Giana’s Blog

Last night I went to the closing of the first exhibit/ show / product display of the R&D Northern Electronics. My collegueas Jamie Allen and Megan Trainor [aka MEGATRON] gave a very intereting spin to the traitional way venture capitalist direct the presentation of their findings: by includdding performance, weird soundclouds, and shaking suitcases

Given the credibility that these too lucky people have, Megan had a RFID tag implanted in her arm last year, does robotic work , Jamie an engineer, designer,performer and teacher at the Interactive Telecomunications program at New York University , I hope more investors follow the initiative and allow them to explore new findings .

CONGRATULATIONS to both and I look forward to see what they are up to next!

SO I have been pondering about this…. I think everyone unconciously has such language, for example you know what why want to wear, or the feeling you want to have when attending certain ocassion, so you extract out of your closet the pieces that speak the necessary language to communicate your concious/unconcious feelings. For some it is easier to execute it because they are aware of their own visual language, through their clothes, designs, artwork, emotions. conversations, etc.

Photographers are a good example, they usually have a great sense of what they are looking for, still having the flexibility to incorporate diverse aesthetics into what they try to communicate.

Designers, graphic artics I feel are more limited in this sense, because they need to get down to the nitty gritty of the detail, whereas the photographer allows a natural 3_Dimentionality over his work, allowing the especifics [stylits, subject, makeup artist, landscape, etc] to become its own and then he extracts from them the feeling he is looking for.

I wanna let other talk, to understand what they are all about, and then been able to structure what I need to communicate

It has been hard to get back in the game. today I came to Maria Mayer’s studio. A New York based romanian- german photographer

http://mariamayer.com

I am a bit tired and the unexpected is frightening but I think it will be ok ///
I am making the point of keeping a blog. A post a day!

So I have been gone for almost 6 months. Working on some interesting projects here in NYC.

I finished my final thesis project : Hacking Couture. After this experience I am recopilating my thoughts , images and ideas.

This is the latest picture of me. Take by John Schimmel, with his new built-in Isight camera, of the latest powerbook.

I love the pop art you can get.

Art for the masses . . .

Hackers and painters = hacking the paper….

So after reading this essay I am very excited to lear more about what hacking is.

I made tons of notes and I felt that there is a tight relationship between creativity and science. Since I came to ITP I have felt as a outcast. Most people, at least that is the stereotype, of the people who are into Fashion and that are “Fashionistas” seems not to care about the power of technology: how it can brings us closer to each other and to ourself, because Fashion more than anything provides the framework for self-expresssion.

On the order hand , I felt that by embracing what I call sometimes “my shallowness” I was a complete outcast in an environment like ITP. What I consider my shallowness is the relevance that fun and beautiful things have to me. There is beauty in all beings even if they do not fill the standard, but I cannot help myself in being attracted and inspired by aesthetically beautiful things.

When reading Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” I felt so identified in many ways. I respect his willingness to expose his vulnerability and his reflections on his process, and not being afraid to share it.

In relation to the work that I am trying to do.

“The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.”

When he talks about how writing is an craft acquired by copying, pasting, paraphrasing in order to come up with our own creation
“Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.”

It is part of human nature, we imitate what we think is right, beautiful and interesting. The after imitating our thinking process starts its own road. This is how I see my experience with Fashion: by imitation I have being able to come up with my own ideas. This has also depend upon the lack of resources [not being able to afford certain clothes, and working with materials that are available to me].

I also really like Graham’s emphasis on learning by doing, and that is something that come across in a lot of the readings you have assigned us in class. This is true to any craft that involves the human factor, as you might say ” there is no perfect network, only highly efficient ones”. I really share this approach to technology and to design at any level!

His insights on project development and what he calls sketching is something I share. When you are designing, I personally never get it right on a 100%, I only manage to get figure out parts of the puzzle at the time, and I never thought of programming in this way.

I think this is a great coincidence you referred me to this article, since I have been struggling to figure out my creative process and how it embraces the environment in which I am developing [ITP] , with my “lack of technical knowledge”. Technology always felt unfitted to me: I am not precise, I can have thoughts or ideas that do not have a especific answer, but many possibilities and it is hard to settle for one. Also, I felt a lack in my background, I felt that not having a rigorous background in the sciences I was not worthy of doing interesting work, like the “lucky” people who had it.

SO … empathy and intelligence not really related , you can have one without the other. This is such an interesting concept. Math is precise to approach hacking as a liberal art is an interesting concept and this is were I fit better. I never understood why someone with the technical and scientific knowledge , like many of my classmates and professors here at NYU’s ITP would want to spend time explaining over and over concepts that naturally I would not grasp by myself. They were suppose to be snobs, and see me as a outcast who do not have their same mentality and skill, how wrong I was to expect that from those people. In part was my own insecurity, but I realize that it is a stereotype that has been created and that unconsciously many people like me have nurtured. Within myself I am fighting these silly misjudgments.

