MEMORETTE

"Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth" - Martin Heidegger

Video art in a gallery, when projected on a wall, is totally out of context in this day in age. The art gallery exists mainly as a showcase to connect collectors and artists; as a venue that presents new work to those who might appreciate it and pay the artist for their blood, sweat and tears. Video art, devoid of a space-specific installation, may as well be viewed on Youtube. It lacks the object-specificity of the canvas or the sculpture and therefore becomes less precious by its very nature.

Media has lost its object-ness. We stare endlessly at glowing rectangles that instantly and endlessly change. Your sweetheart's "I love you" text becomes some dumb teenager being kicked in the crotch three seconds later.

A visceral connection to a tangible object bridges the gap between what we are and what we do.

This project comes from this argument (or the argument comes from the project). Video is a medium with which I feel comfortable as an artist, by which I mean I feel capable of producing work through it that I believe is worth showing, that I'm proud of. So how does one practically bridge the phenomenological gap and connect the art to the viewer?

When art is not preformed, it should be carefully and preciously packaged to give it a singular physical manifestation.

My solution is a proprietary device, capable only of presenting my work (or work that I choose to transpose to the format of my invention).

Panelized Punk

A friend and I decided to be Daft Punk for Halloween 2009. Not having the time to sculpt and mold helmets or access to a vacuum former, it seemed the best way to execute a complex form like a helmet would be to build a polygonal model in Maya, make a flattened layout of the pieces in Pepakura, and assemble the parts by hand using super glue.

Step 1: Maya Model

Step 2: Pepakura layout

Step 3: Cutting and seaming

I did a poor job of documenting these steps. I had the layouts laser cut at CCA in San Francisco for about $15 each. They could have been cut by hand with an exacto knife, but as you can image that would have been really time consuming. The red lines in the layouts are for valley folds and the blue are for mountain folds. The chip board material used made it easy to bend the scores in either direction without too much trouble. It dawned on me after making these layouts that the visors would be much easier to make and much more realistic if I just traced splines between the points on the polygon model, and cut out curved strips to be seamed together later with transparent model glue.