This Week's Work

Week 01: Studio, Publish on Demand, Architecture to Architecture


-----------------Publish---ON---Demand-----------------
I am hopeuflly dropping Publish on Demand in order to pick up a very strange Photography course. I will also start attending Shaping Seams, but not receive credit.

Publish on Demand requires a rough draft of a manifesto for next week. While I would love to write something and have it published at the AA, we are writing a manifesto for studio and there are only 3 weeks of content development for the class. The latter weeks are simply printing it off. I would prefer to be in a class that has 8 full weeks of content since I am only here for a short time.
However, I did scratch out the beginnings of a manifesto, because I have been agonizing throughout this [incredibly] long week about a need and desire for depth, sincerity, and meaning.

I filled a few pages in my sketchbook with musings that went from "End of the World and Total Collapse" to "Hope Beyond and Before Despair." It's much healthier to end on a bright note.


-----------------Studio-----------------
Self Dividing Line by J. Tarbell

We are being asked in Studio to create art from Processing or Flash scripting, to obsess over an image, a shape. Knowing that this will turn into my studio project, I have been having a hard time overcoming my inherent disdain for such practice. This is not only a very different approach than I normally take, but emblematic of the type of architectural design process I disagree with.
We have chosen a script to modify play with. For Monday, we are to have a finished piece. The final image can be a collage or taken directly from the script. It can have color, represent anything, and should be jaw-droppingly beautiful.
While I'm not quite there yet, my first attempts at playing with the script have resulted in a few compositions like this:


Growing things


Cloud or mountain?


Secret box


-----------------Architecture--to--Architecture-----------------
My History / Theory course seems to be a good class. An hour long lecture crammed in a tiny room, sitting on plastic chairs or the wooden floor, is followed by smaller group discussion about an assigned reading and its relationship to the lecture. Though the conversation easily strays to wilder and wilder tangents, it is refreshing to hear people talk intelligently about obscure architectural nuances.
Favorite quote: "We want this to a problem to you. We want you to be agitated."
The TAs/Discussion leaders seem pretty cool... recent grads of the Masters and PhD History and Theory Studies.