As I begin the process of narrowing my thesis project for graduate school this blog will serve as a resource and as a document to be referenced later when writing.
Deep in the sands of summer I began to ponder my roots. No not where I'm from, or even my natural hair color. I mean the roots of making. Photography has always captured my imagination. The idea of collecting a moment in time in a very precise way is somehow very appealing. Few things in life can really be considered perfect but for me a well timed photograph can reach some form of timeless perfection.
Among my summer thought experiments I began to have a singular vision of a photograph I wanted to make. It hit me like a flash of lighting "the unknown designer" inspired by the infamous "unknown comic" from TV's the Gong Show and photographer Mary Ellen Matthews, the long time photographer for SNL. His jokes were terrible but somehow I never wanted him to get gonged and at times Mary's photos were the best part of SNL for me.
Maybe this inspiration comes because I see myself as a bit of a floundering designer. Well I don't think I'm awful but to get to something I can stand looking at takes a very long time. As I begin this process I hope to break out of that. One way I've found to be effective is to give some of the idea generation and iteration over to programming. I've done this with some success with my haiku series. A project where I fed key words into a program to create a new haiku each time it was run. The source data contained references to global climate change and science fiction. The end result being an object inspired by the haiku, in the style of Dunne and Raby(Speculative Designers). In this case a vehicle designed to withstand a dystopian future.
I imagine my thesis defense as an episode of the gong show. The committee members having the ability to hit the gong at any point in my presentation. To stave off a gong I will be conducting mini research/projects bi-weekly or weekly(as needed) until my official thesis proposal is due at the end of November. I ask the following questions on each blog post
Circle,what do you have a question about
Square, one thing that made sense
Triangle, three things that stood out
Topics will likely include but are not limited to:
Machine Learning
Generative Design
Speculative Design
Design Fiction
Generative Audio
Interactive Installations
3d modeling and printing
Photography
Public Sculpture
Sputniko inspired
Writing
I will begin with exploring what I can and cannot accomplish with machine learning.
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