Systematic Design

For my conceptual project, where we had to create a design that uses a system with inspiration from Sol Lewitt's work, I decided to create a system of an increasing pattern design. I wanted to make my pattern begin from the center and work its way out, so that there would be a center point on the design. Therefore, I began with a simple four squares in the middle of the graphing paper. 

After this start point, I began to grow my design from the center diagonally from each side. I increased the design outwards by two squares off of each point of the original starting square.

Once those diagonals were in place, I created a box around that enclosed the diagonals. This pattern continues up until my last 10th piece... 

Examples of a few other pieces within the design, and my 10th piece:

   

The color scheme that I chose came from a few experiments. I wanted to create the feel that the design was growing outwards from the page, to create depth from the center. I first tried dealing with red, orange, and yellow, but I realized that no matter how hard I worked on it, it did not really create the feel of depth that I was hoping for. Therefore, I moved onto the colors of green, blue and purple. I felt that these colors all are based off of relatively the same hue, and work well together. I still wanted to create some form of depth, so that is when I made the choice to make the color really dark first, and then continue the pattern with the same color, except for really light. I felt that the darkness of the color followed by the lightness of the color created depth. This pattern continues then, for each color following green. 

Representation of Art at Duke

I decided to interview my friends about the representation of art at Duke, and the interest they thought people took to it.  I did not include all of the interview, but as evidenced by the last clip, art is apparently important to some students more than others.  Matt Davis is an engineer and does not even consider art at Duke, and only really has any idea of art at Duke through his friends.  My friend Ellary also had a hard time coming up with art pieces that she could name off the top of her head, which is implies a lack of visibility for the few works of art that we do see at Duke.  She is more interested in Performance art, but even in this category, as she says, many times the actors are met with a small audience.  To me, art has a small representation here at Duke, and as Ellary says, even the "artsy" students must it seek out.  

Gina & Laura - Art at Duke

Laura and I worked collaboratively for this project to get a feel for how people within the Duke community see art on campus, the university's receptiveness to art, and where they think art should be better represented. Responses varied, but the overall responses we recieved were in favor of more student art, installations, public art, etc. It seemed obvious from our interviews that students' perceptions of Duke are that it is a university campus severely lacking in innovative and thought-provoking artwork.

Gina: Duke is not particularly known as an artistically liberal, creative, art-embracing campus, and unfortunately, some of these external stereotypes actually hold true. Although certain areas of campus are decorated with student-created advertisements, poltical beliefs, or random blurbs of graffiti (namely, the bridge to east campus), Duke's public artwork predominately remains the austere, memorial-type statuary or portraiture. As Babs so eloquently stated in her interview, this campus is in desperate need to art that can shock, inspire, or simply to make campus a more visually-stimulating, artistic environment.

Laura: I actually was not shocked by the student response in our interviews. Art is not a very prevalent element on the Duke Unversity campus. I feel like Duke ought to make more of an effort to showcase student art -- especially in more public areas such as the main quad, bryan center, east campus student union, and even the libraries. Art is a way to broaden minds and has various uses: breaking down social conventions, asking unanswered questions, etc. I hope that we, as students and members of the Duke community, can act upon this.

conceptual project

I chose to my conceptual project about aligned objects that create a face. With each new page, something on the face moves. This concept allows others to think of what they would tweak on the face. The face generally stays the same; however, some parts are altered. I chose to move the eyes, mouth, teeth, and eyebrows. Different color schemes consisting of a primary and secondary color were used and the part that was changing had one color while the rest of the face had the other. This enabled the viewer to focus in on the change.

The face is constructed in a patterned format that was followed for all ten pages. 

-Start by making 4 faint guidelines on the paper vertically. These lines are the outline of the face. All parts are within the lines.

1st-5 boxes in from left

2nd-8 bxes in from left from 1st line

3rd-8 boxes from left from 2nd line

4th-8 boxes in from left from 3rd line

-2 eyebrows 7 blocks  down from top, 1 block deep, 8 blocks wide

fit between 1st&2nd and 3rd&4th guidelines

-2 eyes 3 blocks down from eyebrows. 3 blocks height, 4 blocks width

count 2 in from 1st&2nd and 3rd&4th line

-eyeballs 2 block height & width, in center of eyes

-nose- between 2nd&3rd line 4 blocks down

2 in from 2nd&3rd guidelines. triangle shape with hypotenuse on top.

4 block top length, 2 block width

-mouth- the middle part is 8 blocks down from nose. 8 blocks wide 2 blocks height

between 2nd&3rd lines

the sides of the mouth are two diagonal lines covering 4 blocks on bottom line, 3 on top.

-teeth- two teeth, 4 block squares.  with 2 blocks in between

visual art @ duke

For my video project, I wanted to document existing art, student reactions to art on campus, and potential spaces for new art. Each of these topics is covered in a separate part. I interviewed three of my friends, all of whom have different perspectives on the arts, but who ended up saying similar things: we need more art on campus, especially student art!

The Arts at Duke

For my video documentary on the arts at Duke I decided to interview a friend of mine, Bri Connolly.  Bri is a civil engineering major, but is also known around campus for her artistic abilities.  Bri has not taken an arts class at Duke yet, but she manages to stay busy doing artwork around campus.  The interview was done in Duke's Coffeehouse in front of a mural Bri completed this semester.

What is the most important piece of art at Duke?

What art have you done at Duke?

Where should more public art should be seen?

How important is art/design at Duke?  And do people care about it?

The mural at the Coffeehouse.

The mural at the Central Campus apartment.

As a side note: there are a lot of neat murals all over the Coffeehouse, so I took a quick video of those too:

Probability and Growth

My system is based on a very simple, yet dynamic series of rules.  When thinking about what type of system I wanted to portray, I knew I wanted it to involve randomness and probability; I wanted the system to have a different outcome each time even if the exact same rules were followed by everyone with the same assumptions. 

I started by placing rectangular blocks of the three primary colors in random locations on the graph paper.  Each page after that, the blocks attempted to 'expand' by filling in the spaces next to them (horizontally and vertically) with their color.  However, each color was not guaranteed that it would 'take over' the adjacent blocks; the colors were assigned a probabilities as to whether they would succeed.  

The probabilities were assigned at random, based on my preferences.

page 1

Any color vs. White (85% chance of take over)

Blue vs. Red (55% chance of take over)

Blue vs. Yellow (75% chance of take over)

Red vs. Yellow (60% chance of take over)

From these probabilities we would expect to see easy expansion by the colors until they ran into one another.  Once this occurred, we would see yellow lose ground pretty steadily to both red and blue; we would also expect to see blue slowly advance into red's territory.  However, none of these outcomes are guaranteed as all expansion is left up to chance.

To determine each individual outcome I used a random number generator (link), with limits of 1 and 100.  If the number generated was less than or equal to the percentage assigned, the color would expand; if not, the other color would succeed (*not applicable to white).  The process of determining each outcome was long and tedious, however, I like the outcome.

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

page 6

page 7

page 8

page 9

page 10

Hopefully I did not make this sound too complicated and its easy to follow.

Heres a short video of the progression: