PROJECT 3: ATMOSPHERIC APPENDAGE

PROJECT 3_ ATMOSPHERIC APPENDAGE ray xu

That link up there is my presentation pdf. It contains my adjective photos, my collage, and a photo of my 3D manipulation of the collage.

I took the adjective photos in my parents’ house over Thanksgiving break at 3am while everyone was sleeping. The adjectives are:

soft – the lantern gives off a soft, fuzzy feeling, both due to the light it emits and the polyester’s texture.
formless – the light does not have a clear form, but an unstructured, shapeless illumination.
glow – the light also glows instead of beaming a strong shine.

Here is a gallery with more atmospheric photos that I did not include in the presentation.

When we were told to make a collage, I panicked. I had not made a collage since elementary school. I still do not understand collages today. However, you made favorable comments about the first slide of my presentation – the one where I spliced two photos together and stuck the word “soft” in between which apparently looked like a reflection – so I removed the word, enlarged the photos, leveled the blacks of the two photos until they looked like they matched on the computer screen, and printed it. The collage, though simple, worked, although the blacks between the two photos did not match exactly when the collage printed.

For the 3D component of the piece, I used the same materials left over from making the lantern: basswood, wooden coffee stirrers, Halloween-cobweb polyester, and black string from Halloween-spooky-drape.

I made the wood stick through the chipboard that I glued the collage to, effectively making components of the lantern pop out of the surface. I kept the wood long; otherwise, the board would have toppled over from the weight. This turned out useful because the piece could stand up on its own, provided the long sticks angled correctly.

I included small reinforcement sticks for structural support. I also put some polyester through the wood formation to add resemblance to the lantern and to, in a way, join the two lanterns in the collage together not only by reflecting light, but also by a white cloud of fluffiness (now that I think about it, I should have put a light source in there to see the effect…).