This is Action 11, the last one. I thought this was a nice opportunity for me to pick up some of the things I came through during this first term, and trying to take them to a new stage for what is next to come.
I came back to the wire once again, but this time with the idea of generating surfaces and exploring with lines, density, light and movement, and the resulting changes in texture, contour and shape. For this purpose, I went into my first explorations with weaving with the idea of making some kind of mesh. This is the beginning of something I’m gonna keep exploring for sure and, hopefully, this can become part of my language and practice in the future. In the meantime, I’ll just keep weaving.
THE END
(but just for now)
Thanks to my wife, Agustina, who took care of the footage while my hands were busy. Gotta give credit!
I will investigate the interdependence/interconnections of all of my previous actions through the making strategy of Storyboarding and Mind Mapping.
For investigating and communicating the connections between my actions so far, I decided to use Storyboarding and Mind Mapping.
I felt Storyboarding would be an appropriate method for describing my process during this term as it would allow me to represent the events developing through time clearly. In addition, Storyboarding was an excellent excuse for getting to draw once again, and it would also allow me to observe and redraw some of those things I didn’t feel so represented with, like one of the images in the diagram of Action 2, for instance.
Mapping is a method I hadn’t used before until some weeks ago, and it’s become a useful tool for me since then. In this particular case, I thought a mind map could work pretty well for making explicit the more abstract connections and even finding threads I hadn’t previously seen. I’m including below the link to a Miro board with the map.
As a bonus track, I included some Video Sketching featuring Aerosmith, because I can always include Aerosmith and because the name of the song and album matched pretty well part of my journey through the actions in Studio.
Running day 6 of quarantine, I decided it was time to look at the hotel room from a different perspective to find something new in an already too familiar location. The mirrors and lights used as materials for this action were included in the reservation.
I will investigate how to explore my perception of the space around me through the action of experimenting with light and reflection.
After Action 7, I kept the gelatin cube in the fridge to observe how it would deteriorate over time. It finally sat there for around 12 days. Some hours before going to the airport for leaving Denmark and moving to Vancouver, I took the cube out to document the collapse. As I was getting out of time, I decided to use a hairdryer for speeding up the process. After a few minutes, I realized I was again wasting resources, in this case, electricity. Eventually, the water was gone and all that was left was a dry, stiff gelatin skin holding aged small pieces of food, all framed by the slightly deformed wire structure. The action ended as it started: with a photograph of stuff in a garbage bag. During the process, I managed to capture the moment of the waste but, in the end, the water was all gone anyway.
This action is the result of drawing with no gadgets involved and not trying to represent anything at all, just drawing by hand for observing and reflecting. These illustrations started as relaxing, unpretending doodlings that at some point became an action. I was still doodling when I noticed that after some minutes of drawing, my hands were moving smoother and lighter and the traces were following that trend as well. I then decided to approach these illustrations as an exercise for connecting with my hands during the drawing process and for acknowledging and identifying the changes in my movements, positions, pressure, speed, and grip. After several minutes it also became some kind of hand-pen-paper connection assessment exercise.
The first drawing started from a dot being surrounded by a closely drawn circle, and a new circle surrounding that circle, and so on. In the next illustrations, I replaced the dot with a line as the starting point. The main idea was to always follow the preceding line as closely as possible, including the “inconsistencies” -or those moments when the hand and line went on its own and a little out of the route-. As a result, at any given point, curves may appear and pronounce more and more even when the starting point was a straight line. The last two drawings include both lines and dots as well as interruptions as an exploration of density and texture.
It was late at night when I was making most of these drawings. While giving a little rest to the eyes and getting away from the paper and the compressed lines, I looked at the glass of water and the cell phone lying aside and the connection with Action 7 and the retro illuminated gelatin cube came to my head. I turned off the lights, put the cell phone standing behind the glass, and started playing around with the papers, the light, perspective, superposition, and translucency.
This action is the continuation for ACTION 6: A chronicle of waste.
