University Campus Suffolk

As I have been experiencing technical issues with my internet recently, I have resorted to the old fashioned method of documneting my work and progression in a sketchbook.

Tuesday 25th March 2014

Over the last two days, I have decided to construct the wooden stand for the gravity-fed aquaponics system as I have my water pump built and functioning, and I am excited to see the whole system working. It may still require some fine tuning, but I believe that it is at a point now where it will be sufficient enough to force the water to a height of one meter (roughly how tall I planned for it to be.)

All of the wood which I have been using within the stand has been aquired for free, with the majority of it being reclaimed from structures and some being saved from skips. My reason for this is to yet again show others that there are materials out there which can be re-used, instead of purchasing from new, and secondly to comment on those who take the materials for granted and discard them in the first place.

Because the wood has come from a number of sources, hardly any of it matches – both in dimensions and type, but I am not concerned about this because I believe that the installation does not need to be pleasing to the eye.

Whilst on the subject of aesthetics, some of my peers have made suggestions or queried as to whether or not I am going to hide/paint the frame, but again, I believe that there is no need as it would only require more materials, which could be used for other purposes.

Being concerned with the amount of energy I use in the construction of this piece, I have tried to rely on manual labour more so than electrical devices where ever I could. For instance; I have mainly used a handsaw and screwdriver (with the exception for drilling awkward pilot holes with a hand drill, and splitting the timber on a table saw to make it into two, maybe four lengths instead of the thicker one.

If I had more time to spend on the project, then I would have liked to have built it completely with a lack of electrical power, but with so many other things to be tackling, I didn’t think that it would be realistic.

Even though I haven’t documented the process of building the stand (through forgetting my camera on the day), I have taken photographs of the end product, and will eventually upload the illustrations of the design.

I may choose to use some of these illustrations alongside the piece, as I have always been fond of process, and it depicts the piece in an exploded view.

Possibilities:

Framed

Reverse of bussiness cards

Within a sketchbook to accompany piece.

Again your suggestions would be much appreciated.

As I plan on relying on audience interaction with my piece, I will also need to develop a sucessful method of getting them engaged in the first place. My reason for wanting audience participation is to hopefully transfer a message to the audience of how we are going to have to work hard if we are to be able to repair and maintain our natural world. What better way to get this message across than to request the to exhert their energy to maintain the living organisms in the installation.

Its all very well building manually operated pumps and possibly turbines, but how do I get the audience involved?

Some ideas which I have contemplated so far are;

Using a clever title to provoke the audience to engage.

Mention ‘audience participation’ in my artist statement, and post in the surround space.

Provide instructions.

Involve a reward system.

Project a video of the installation in use.

So far I am leaning towards the Idea of adding it into my artist statement, and possibly adding a video of the piece in use, however as I already plan to use three projectors for my other piece, I might consider displaying on a monitor instead.

If anybody out there just so happens to read this, and has any suggestions, please could you comment.

Thanks.

Because I feel as though I have reached a point of understanding the processes and direction of my ‘submersive experience’ piece, I have decided to dedicate more of my time to developing my ‘artificial environment’, as I feel there are going to be more complications involved.

I have recently began working on some of the functional aspects of piece, such as the creation of the water pump – to force the water to the top of the gravity fed aquaponics system. Building the stand for the tanks, and removing any access material from the exterior of the tanks.

In order to make this installation, I have decided to find scrap materials and forms of waste packaging to use as the building blocks, as I am hoping to help my audeince realise that we (as a society) are discarding useful materials everyday just because in the short term it is more practical.

Fortunate for me, one of my brothers is a plumber and heating engineer, so I have been able to gain access to many off-cuts of pipe (both copper and plastic) as well as some second-hand plumbing fittings such as one way valves. By doing this, I have stopped these materials from finding their way into a landfill.

For quite a while, my attention has been aimed at the ‘submersive experience’ art piece, where I wanted to learn more about the process and materials that I would be using.

After experimenting with possible materials to use in the making of the screens and sampling different footage, I believe the piece will be more successful if I choose to project the one environment onto a relative material (rather than three individual biomes), showing the audience that one place from three different angles.

At this moment, I am more drawn to the projection of the beach/ocean, as I feel the plastic screens would make a good political comment about the amount of plastic debris that is in our oceans and constantly washes up onto our shores.

Considering the underlying principle of this piece shall be commenting on litter, I may choose to cut the footage with other video footage taken from inside a landfill.

Because I only had video footage of the beach/sea environment, I decided to also project images of other areas, to get a rough idea of how they will look.