MFA in Studio, School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2009 – 2011)

Something Out of Thin Air

Whilst grappling unsuccessfully with the Arduino platform, I had one of those things that I suppose some people call an EUREKA moment, although I didn’t figure anything else new out about gravity or anything like that.

…and unfortuantly this had nothing to do with understanding Arduino….

I had a sudden and completley formed idea in my head. It did make me quite nervous. I’m not sure if anyone else has felt this when you have a sudden thought of a complete and pretty much fully-formed idea. I wondered if this would make sense to anyone but me, if I needed to talk it through with my advisor or if I was going off to do something ridiculous and a waste of my time and energies.

So since I was waiting to start work on something else, I just decided to go ahead with it and record it anyway. When I showed it, both advisors said that it was basically done, and I didn’t need to do anything else to it at all and that they really liked it.

Shawn recommended to think about context and presentation of these kind of pieces. Research artists that have prehaps done something like this before so you know similarities and differnces.

Walking up, up, up thirteen flights of stairs with my breathing becoming more and more laboured and my steps becoming slower as I ascend. A looped video so that I continually ascend and never descend.

Week 3

The third week of my last semester. I’m doing a fantastic art history course entitled The Space for Art: From Imrpressionism to Relational Aesthetics. So far great, challenging readings and a relaxed atmosphere which is really what you want from art history class.

I’m also juming head first into the mind boggling world of pysical computing through the Arduino platform. Arduino can control things like LED’s, motors, speakers, amp’s and can respond to data entry from a computer or from the external environment.

On our third week of class we reviewed electronics theory (thankfully) and worked on our task to blink an LED that is controlled by switches that variry it’s speed.

PHEW. So I got there abouts with a few hiccups along the way. My code was described as beautiful, nice code…although it didn’t do exactly what I’d thought it would. (sigh).

Oh well, back to the Arduino board…