In Action 6 I made a little research about my water consumption by accounting the water I would throw away every day for 5 days, both at work and at home. In total, I documented 312 liters going down the drain, although I know my total waste during that lapse of time was actually bigger.
When washing, water basically goes from the tap to the drain, only deviating and slowing down its pace when encountering objects/bodies in the way but, soon after that, it’ll be gone anyway. This action consists in making for representing the water gone and, hopefully, making those ephemeral moments of water being wasted more palpable through longer lasting forms.
The first object is a 1:1 scale representation of the actual volume that the 312 liters of water would occupy in a space. The second one is a 1:10 scale version of the former, filled with water from different dish washings and solidified using gelatin for capturing the moment of waste.
Object 1
A 67,8 cm3 wire cube (312 L).
Object 2
A 6,8 cm3 wire + gelatin cube. Gelatin testing and process.
A reflective research for visualizing aspects of my consumption and waste of resources.
At this moment I’m working in a Pizzeria and throwing food into the trash is, at some point, part of the job. Most of the time it’s just the remainders of what the customers didn’t eat and oftentimes, some food gone bad is thrown away.
A day or two after the assignment for Action 6 was published, I was at the pizzeria, working and thinking about what my Action should be. Suddenly, I had to throw some tomatoes into the garbage. This was yet again one of those times when I got to do that thing that always feels wrong. Looking at the tomatoes in the bag, I started to think about all the waste I produce every week in my place of work. My next task was washing some lettuce.
The tomatoes in the bag
For washing the lettuce we use some big containers with water, where the vegetables will stay submerged for a while before drying and using them. I started filling one of those containers with water. As usual, it was a little heavy. Still thinking about the waste while holding the container with water to be thrown away in some minutes, it came to my mind how working in a kitchen, I use lots of water every day. In restaurants, people work at a very fast pace and things get dirty and messy every minute. Washing in a professional kitchen means washing fast, and washing fast also means spilling lots of water.
Those reflections continued for a few minutes while doing other things, and while taking the lettuce out of the container, I realized I could weigh the water I was just about to throw. If I was going to use it and throw it away just like that, at least I should be aware of how much water I was throwing away. So, I grabbed one of the empty Creme Fraiche buckets that we have in the kitchen, which I know they can contain up to 12 liters of water, filled it with the lettuce water once full and a second time almost completely, to about 5/6 of the capacity. The result: approximately 22 liters of water for washing some plants of lettuce. It felt definitely like a lot, a little shocking actually. Suddenly, I realized that it would be interesting to know how much water I actually use/waste daily. So, like that, I defined my Action 6: To measure and document my consumption of water per day. At work, and at home.
I already had my reference with the Creme Fraiche bucket so, I would place the bucket under the tap so that all the water I used went into there and not to the drain. I would take a picture of every bucket before throwing the water away. I did this for 5 days. It’s important to say that I did this at work every time it was possible, meaning no boss around and having the time to wash slower. During not so busy days, like Thursday, I could document more things than during Friday or Saturday. I did the same at home but actually weighing the water, and I also measured the water I used for showers, putting the plug, flooding the tub, and using a bowl as a reference for volume. At work I took as many samples as possible but, I could say that I normally use around 3 or 4 times the volume that I was able to document this time. At home, I accounted for every wash and shower but I didn’t document things like washing my hands or my teeth, for instance. Also worth noting is that while doing this action, every time I had a shower or washed anything, I was particularly careful and aware of the water consumption, using the minimum possible for each task, and even trying to break my previous records for using less water every time. So, I can say that every liter documented here is actually just a fraction of all the water I use every dayunder normal conditions. With all the data collected, I made a spreadsheet for putting together a consumption calculation and that could enable some further estimations.
This action made me question my consumption/waste of water and reflect on the little everyday things I can do to reduce my water spilling. What I found particularly useful with this action was that as soonas I started to visualize the water as volumes, my perception of my consumption became much more clearer. With that in mind, Action 7 will continue this action through some representations of the water I wasted while doing this.
In total, during these 5 days, I accounted for almost 312 liters of water going down the drain.
Up next, the pictures of the process and the spreadsheet:
