GLASS AS (......)

It's quite hard to follow the presentation of Rocio von Jungenfeld, an artist instead of a designer. Most of her work presented are based on very abstract ideas and delivered in a poetic way to the audience. All of the videos, installations and photographs are very impressive and inspiring as experiments of materials, however, tough to fully understand. 

Thanks to her beautiful summary in the presentation, finally I got a little bit of her art thinking. (After all, these blogs are about GLASS, I have to connect the ideas with it.)

Screen shot of the presentation of Rocio von Jungenfeld, page 3.

According to her, it can be seen that the process of artworks can be roughly divided into two steps: 1.generate ideas. 2.translate ideas. ''Choose the media that best fit the idea you want to express" She mentioned.

GLASS AS A MEDIA

The below is a very typical artwork following the process of Generate-Translate. The main purpose of this project is to show the forms encapsulate the ephemeral echo of the moth’s erratic trail. The very best feature of glass as the media is the optical crystal and appears invisible.

Dogfight, Long Exposure series, Optical Cast Glass, sub-surface engraving. Geoffrey Mann.

I myself, as a product design student, often ask questions like this: What is the features of the material? What existing products are made of this material? What can I design with this material? Most of the works we are doing right now are using the glass as a media to convey ideas, which is a common trend when we first learn about this material. Here is an example of my own practice:

Screen shot of the 3D bracelet model.

Originally, I designed a bracelet and want to cast it into glass, taking the advantage of 3D printing technology. It was like to have a design idea first, then to translate the idea with a proper material.

Completed 3D printing model.

However, after finishing the 3D printing model, I have found that they are very difficult to be cast into glass because of the thickness of the structure is not enough. So I have change my mind, just skip the glass casting process. In the end, the 3D printing models are my final design, with the failure of material translation.

Final product 1. Final product 2.

In this case, although the translation process is failed, the idea is still there.

GLASS AS AN IDEA

What if we see the glass itself as an idea? How to choose the best media to convey the idea of glass? This may lead to a project that could interact with the audience. Since the main idea is glass, then the project is more like to get people involved into a world of glass.

Maybe provide the equipments and let participants make glass from the sand in order to learn about the raw material and the making process. Or exhibit a series of different forms of glass-different colors, textures, states, sizes or even microstructure of the glass-to help people to get a general understanding. A large piece of glass artwork in my imagination is like the sketch below:

Sketch.

As there are far more contexts than what I've listed, maybe a series of artwork would be required to show the glass world, like a glass library or a museum.

Sounds quite like the introduction of the glass studio in ECA~