Mini Project Finally Done
We are done with our mini project and that makes me quite relieved. Our group had a pretty hard time scheduling times that we could meet. Most of our group was gone the first week and we were all pretty bad at or just terribly unlucky at checking our emails (except Muhammad Zahid, who deserves my apology for always getting his message a day late.) .It was even harder to decide what exactly we were going to do. A lot of ideas were too hard or were too artistically vague. Our group thought we had something going toward the end of the second week with the ferrofluid that Andy had ordered but that ended up being a chemical puzzle and we were lacking a chemist. I even asked some chemists I knew but nothing really came off the top of their head or they weren’t household solutions either. We finally had to make the executive decision of scraping the last two weeks research and coming up with something to do in a short amount of time. Nick had an interesting idea about having two logo chips hooked to keyboards that would type randomly and eventually write something from Shakespeare just as the saying goes…Put two computer chips in a room etc etc. Nick and I talked again toward the deadline about some kind of statement we could make about technology and computers. He was interested in changing and complicating interfaces, specifically the mouse. The mouse seemed like a simple idea to emulate to me. We sat and discussed it with Andy, while he was available, and came up with basics of how this would come about. That night I robbed my poor mother’s mouse from her computer and rewired it with CAT5 cables so that I could use the right and left click remotely. Around Ten O’clock that night Nick was able to meet me in the studio and we built the whole thing from scratch. It took us until about midnight. Today I found my old digital camera I got for Christmas and uploaded pictures to the mini project wiki. That has been what the mini project journey has been like for me. I don’t think we made as pristine of a product as we could be but I think the real message our group got out of this was the problems with concept vs. design. It seemed like the ideas that the engineers came up were to technical and a artistically unsound. I think it is important for the artist to take an initiative in coming up with the concept, the engineers providing a means, then both groups coming together in the execution. It seem that with Nick finally said “this is what I want to do” and I was able to say “this is how we could do it” and then we did it, that there was the most natural progression in our work and the most efficient use of our expertise. I hope this will help keep me in perspective for the final project and that it will be as much fun as do the mini project was!
