Joints come together

We left on a Thursday morning, arriving just in time for dinner, and spent three full days working on the structure, scribing and marking, cutting and fitting the joinery, and parts-assembly and transporting the stuff to the site.  We didn’t have time to see it raised, but it was an awesome time nonetheless.

The structure stands

I’ve grown a love of Timberframing since my experience in Poland, and though it’s not something I yearn for, every time I go on a project I’m reminded of how simple and pure and great life can be when we work hard together, and create something at the end of each day.

Woodworking has become a passion in many forms for me, from furniture to historic restoration, maybe because it’s nostalgic, historically important, but it’s also personally satisfying, and invigorating to make something with my own hands, to craft something that becomes part of someone’s existence.  It’s interesting to see the shift of my attentions from entertaining people with my film/video work and into a more direct connection by making objects for them, and wanting to make change and do good through this process.  I often wonder how it can make a real difference in lives already so full.

Cadets, Art Students and Craftspeople

Elements

Working Together

Roughing Hands

to Build

a Friend

a Structure

a Home

Joinery of the inner hidden box-shelf

I designed it so that there’d be a hidden shelf inside the main body of the footstool, held up by pegs.  Once you released those pegs, the shelf would drop and hang out of the body, letting you store whatever goodies you wanted kept secret.  Then you’d simply raise the shelf again and re-insert the pegs.

The secret inner shelf

Since making the stool, and even during the process, I thought about using drawer runners and other things that would help give smoother, more even movement and locking, instead of the quick drop that happens now once the pegs are removed.  Alas, food for thought on future projects.

4 matched legs

What was really fun, though, was learning the lathe for this.  I’d asked to learn it early in the semester anyway, jumping on an opportunity to add a new tool to my repertoire, especially if I continue on in the furniture route, and was pleased to discover that it is very fun, and pretty simple once you get a feel for it.  Now I just need practice .

Leg mortises

The joinery was pretty simple, just tenons into the legs and the inner box has pegs that fit into groove inside the outer box, the grooves stopped near the bottom so it doesn’t drop out.  The seat is removable (another note for future projects: research upholstery before doing it!)

Upholstery?

One of the things I’m probably the most proud of, though, is that all of the sides are made from old 2×4 pieces.  I had a bunch of scrap pieces around 2 feet long laying around so I squared them up, ripped them in half and laminated 3 together to get the 8 panels I needed for this thing.  Yay for re-using materials!

Recycled lumber

Lastly, as I’ve done in the past, I wrote an Instructable on the making of this piece.  They’ve got a furniture contest going on right now, so I submitted my piece.  I got award another Pro membership (seems to be the norm, I’ve gotten one for the last 2 things I’ve submitted too) and this got on the front page of the site.

The Finished Footstool

I tried to make this one approachable (moreso than the photomanipulation one, for example) by splitting it into “If you know” and “if you don’t know” categories, addressing each step in simplified terms for experienced makers, and then in more detail for those who needed some more detailed explanations.  My only complaint is that you can’t organize Instructables into a more straightforward step-by-step way, using images inline with the text so that you can outline steps and then show the images of those steps right there in the body of the text, similar to the Make Projects site.  It’s closer to the way I think through a project, so it would be more helpful laid out in that way, instead of having to read a chunk of text, scroll back up to its corresponding image(s), decipher what’s what, and then find your place in the reading below again.

It was a fun project, got a great response, and certainly taught me some new things.  The rest of this semester in terms of woodworking, I’m going to make some simpler things, and learn how to take care of tools and cultivate good work ethics and habits.  Plus, I’ve got all those other classes….

Tools of refinement

I tried the carefully planned approach this time, with straight lines, diagrams of joints and everything.