Same way I am misjudging,
Copy , learn, be emphatic , be original, do not be afraid of precision deal with the anxiety, and get use to it because in the real world things are not as precise and smooth as math

“Prices are determined by supply and demand, and there is just not as much demand for things that are fun to work on as there is for things that solve the mundane problems of individual customers. ” I guess assume that this is true because people want o invest their little free time on fun stuff ….

“Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you’ll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there’s something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting. ” This concept of growth and improvement is very important in my thesis, since as in Fashion things are constantly improve, or at least change every given period time. This ephemerality of fashion is one of its most appealing characteristic and at the same time one its biggest disadvantages, since these involves a veery structured system of forecasting and production, so the use of new/radical technologies take a longer time to develop and being implemented. I want a symbiotic relation between fashion_technology and costumer/creators. Then I ask … is every costumer a creator?

The concept that hacking come in cycles is very clever. In order to do good work you have to do it in cycles

his insight in group work is something worth testing = give ownership to the hacker!!! this makes it successful !!

“You need to have empathy not just for your users, but for your readers. It’s in your interest, because you’ll be one of them. Many a hacker has written a program only to find on returning to it six months later that he has no idea how it works. I know several people who’ve sworn off Perl after such experiences. [7]”
The fashion industry alienates, [at least in my experience ] . Enlightenment maker better users and it enhances their creativity, which enhances other aspects of their lives. Fashion sells a fantasy. It makes me dream, I love these fantasies the same that I get from music videos. I want to make people dream, but there is an awareness that needs to be created of the existence of the real world, in order to translate abstracts experiences into our everyday life. \\

This are my notes on this paper!! very good reading …..

http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

Now that I think a little bit more about this exercise… part of what your work reflects is what you are all about.
So asking the right questions is the real foundation of the development of any ideas/projects . . .

So throughout this whole semester in this class I have been able to build up this skill and develop that part of my thinking process. If one thing I want to be able to get out of graduate school is to have the capability to ask the right question. top attemp to give my best answer and that way get somewhere. how get anywhere is you dont know where you are going…. !!!

“Know yourself” Socrates …. and what you are all about

I guess in order to continue growth in this aspect I need to explore the Socratic method

this exercise was great!
How I understand this rethorical question is that a hand clapping is something that you dont often do. I also see it in a more “realistic” way. When someone has a motor handicap , like when someone has difficulty developing their handwritting, they are asked to do exercises similar in motion to the one hand clapping. At the end it has a good result to do such exercise.

It is somehow of a “two-way monologue”: something uncessary but needed. By this I mean that there are certain things or feelings within ourselves in life that might seem needless, absurd, stupid, or just a waste of time, but if they are not experience, personal growth will not happen, and the only way to grow is by embracing and exploring the absurd, the silly or the unexplicable of our inner-self [of course in a positive manner].

After these “things” take a life of itself then we understand how they work and we are able to embrace them and see how they contribute to our entire self.

Work in progress presentation
Oct 28th/2005

Inspiration

Concept

Execution
Design

Materials
“TV screen” -Portable DVD Player or Portable TV or LCD screen try at www.overallstack.com or at www.overstack.com
-Mac mini
-Bluetooth keyboard and mouse

Construction

- do a frame and test hot glue it to the floor

-Use a structural base with poles [ metal? wood? plexi? no plexi screwing it is a pain in the a#$!!!!]
Maybe a big metal piece , or 3 or a pre-made finished sheet [with a veneer] I will live it if it is white . Look at a table

-Internal Structure, metal or plastic pipes. Threated [los que se enroscan juntos]

-Use “Piano hinges” the really long one”, carve inside so you wont see them
-Epoxi ? what will glue foam and metal? contact 3M

-Look at glues from 3M [for vinyl , foam and metal, what happen when they bend are they supportive enough???]

-Look for a plexi glass mirror to mount
Notes about mirror . A mirror is private the TV is not. Functionality is
different. How are they revealed is very different, there is a hierarchy in
between them. One is to view and copy the other constructs an image it is
an aid for the construction of a portray. help in the drapping and
construction of an image.

-Research the flat screen like the one Xiao_li used on her thesis. battery???. Play around with what you create and with what you can do with it
Main issue = keeping the wall up! + dealing w/lateral force

Performance

_____________________________________________
Thoughts
” You can’t hide until you know what you are hiding”
“More interesting … less obvious shapes” .

Giana- Explore your design aesthetics and lines , Take out of a wolrd, create new elements….

_____________________________________________
Things I need to do after meeting:
1. Make a real-size Mock up [brown paper] of the pieces of the wall. See what the pieces really are !!

