Required Blog Entery for Contemporary Design #5. Today's Topic: New Ideas

My second blog of the day! This is a first.

I've had some ideas for projects the past few days that I thought I would share. PLEASE shoot me some feedback if you have time (all 1 or 2 of you who actually read this). That would be much appreciated. Let me know if you think any of these ideas are worth pursuing.

1) A 3-D Sculpture: With Nate talking about making 3-D images the other day I had the idea of making a 3-D image IN three dimensions! So for example, 2 human forms, one red, one green, overlapping each other. Maybe made out of wire? Or wood? Like real life....but better...because its in 3-D. Maybe this one is silly, but amusing nonetheless.

2) Desk Drawer Zen Garden: Once again this one is more just for laughs, but it could also be marketed as a real item. I've seen deskTOP zen gardens, but this would be designed as a kit to take up a drawer in your desk. So when you are feeling stressed out you open the drawer, rake the sand, arrange the rocks, et cetera, in order to relax yourself. But then when the boss comes around you can just close the drawer, thus maintaining a certain level of professionalism and keeping your desktop open for various other important projects. There could even be a fake bonsai tree that pops up and down as the drawer opens and closes.

3) Flag Creature: This would involve taking the elements of the U.S. flag (stars, bars, blue rectangle) and constructing an anthropomorphic 3-D sculpture out of them. I was thinking wood would probably be the best medium for this, but metal might work too. What I'm curious about here is how people will react to such a creature. Will they see it as a flag? Will they only see it as a creature? Will they be offended somehow? The creature will share characteristics with our flag, but at no point will it ever be a flag, thus protecting me from that pesky U.S. flag code. This piece also fits into my theme of fragmentation (see previous blog entry).

4) Obselete Technology Art Show: Nothing is more sad, and worthless that a peice of technology that has been rendered obselete. Companies spend years, and millions of dollars developing the newest and fastest gizmo. Then people spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on said gizmo, love it like their 1st born, then toss it in the trash when a newer gizmo is released. You all know what I'm talking about: the Apple IIe, the Motorola "Brick" cell phone, Betamax players, and so on. So what if I (or we) were to take these items and give them new life. We could use an old monitor as a canvas and paint it. We could take an old 1-megapixel camera and have it bronzed and mounted. We could even strap a bunch of old cellphones together and use their combined screens as a makeshift reading lamp. Just a thought.

5) Ugly Body Parts Installation: And for those of you who didn't read my last post....
This idea came to me last night while I was trying to fall asleep: What if I were to take close-up photographs of the parts of my body that I'm insecure about, print them really large scale, and assemble them into a pseudo human shape. So a series of prints with my hair line and teeth at the top, my belly in the middle, my knees more towards the bottom, etc. This would make me really uncomfortable. And I can imagine it would make other people a little uncomfortable as well. But the idea is that it would force people (including myself) to look at these body parts in a different way. It would force me to get over the fact that I have knobby knees. Because who really cares? We all have knees, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has knobby knees, but that is something that we all avoid talking about, thinking about, or even looking at.