After experimenting and ‘learning by doing’ with a lot of the tools in the EchoFab and getting told priceless information by the people there, at day 4, it is time to make progress with the idea for the final art piece! It is like preparing for a journey and finally stepping out, taking the first footsteps towards a destination I do not fully know yet. What an exciting feeling of anticipation, the journey of creativity. After pestering people in the FabLab about possible interactive aspects I could use with the Arduino, I decided to embark on a brainstorm ideas session.

Rather than using too many words here. I will let you look at the sequence of brainstorms on paper. Don’t worry if you cannot read some of the writing, sometimes I cannot read it myself! The idea I have developed is not the same as a final design. With the art I create, this is a springboard. When I make the piece, I will push things around, implode things, add things, subtract things. This is the intuitive aspect of an artwork that makes it ‘sing’. Again, encountering the unknown in a journey often leads to great things!

I envisage the art-piece at the moment to be a wall frieze. In some ways although I do not want it to be like a design piece, at this stage I keep thinking about Isamu Noguchi‘s work ‘Model of Riverside Park Playground’. This piece of work always inspired me, an architectural diorama but in many ways, the diorama is a sculpture art-piece in itself.

A summary of what I did today –

1. I pestered people in the FabLab about how feasible it is to add some interactive elements using the Arduino. I want to make lights activated by movement. Ideally a sound with each light activation too. I realised that many lights will be very difficult. To remedy this, I will section off 5 lighting areas with a white material to diffuse the light below the stencilled patterns. This way it will give an effect of a pulse but not with individual lights. In future art projects, I would like to experiment with individual lights.

2. Through a series of brainstorms and also some 3dsMax compositions, I laid down the foundations to develop the work intuitively and freely…

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