This is because I know they will quite rightly have health and safety concerns, and I would like to address these. Some Considerations How large is the area that I’m trying to fill? What are the best materials to use? How will the mobile be suspended? What are the health and safety requirements? How much will the structure weigh? How easy will it be to transport? Am I physically capable of making the structure? Do I need to enlist help with the making process These are just […]

Jan 02

by Karyn in Experimentation, Final Major Project, Food for Thought, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Final Major Project, Food for Thought, Unit 3 Blogs

Still Thinking

How Do Computers See Art? – Throughout my research journey, I focussed a lot on how humans perceive AI generated art. On the whole there was quite an amount of negative bias towards it. Further research revealed that some of this negativity could be mitigated by carefully crafting a narrative to accompany the AI art. However, this led me to question how do computers actually see and understand the art that they are fed? I did some further research and I stumbled upon something called ‘pixel data’. This is the raw data the computer uses to display both the colour and brightness of any given pixel on a screen. I wanted to learn more about pixel data. While doing some research I stumbled across a really interesting website called ‘Think Maths’. On this website was an interesting piece of software to enable the extraction of pixel data called the ‘Spreadsheet Pixel Converter. After watching one of Matt Parker’s videos on the website, I became completely ‘sold’ on the idea of pixel data and how a computer might at some level actually view or ‘see’ the imagery that is input into a machine learning system. In his video, Matt demonstrated how […]