Builds
Experimentation is a powerful technique to learn the strengths and limitations of materials, tools and ideas. Since 2013 I have had the privilege of being a member of various makerspaces and contributing to their respective culture of creation. From 3D printing to laser cutters, access to prototyping tools have bred a few of the following projects.
Japanese woodblock printing and Lithography is a process of creating a relief on wood, limestone or linoleum in order to make impressions of the image onto other mediums. A monochromatic image may only take a single block, whereas images like that to the right of Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa may need dozens of blocks to create to add color or depth features.
I ventured to reverse engineer the printing process and isolate planes of depth in common images. Using Adobe Suite Photoshop and Illustrator I separated planes in the images, laser cut prints and wood along the same lines and placed spacers between each plane, creating a greater sense of depth. A future direction would be printing at human scale so someone could “walk through” the image.
Eadweard Muybridge was a pioneer in photography and performed critical research on the formulation of motion pictures. One important experiment was The Horse In Motion, where Muybridge determined that during full stride there is a moment when all four hooves of a horse are off the ground.
I wanted to recreate this iconic experiment with the construction of a zoetrope using Muybridge’s images. Using Photoshop and Illustrator I isolated the form of the horse mid gallop, cut the pieces from MDF and build a support structure. Using a record player and strobe light I was able to recreate Muybridge’s foundational research.