Last year, I made the bookshelf.  And what a treat it was to choose wood, plan, prepare, construct and finish my own large piece of furniture.  And it’s very happy with its current living conditions .  This year, I’d come up with the idea early on of somehow making a rock-and-moss table, which would be simply a small side table or coffee table with glass sides and top.  I’d attach two small reservoirs on either end of the table, to be kept full of water, and run tubing – the kind used in small animal cages or fish tanks – along the underside of the lid of the table, with holes cut in it along the way for water to drip onto the rocks and moss inside, keeping them moist and the moss alive.

It would be an awesome feat not only to build something to withstand that, but to execute and use it in my apartment.  But maybe another time.  This assignment had to two parts for its guidelines:

1. Precious object
2. Historic precedent/box style

Essentially, we had to choose something significant to us, a style of box from history that we admire and that relates somehow to our object, and create our interpretation of that style in a form that fits our object.  Some people made locket boxes for their pocket watches, or vertical Chinese pottery boxes with adjustable shelves.  I decided, since I’ve been experimenting with cooking so much recently, to use spice boxes and tables as reference to make a garden box for herbs that also functioned as a table, frankly because we didn’t have a coffee table in our apartment yet and I wanted to make one.

Pulling images from all over the internet, I chose the bottom left as the strongest influence, and went from there.

In the end, that’s almost what I made, short of it being deeper and with a hinged lid.  From approval on, the project really was more a matter of figuring out dimensions on all of the matching pieces, with the legs partially inside and out of the frame, and the top being a completely separate piece I had to then place quite exactly.  Not to mention I’d never used hardware before and made a few holes for some hinge supports that ended up not working with the inset legs.

No gaps!

Creator-griping aside, I am very pleased with how it came out, and excited both to have worked with joinery again, and to have added glass to a piece.  Both side and end pieces use two tenons into mortises in the legs; the bottom is luan that fits into a grove around all of the side/end pieces, and is cut to fit around the legs; the top panels are glued together with two dominoes at each joint, the glass simply fits into a groove around the inside of the lid and the whole thing hinges on 2/3s of a piano hinge.

This project has sparked a bit of interest in how wood finishing works, what to use on what, so that may be something I’ll experiment with in future projects.  Of course I do still have to setup and plant the herb garden in this thing, so maybe I’ll get to that first .

The context of the piece kept secondary, I hoped to shock and unnerve, and inspire late-night wondering about social worth, desperation and injustice in casual viewers and artistic minds alike.

We were given the deadline for the final show, for which we had to make something that had to do with the intersection of food and art.  That was how broad the class usually was, both a blessing and a curse.  In this case, it allowed me freedom to make whatever I wanted or needed.  I was struggling (and still do from time to time) to justify being an artist at all in a world with so many problems.  With the idea to make something that goes beyond the piece and is more about making a difference than making a thing, I decided to make something with enough shock value that would hopefully take the viewer out of context for a moment, and force them to acknowledge the extremity of the piece’s content and the reality it portrays.

A starving child is lost in a luxury of waste.

I found the photo through a simple Google search,*which I taped down to a pedestal.  I baked store-brand brownies, and crushed them up with chips, candies, food-related trash I found around campus and dust and floor grit swept from the gallery space we used for the show.  I frosted around the edges of the picture with chocolate frosting, drawing the spaces where I wanted the food trash to be piled.  I built up some areas with larger brownie chunks and piled the rest on top of that.  I made a few passes at it, with larger pieces and then smaller dust and grit, trying to get a fully-formed and -coated perimeter of food trash around the child.

Nails and gummy worms, fishing line and greasy chips and brownie dust mingle around the child's desperate form.

Influenced I suppose by watching Waste Land previously in class, and by my experiences in Latin American countries where I saw a much tamer version of what this piece addresses, I really wanted to make something that had a profound impact on its viewer, striking them hard enough to force them to try to do something about it.  It’s a powerful issue, and it’s extremely easy – especially in modern society – to get wrapped up in our own private worlds and lose sight of things like this that are so distant from our own realities, even if they could exist in the next country, or even our own.

Today, it becomes easier to envelop ourselves in the dressing of a matter, rather than the matter itself.

