SAVAGE CONCEPTS
Materials & Senses
3 Postcards
As aa starting point, I created 3 postcard sized objects that were to explore or represent the 3 senses of touch, sounds and smell.
My approach to this task was to create these objects in a manner that was in line with my design philosophies of authenticity from materials and to create items that would hopefully bring joy and surprise.
Touch
From an induction within the resin and silicone area, there had been a sample of silicone that was soft to the touch and responded a little like flesh. This sample I learnt has been a platinum silicone with a deadener within it – the deader ratio was what gave the material the softer texture.
I created a clay texture that I liked the visual texture of, to entice the audience to want to interact with the piece. The soft platinum silicone was so delicate and soft that I was unable to remove the clay pieces from it, however the other sample in the tin silicone was a bit tougher and allowed me to remove the clay
Responses; the soft platinum silicone has positive reactions even without the texture being present, and the texture being present in the tin silicone wasn’t interacted with as much. From this is have gained that the lure of the material itself can sometime be enough – maybe the obscure nature of what it may feel like leads people to want to explore it themselves.
The texture of the clay model for the silicone. I chose to cast this is silicone as the unfired clay would be too brittle to keep its shape.
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The texture of the softer silicone with the clay still attached to the back.
The texture of the harder silicone witht heclay removed from it.
Sound
Initial thoughts for this object were around how to convey sound. In this brief it was stated that it should show sound without the use of another device. I had thought about using graphical representation of sounds such as Onomatopoeia words that were common within POP art such as Roy Lichtenstein’s WHAAAM.
Roy Lichtenstein
Whaam!
1963
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lichtenstein-whaam-t00897
I then reflected on what values I thought were important to me, and how I wanted to have the item be the noise. For this noise to occur I reasoned that an event would have to happen – whether that was pressing a button or shaking something, but what if you could make it happen without that input.
Therefore, I explored the thought between intentional sound and accidental sound, and what the space was like I was deigning within. In an ideal situation, I would have liked to have used airflow alone as a catalyst for the sound to be made – and so started to look at materials that could give sounds without much input and settled on tin foil. As a light material it has the potential to create a sound under the slightest movement and can have quite a loud volume. Its potential for holding a shape could also be used if needed.
The first design I made, needed an airflow to create the sound at all – and quite a bit. This led me to think about ways that I could add a mechanism to create movement for the foil to react to. I turned to a book on Heath Robinson as inspiration for mad contraptions to create the most ridiculous things. Most of the inputs from his book were handles or pedals or some such things. I decided upon a cam and handle system to make the bord holding the foil move against the air particles, therefore creating air movement but in a different manner. The alternative was going to be getting everyone to walk fast backwards and forwards.
The foil flags sample, I was thinking about the ability to harness the airflow as it passes
The final postcard idea, shows the workings of the CAM system to overcome a lack of airflow. I decided to move away from the flags due to transportation issues.
Smell
Similar to the postcard on sound, I had an initial idea of how smell could be incorporated within the item – such as creating a scratch-and-sniff option by spraying perfume or essential oils. This seemed an obvious choice, and one that didn’t reflect what I feel are my values in authenticity – I wanted to make the smell part of the item rather than just applied to it. I then had the thought of creating a paper with the smell made within it – such as lavender or rose. However, on a trip to a garden centre, and the Christmas items that were starting to come out, I decided to see if I could encapsulate the scent of orange within the paper.
I started by using some shredded paper and mulching it down with water to create a base pulp and then added some orange zest. This had a lovely smell in the kitchen and created some samples that had a range of colours. I then created a sample where I put the mix into a blender so that the particles were more harmonised. This then evolved to see if the pulp could be made into paper without any other paper as a binder. I had some success with this – however, I have found that with the base of the paper, the particles didn’t bind to themselves as much as the paper particles did, so when trying to compress it, the material tended to spread out rather than compress. I created a card frame to alleviate this but found that if you dry the orange in it, the orange wants to shrink at a high rate and it tore itself. I was able to mould it back together and get it to dry out almost flat.
A mix of blended paper ulp and orange peel, with some less shredded paper intermixed.
The Orange peel and Paper pulp bended mix together
The blended paper now it has dried out - the colour has faded from it but you can still see the flecks of peel
The Pure orange peel paper once it dried out.
