“Silence in Chaos”
Selina Zhang, Mylan Tran-Roark, Hiya Singh
Mixed Medium – cardboard, rope, string, fabric, bells, beads, thread, lights.
48″ x 16” x 16”
The Process:
Ideation sketches:
As you can see, the initial steps of this project involved the consideration of multiple sounds including: the sound of air conditioners, Tibetan throat singing and even the sound of a flush. We narrowed down to four sound that we thought had a similar visual structure:
- Theremin
- Kathak Foot sounds
- Ambulance siren
- Rain
We combined these sounds to make a new sound. This sound was chaotic and yet, cohesive.
We believed that the double helix shape represented all the sounds very well.
This is our mini prototype. It might seem unhelpful, but it helped us make an important decision regarding the length of the cardboard pieces.
The cardboard pieces, we decided, would be of varying lengths.
Tracing the 21 pieces and cutting them out of cardboard took a surprising 5 hours to do. We arranged them in a ‘step’ like fashion to understand what our final piece might look like. Disclaimer: It looks very different from this.
Once we had all our cardboard pieces, we cut out holes in the centre and painted them with white spray paint.
The ghungroos we ordered were wearable. Undoing the braid helped us use the rope to suspend the piece. The ghungroos(bells) were then sewn onto each side of every cardboard piece.
Loops, made out of thread were carefully tied into the beads to make it easier to attach them to pieces of wire.
We covered the ghungroos on each end of the cardboard with silver fabric.
We tied the beads to pieces of wire.
The inverted triangle shape was cut out and glued onto the last piece. We now arranged the pieces according to their lengths. We used knots to secure them in place. Two knots, one above and one below each piece.
Once, the whole piece was assembled, we attached the wire with beads to the last piece.
We finally stuck three lights to the piece and wrapped them in the same silver fabric. One white light on the top, facing down. Two lights in the bottom, facing up – blue and red.
And there you have it!
The Final Work:
Reflections:
I think the overall project turned out good and we’re all happy with it. This was probably the healthiest group project of my life, we all put in over 15 hours of collaborative work.
However, there are definitely things I’d like to reflect upon:
- The fact that this project is huge and involved the use of multiple materials, made it hard for all of us to imagine the same thing. The sketches gave us an overall idea, but we didn’t know how we were going to execute certain things like stacking the pieces of cardboard, etc. going into it.
- I think the size of the things we ordered on Amazon took us by surprise at first but we made it work. If we could, we would increase the size of the beads, increase the size of the ghungroos and decrease the size of the lights a light.
- Another thing we did not anticipate was how hard it would be to keep the pieces of cardboard sturdy and perpendicular to the rope. It helps that the slanted pieces add to the dynamic structure and give it a sense of motion. But if we were trying to make it sturdy, we’d have a hard time.
Inspirations:
Leon Theremin, Russian Physicist, Inventor of the Theremin, 1920
Umschreibung, 2004 by Olafur Eliasson
KPMG Deutsche Treuhand-Gesellschaft, Munich, 2004
Materials: Stainless steel, Wood
La Légende de Saint-Hubert : le Bien-Aller, 1897 by Maurice Denis
225 x 175 cm