It is disheartening to see this, needless to say, and a friend and I couldn’t help remarking how ironic it was that my piece was placed right next to a life-size chocolate infant that the audience participated in eating during the gallery opening event.

Eat up the baby

The next class after the show we had a vertical iron chef challenge, a sort of fun-final, which I couldn’t help thinking of as a competition of waste, a purely decorative creation funneled into the industrial-sized garbage can at the end of the room, along with the table linings, utensils and food scraps leftover from the process.  How much can we continue to throw away for the pure and simple purpose of “enjoyment?”

Not meaning this to turn into a rant, I should come to a close.  It brings to light, however, the debate over how much use it is to be an artist in these times when so much else can be done.  So much tangible good is possible, and yet somehow so far away, that it is difficult to justify making things like a cast sugar spinal cord or a multilingual grid reference to the various meanings of the word ‘toast.’  Sure, there’s value, but at what point does the piece lose sight of its context as an art piece in the society in which it exists?  When does the piece begin to exist for itself, rather than with relation to and in response to the situation in which it is made and exhibited.

* Note: I didn’t take down credit for the photograph I used, and apologize for that; I know it existed on multiple websites, but can’t remember who I took it from.  I profited none from this piece, but will give credit if a rights holder feels it is due.

It’s interesting to note that difference in how I approach a project depending on what its purpose is; almost like writing a story from a character’s point of view, or organizing a screenplay so that what’s seen portrays the story instead of narration or other exposition.

Anyway, I wanted a tree with obvious wiring and lights on it, and blatantly fake leaves.  It was meant as a comment about “commodification” of nature, about dressing up and “making beautiful” something as simply and naturally gorgeous as a tree, and about the absurdity of re-using nature for something “better,” or “more practical,” since what could be more practical than manufacturing oxygen?

So there were ideas, vague, but there was a direction, and I convinced myself that was enough.  I got to learn a good deal of foundation electronics stuff, in terms of simple wiring, currents, soldering and LEDs and power usage.  It was a good introduction to the topics of working with electronics, and I’m looking forward to taking an electronics elective next year.

Something related I’ve found online since the project is Peter Bristol’s American Standards lamp.

On the right is the Pozen Center, where we’ll see performances, but not just yet.  First, straight ahead, is the North Crakertorium, an open space for student-run shows and exhibitions; tonight it’s been dressed up for the Big Show.

Blacklight Painting by Aly Stoltz

Blacklight paintings, reminders of the music-painting performance series ToonColor, interactive pedestal pieces and the giant hand-painted SIM Big Show sign!

Awesomeness is still in store if we turn around and head back toward Pozen.  On the left is the Godine Gallery, a very nice space in the school for visiting artists’ shows and the like, also displaying SIM students’ fine work.  In it are the tree of dreams, a mesmerizing wall-mounted wood piece, my piece titled Practical Nature, decorated pests, and a sculpture selling satirically on eBay from the Mighty Leaf Tea Company, among others.

Next to that is N181, an open space most often used for performance classes (and the near-monthly open mic/poetry slam events), also dedicated to tonight’s’ shindig.  Plaster caps on steel make up Growth, a closet opens to the Mac Shrine, Mighty Leaf hosts a poetry contest, and lithograph prints spread to pyramid form on a wall.

Lastly, though certainly not least, is the Pozen Center performance show.  At 8 o’clock the audience began filing in, ready for splendor.  And it was delivered.  Beginning with a performance piece, phone conversations mumbled through the sound system while people moved to the tone of the words, echoing the tone of communication in their twinges and tensions of muscle.

Next up, we had live-music-driven animation, followed by a dark room to a brief sound piece.  Phoebe Amis brought the Mighty Leaf Tea Company’s advertising presence full circle with her nomination of the poetry contest winner and his grand prize of herself stuffed into a giant teabag-like cloth.

