Friday 5 November 2010
MAkE thInGs maKE SenSE
Hazel White, head of the masters program, gave us a personal lecture about her experiences of jewellery and digital design and her aim to connect the two. Some of the points she made were very interesting, for example geneotypes. A geneotype represents the genes of an idea that can take things to the next stage. This reminded me of what we have been doing with mind mapping, writing every idea down however ridiculous and then somehow finding a few good ideas amongst the mess. Another point that interested me was her idea that you don't know how people really view Scotland until you leave. I have by no means ever wanted to stay in Scotland all my life but i have never been the kind of person really eager to travel the world. However this has made me wonder what i might learn about my home country by looking at it through other peoples eyes. When discussing work for seminar 2, we talked about the idea of smoking in Paris and how it is portrayed as glamorous and nostalgic. I now wonder how the Parisians see it? Probably just as much of a strain on their health service and litter problem as we do, yet we romanticise it in Paris. Overall i found the lecture quite interesting, Hazel talked a lot about wearable computing and much of her work has been focused on creating digital jewellery. She mentioned how when experimenting with adding light to pieces she had to drill a hole in a Victorian locket. This would have broken my heart. The locket looked far more beautiful before the LED bulb was randomly inserted. As a lover of jewellery i don't know if i particularly want it to have a function or a purpose, i think i simply want it to be beautiful.
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Funny, isn't it? I felt the same way about the brooch, but you know it was supposed to be "used" and still is, so in a way you could argue it's been rescued from just been looked at, which wasn't what it was made for!
ReplyDeleteDo you not think "beauty" has a purpose? Interesting... I just commented on someone else's blog that maybe we're pushing "function" a bit too much without emphasising that it's a broad term that includes "being pretty". However, sometimes something isn't just pretty. Like the brooch, in fact: it was designed to look beautiful but also to hold something that was meaningful for the wearer or giver. Remember the economy of the sign from lecture 2? Might be worth looking at it again.
We'll be looking at "beauty" briefly next semester but you might want to look up Kant's "Aesthetics" and Hogarth's "Analysis of Beauty". They're difficult reads, being quite old (although the Hogarth is rather interesting when you get in to the swing of his 18th century writing style).
Kant was a philosopher and basically said beauty was universal and un-involving, i.e. a sunset. No "function" (for us, anyway) but everyone can agree it is beautiful. He also said there were different types of beauty.
Hogarth was a famous artist and cartoonist, and really went to town on what made something beautiful, such as the shape of the line...
I really enjoyed studying him when I was doing my degree, he's a fun artist.
If you can find a good introductory article on them you might find it interesting but I probably wouldn't recommend getting hold of the actual texts :)
Like I say, we'll take a look at "taste" next semester.