The day before our first thesis class I sat down with our professor Jason Sloan and discussed what he had in mind for the first few sessions and what his expectations of us were. I took the opprtunity to talk with him because I was nervous. I was thinking about what I was going to do as a project, where to start, and how to go it alone. I also started to realize that this year, this experience of thesis and senior year, ceases to be about the professor and must be about our own work, thoughts, and revelations. The era of assignments is over.
I’m grateful for the group that I’m working with. They produce excellent, beautifully crafted, and sometimes humorous work. Without them I would still be a freshman in mind, even if our antics are more often then not “sophomoric.” Chris’s latest artwork post is a good example. Simple yet interesting, he took 15 CRT’s laying around in our “studio” and organized them, named it, and called it art. It was unexpected and enough to make me say, “Well shit, why don’t I try making something random for fun?” I feel like I say that a lot, but seeing my peers act on the feelings we all seem to have is a damn good impetus to make incidental work of my own. I just got my macro lens, maybe I should go exploring.
I mentioned my meeting with Jason for another reason then to describe my initial quivering, during our sitdown I had an idea for thesis. The past two major projects I’ve been involved in dealth with magnatism pretty directly. Relay used a magnetic presence detector to rotate motors with fat neodynium magnets attached underneath a layer of iron filings. Contact mic’d sound was “relayed” through MAX/Msp, abstracted, and pumped out into the space. Fields took our clumsy but successful first attempt and refined it. The entire structure was a freestanding tower of acrylic power. The filings were replaced with ferrofluid. The premise stayed the same though, your movement would affect the latent magnetic field in the room, making the sensor go crazy and causing motors to move those same fat magnets. It was impressive technically and most people thought it was amazing mostly because they had never seen ferrofluid before.
The goal this time around is to take the technical accomplishment of prior works and meld it with something that allows the viewer an avenue of interpritation, so that they leave the work with some experience other than “Wow!” Don’t get me wrong, I felt privaleged to have elicited such a response from so many, but even that wasn’t enough to cut the sting of comments that compared our piece and even the exhibition that contained it to a lowly “science fair.”I love science. I loved science fairs. I love learning about the little things that make our big life experiement tick. But the feeling you get when you’ve experienced a beautiful and clear piece of art is far more emotional than even the best baking soda volcano.