Following that were a song from a musical, a rapping duet, DJing, and three performances of music-driven light shows.  Using our LED Colorado fixtures and a DMXIS box, the three performers delivered mesmerizing mood, an infectious dance party, and an engrossing techno-remix beat that echoed in lights and darks throughout the whole event space.

Pozen alight with music and dancing, lighting up the friezes of the Parthenon lining the hall.

One of the performances inspired a dance party that involved most of the audience. It was pretty awesome to watch.

Kerri had a dark and droning piece, shifting the lights' tones and colors to match her own.

My job during this madness of awesome was to coordinate the moving of each act into and out of their spaces in the room, be they on or off stage, with whatever equipment they needed or had with them.  It varied from case to case; the dancers needed nothing, the first music-light-show was simply a guitar plugging in; but the DJing and the other light shows had carts to be wheeled in and out, a piano was moved, and mics were placed and removed.  Simple, really, and at the base of it not a tough job in the least, but a hectic atmosphere gives my mind plenty to run with, and so it was a long night.  Immediately after the performances ended and the room cleared, we struck everything set up for the show to make way for another event the following evening.  Tons of work, lots of fun, but I don’t think I’ll do it again next year.  I missed all of the other show, and only know of it from pictures and what I’ve heard or seen while setting up.

Photos from SIM Studio’s Flickr.  Pozen info @ SIM site.

Resources:

• Bookbinding on Instructables
• http://www.praxisbindery.com/ - My uncle works here, he taught me some things
• http://www.guildofbookworkers.org/

From the video above alone, the possibilities seem to abound, and its uses in theatrical production and environment creation/transformation, and guerrila applications, are pretty exciting.

I’m kind of a stickler for really learning deeply and fullly whatever it is I dive into, and this is no exception.  I’ve always loved writing tutorials, synthesizing ideas and communicating them was almost second to filmmaking when that was my main passion, and I created various graphics-related tutorial sites, both as tutorial-writing venues but also as web design and development projects.  They were great fun, and sometimes I’m bummed they’re not hosted anymore.  Oh well, onwards and upwards.

For my entry into the Photomanipulation contest over at Instructables, I walk the viewer through a very detailed process of taking a daytime image and converting it into a nighttime image, with a moon and some creepy Halloween-style effects:

Before (Grey day by larskflem)

After

My penchant for delving into the nuts and bolts of what we’re doing at nearly every step of the tutorial doesn’t lighten up until near the end, but I feel like it’s a very full and comprehensive guide on how to do something simple, with all of the why to back it up.  The video form is more engaging, for sure, and I did love recording it, but the contest required their entries in writing, so my 3-4-day transcription process leads us to the final entry here.  And I’m pretty proud of it.

So, if you’re interested, there are 7 pages of technically solid and thorough instruction on how and why to take an image from boring grey day to creepy ghost hand under the moonlight.  Check it out and vote for me if you like it .

Also: PDF of the tutorial, video version (Vimeo).

… One of my majors requires (not explicitly, but very implicitly) that we develop a practice of making our own stuff without external forces pushing us to do so.  While this is awesome, and probably one of the best things to have going on in art school, it really means we have to step up and tackle the world and ourselves in a serious manner.  (Not always serious, but at least as far as taking ourselves serious as stuff-makers goes).

So, one of my projects for this year is a short film.  Starting with the guidelines of some cool, fast-paced cinematography, some simple, flashy effects work, and a bitchin’ fight scene with weapons and unique choreography, I banged this out in a few weeks near the end of August, and would looove some feedback.

Originally I wasn’t going for heavy story or even fully-fleshed emotional tones, but now that I’ve gotten out the first draft, I’m open to developing that stuff and really the whole thing in almost any direction.  That said, I like the piece as it is now, and I do want to keep things short and concise, while also trying to pack a punch (both metaphorically and literally).

So, please attack this with fervor and excitement, and I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say in the comments.

Also, check out Scribd.com if you like the PDF-embedding doo-hickey I used above.  I used the iPaper plugin to add the document into WordPress.