User:Jeanine Verloop/graduationpaper

>>> graduation <<<

research paper


GRADUATION
>>> RESEARCH PAPER <<<

Jeanine Verloop
Major // illustration
USER PAGE JEANINE

Introduction

Forward

As a visual artist I am finding and exploiting the boundaries of a medium. I am always moving back and forth between different ways of telling a story, different ways of illustrating. For me illustration is telling a story or sharing information, by any medium possible.

You could say I am a remediation artist. I look back to the origins and implement that in my design and research. As some kind of archeologist I scavenge in 19th century inventions for inspirations. We must place the crafts in the contemporary landscapes by benefitting from techniques created in the digital revolution. Craft is not old and technology is not new.

You talk about craft, what would have been your craft if you lived back then?
I think I would live on some kind of junkyard, collecting all the strange curiosities of that age.

Introduction Graduation

My graduation project has it’s roots in earlier work, the printing devices. For me this project revolved around making, craft and fighting against the loss of knowledge. In the age of mass production I see less characteristics in our daily tools and objects, I wonder how this affects our imagination.

As Robert McLiam Wilson writes, in the introduction Wild at Heart for WilderMann, 'Plugged in, neurotically wi-fied and G3d as we are, we yearn to re-establish contact with the actual, the primal, the old. We dream of something real, something unmitigated by the filter of profit-making portals and franchises. We want the as-was, the erstwhile. We languish for the non-mechanical and the pre- or post-industrial. We are pilgrims seeking the past, the genuine, the individual.' I believe we will find this genuine and individual part in the act of making and producing.

What is the focus of this project?
As Laurie Anderson states ‘Technology is the campfire around which we tell stories’. To tell new stories, the campfire has to evolve.

What is the value of doing this project nowadays? Why is this so special?
My work has close relation with technology and how we as a society mindlessly use our everyday products. Our products are more connected than ever and disconnected at the same time. We are rolling and scrolling without seeing something new. We are becoming one collective mind, the kind of mind that depends on screens for imagination. In my work, there is a pattern where I take complex everyday devices and remake them in hybrid artefacts.

When hand an machine fuse, magic happens. A machine produces reliable objects we expect to see. As a craftsman I enjoy the freedom to combine the tools of the digital revolution with the traditional tools of manufacturing. By combining I reveal a beauty that would have been impossible to conceive in the age of analogue alone.

Abstract

Image humanity through the eye of the alien, from space wouldn’t we look magical? From afar humans seem like a species that generates light, wherever humans are light follows. On closer inspection you would see that, disregarding its weak body, human kind dominates it habitat through the usage tools.

If you had been up there for a while you saw the shift. Humans began to build an industrialized civilization. The age of mass production dawned. For a time human kind flourished in their newly build utopia. Great tools were build. But when the utopia became the standard, humans became enslaved to automatisation. With no need for thinking, their brains got weaker, their ability to dream of radical new technologies faded.

Now humanity and tools live in disconnect, the magic is lost in utility. Humanity fails to be captivated by the technological landscape surrounding them. They have to find a way to re-insert themselves into a process where they are excluded from. Will they fantasize again when they are empowered to understand. When what is dead is resurrected?

Question

Question

Our everyday devices, like printers, are lacking imagination in design and usage: How do I craft a fictional printer?

sub Q

Who are the losers in printing history?
When decomposed, what history can be found in our contemporary printers?
How does the device impact what the user will produce? How does technology influence the imagined result?
What is the psychological impact of new technology?
How does the printing surface relate to the printing mechanism?
When the machine produces, who owns the production?

Relevance of topic

The first caption in the book Digital handmade states ‘A renaissance in the art of making’ '. The industrial revolution created a new order. This period resulted in a diminishing role for the craftsman within a mechanized environment. But now, as before, industrial technologies are informing a new creative movement. Craftsman are resurfacing and benefitting from the precision, efficiency and increasingly unrestricted structural parameters of digital design and fabrication. While retaining the soul of the material and the skill of the human hand. William Morris wrote of the ‘craving for beauty’ awakening in the mind of men no longer tied to the production line. ‘exacting beauty, achieved only through the fusion of hand and machine, which presents a uniquely modern understanding and exploration of hand and machine, which presents a uniquely modern understanding and exploration of the relationship between designer and maker.’

‘Welcome or unwelcome, explicable of inexplicable, this prompt or pattern is undeniable real. Our dissatisfaction with our mental of spiritual diet is expressing itself despite us. It leaps out. Our imaginations are choking and constipated by the confections of Call of Duty 4 and Transformers 5. Our souls are crying out for the roughage of the primal.’ Robert McLiam Wilson, Wild at Heart, introduction WilderMann.

It has become clear to me that it is no coincidence that I am working on the lacking of imagination of our devices. I am not the only one. This is not a movement for art’s sakes, the large online DIY community makes that much clear.

Relevance to others

Hypothesis

My work will surprise and hopefully bring, for those who’ve seen it, a new meaning to printing.

Afbakening

Methodology

Research Approach

Key reference

Literature

Experiments

Results

Insights from experimentation

Artistic / Design principles

Artistic / Desing Proposal

Conclusion

Realised work

Stand alone presentation

What was the point? What do I take away?