User:Stijn van Aardenne/MIC
As a graphic designer I like to work with techniques I don’t know quite well or even at all. This makes every new project much more exciting. I try to care less about the fact if something is already done by others. I think a lot of my work is something I do for myself and doesn’t have to be ground breaking for others, it’s more about the way I use the technique. As a designer I also have another way of working. The more conceptual approach, which can sometimes be a bit more difficult for me to work with. I tend to work more as a scientist, someone who tries something a hundred times by changing something small in the process and see what comes out. Also I like to explain certain things in my work, show how stuff works in a way everybody can understand, but not in the most convenient way. I’m not going to write an essay explainen how reaction diffusion works, but I’ll make an installation that, with some input of the visitor will tell much more about the substance than a lot of words will do. As said before I’m not interested in the most modern techniques but I like to keep it simple. Use the basics of certain appearances, so you can spend more time in how to show it to the people.
As for this year I think I’ve already spend more hours in the workshops at school than I did last year. So my tools are moving from all kinds of software to the woodwork tools etc. When I work with media, I think print is still one of my favourites. A lot of digital work comes to life (or dies, but a good death) when it’s printed, this way you take it of your tiny and hard the look at screen. Which for me has a lot of power. As for animated stuff this can also work but maybe as a more supporting role in to show the process. A lot of time my tools are decided by the project I’m doing. Sometime that means I have to work with tools I’m not familiar with.
Maybe the projects that I make, will give people a better understanding about the stuff that surrounds them (in everyday life). There are examples of people using similar mathematical patterns in there projects, sometimes more in a visual way than in a way in which the work explains itself, but still, I really like the work of Kevin Bray. In a way he uses modern techniques, but not to make a perfect 3d render. There is a lot of noise in his work, and he uses techniques in a way there not meant to be.
I think the work that I make is different from the newest technologies because it’s not meant to be super effective in the way the technology is intended. So as an example we used SSTV, already an older technology, but in stead of refining this technology to get a perfect image, we wanted to add noise to the transmission of the signal so the images we got out of it would be distorted in a controlled but surprising way. What I like about projects like these is that it doesn’t strive to perfection. In everyday life we strive to perfection in means of efficiency and user-friendliness but I like to use them in a way there not perfect and give you ‘unwanted’ results, which in some cases be surprisingly interesting.
