Progression of Model

We have been working on our model of the sculpture. We sanded down the pillars today and we have started to think about how we will present the board for the final piece. We are going to create a organic background for the pillars either using broken up leaves or something to represent the ground. We are making a narrow trough one end of the board to erect a piece of ply wood to which we will stick an representation of our building we want to reflect in our pillars. Once we have the base and background ready we will place our pillars on to create our scuplture and finally we will stick the mirrors on the tops of pillars.

Creating Animations

We decided to create some animations in 3D max to how our sculpture would look like as you were walking around it and also if the sculpture rotated on a platform the sort of effect you would get from the reflections. We also decided to set our sculpture in some different areas to reflect different scenes. This is to show how different structures from building to areas of natural beauty can be viewed in different ways using reflections. We used scenes of the Bath Abbey and also an area of natural beauty cheddar Gorge and Burington Combe.

Progression

We decided to do some experiments with mirrors and water and take some photos of the outcomes. While we were doing these experiements we came up with a new idea. We thought about making our project smaller scale and having a smaller sculpture. After working with some mirrors and looking at reflections in them we thought of trying to get a kalidescope effect with mirrors tilted at different angles on top of different height pillars so you get reflections at different angles.We decided to make a model to try to recreate this idea. We decided to model the pillars out of clay (See below)

Finding a new idea

We took some tools for experimentation to try and find some interesting reflection effects. At first we wanted to use water on a surface to reflect things.



This was not very sucessful as it did not produce any interesting visuals. We then experimented with the placement of mirrors to see what we could find. We got some very interesting effects.




After looking at the placement of mirrors and the different reflections they could capture at different angles, we decided that a sculpture showing lots of mirrors and reflections would be interesting.

We started to sculpt columns for the mirrors to go on.

These are the columns we created.

Next we must fire them.

Provoke Change Project

First Idea

Provoke Change Lecture 'Small Town' Thinking about how we could provoke a change in our own city.

Initial Ideas - Interactive shopping assistant. Cut down the amount of time you need to walk around looking for the product you need. Go straight to the 'Eshopper' and use a touch screen to locate the item and the price so you can go straight to the place to buy that product, no danger of not being in stock or not being able to find it.

Second Idea Looking at the city visually. We talked about in our lecture 'Small Town' about how Bath was stuck in its way and has little modern architecture and infact has little scope to change. All the new developements will be built in the same style of Georgian architecture. My idea is to reference the 'Mirror' in Bordeaux France and to bring this idea into Bath.

One of the most iconic buildings in Bath is the Royal Crescent. This particular area is a hot spot for tourists and I would like to enhance the appeal of the crescent by creating a mirror illusion infront of the crescent.

This particularly fits here as in the design of the crescent has a 'Ha Ha' which is a wall infront of the buildings which allows for a drop in levels which seperated an area of land where they could keep animals but as it was on a different level the animals couldn't escape and it kept them seperate. When looking out from the crescent this level change created an optical illusion that the land was infact on the same level. So I thought you could use this historical reference and still have this illusion of a level area of water which would reflect the crescent.

So instead of trying to change the architecture we are celebrating it by duplicating it.I thought we could expand this in graphical terms by creating some visuals of what it would look like using 3d graphics.

After talking through my ideas within our group Martin had some really good ideas which would enhance my idea of a water scupture in front of the Royal Crescent. We decided to team up and put our ideas together.

Martin had the idea of using roman gods to represent different aspects of the cityApollo - god of prophecy, music and healing andMinerva - god of wisdomAthena - the goddess of wisdom. She also was the goddess of handicrafts and strategy. Juturna - the goodess of springs We thought we could represent these gods in an abstract way. We are still thinking about this. We also are considering other areas in the city that could benefit from a 'tourist attraction'. We will be looking at sites where the developement of the water front is happeneing and other sites around bath.We are also going to be looking at other ways of using water to create a sculpture eg. fountains, water jets.We want to present our ideas using some visualisations using 3d max .

Crescent Project Mockups

Here are two mockups I did to show how the project could look when built. This is how the water could reflect when seen head-on.