_____________________________________________
Things that I feel I need to do after meeting:

*Rent
. Watch “Flashdance” get clips from it
. Watch “Fame” get clips from it
. The actual video ’she’s a maniac’ by Glenn Medeiros
. “the Reflex” by Duran Duran
. “Rio” by Duran Duran
. “Girls on Film” by Duran Duran
. “Just like Heaven” by The Cure

Process :
So far I have tried to explore metrials and shapes [Ideally I would like to use a sponge-like materials something soft]
here are some of my sketches

here are some of the pics from a small study model [not at scale]:

THE WALL - the ripping wall?

For this project I have in mind a performance.
This performance is done by me or by an actress-dancer or by a model, well a dancer that looks like a model will be perfect! anyone is welcome to re-enact the experience.

Clothes/garments are integral part of the performance.

“The Wall” becomes the enhancer of the performance, since it gives the elements that the performer uses for her performance. The wall is a unit, but at the same time it presents deconstructable elements that allow the creation of garments.

This performance is inspired on the re-enactment of my personal experience in re-creating experiences seeing on TV. The experience of re-sampling, re-creating the worlds that I had been exposed to when watching MTV’s music videos and glamorous runway shows. I was just a little girl, then a teenager … and sometimes as an adult too. I will like to illustrate these “performances” that I would do in my room by my myself or in which I would engage my brothers. These performances in a indirect way allowed my creativity to flow, to dream of who I wanted to become … and then I would just become, and create through imitation.

This “creative process” is developed very naturally… [I actually never though of it until I had to write about it!]
It usually starts when I am really happy or when I feel sad , and I want to cheer up, I play a ritual to make myself feel better. I closed up in my room and blast the music. Nowadays I turn on my i-tunes, back in my childhood days I would turn on MTV…

Within my personal creative process, when I create I am usually in my room, and trying things in front of the mirror, or when getting out of the shower, with my towel I wrap it around in creative ways, and I always think of these dresses that I would create [but in fact I have never had made those dresses, I need to get on top of that!! ]. I feel this is the brainstorming for the designing of the clothes, and sometimes they are my own version of the ones seeing on TV [I guess this process is called drapping].

The importance that the introduction of pre-recorded information is a corner stone in the way I think , design and experience life: sometimes isolated by technology other times enhanced by it.

We live on a society of copy and paste and paraphrase … and that is what I constantly do, The results express creativity in a different way . This experience was so powerful that this has driven the experience of growing up, and been fed by information [music videos/ runway shows] , and how the viewer re-samples the experience of the video, mixed with its own.

We take what we like, and we make it our own be enriching its story with ours.

Inspiration:
Aesthetics: Luis Barragán’s “Los Clubes”, Enrique Norten’s Cut-outs on the frosted vs. clear glass of the Habitat Hotel, Mx City facade. I like how out of one material throughout their design strategies and treatment of the material they create variety

Luis Barragán’s Los clubes de San Cristóbal

the color is so beutiful

It is so monumental

his designs are as powerful in real life as in the pictures!

HABITA HOTEL, Mexico City, TEN Arquitectos
I really like how Enrique Norten treats the same material in a different manner, creating a sense of variety and layering out of one material. this is one of my favorite buildings!

Another important inspiration for this performance are videos like “Cradle of Love” by Billy Idol and other 80’s and 90’s songs like ” Maniac” from Flashdance.

The colors are so beutiful … he is so hot!

In addition to the idea of her dancing along to the tape, that at the beginning of the video she places on the tape recorder, I think is marvelous that Billy Idol appears projected on the canvases making them flat screens, or “dynamic paintings”

it is interesting to see how the tectonics change based on the tecnology , even though at that time , I dont think it was conceive to forecast tecnology!

Concept :
The idea of a ballerina , dancing along to music video, a girl so bored in her room, and the only source of entertainment in the space is the TV. Limitation is the enhancer of creativity. So this girl is there seeing all these fancy- cool clothes , she wants to be just like what she sees. she is not happy and she is alone. She cheers up with the music and she lives her fantasy through those music videos.

She wants new clothes, just like the cool ones on the video, so with a towel she drapes them and that is how from those existing shapes she imitates, she becomes happy but then she realizes that there are new shapes she has created once she started imitating the existent. . . and she likes the outcome. Instead of a towel the one element in the room will provide all the necessary elements for the experience.

The wall will rip, and she will create her garments out of one element. she will be able to wrap things around her body with the ripped “wall paper”.

She samples, she remixes , she creates, she re-creates.

Performance:
the dancer will interact with the wall. she uncovers it , she re-shapes it, from there she creates new garments, that she takes out of the wall as she dances around. She reveals the wall by stripping it. Pieces are just garments, others become accessories for dancing, other reveal mirrors in which she tries on the draped pieces , other times she posses.

I will like to have a a TV embedded on the wall .

Aim:
this is a performance reflecting previous experience and with the aim of channel/illustrate the funny way in which I feel inspire to create garments when I have a blank piece of cloth [draping]

Keywords: Reveal, strip, unity, development, creation , re-creation