Blog Post 03
Thematic Prompt Responses
In this essay, Adam Moss makes repeated reference to the work that eludes you. “There was a kind of painting she wanted to make—political but painterly, Mexican inflected: symbolic but also cartoonlike—that was a direct expression of who she was, with both her fury and childlike spirit. She has a hard time describing it, but she knew what she wanted to create and couldn’t do it.”
Do you have a sense of the work that is eluding you right now? What do you know about it? Can you find any intersections between the work that eludes you and your Project 01 topic?
I feel like I’ve had a sense of the work that has been eluding me for years. I think that most of what I have made creatively has been made in pursuit of the work that is eluding me. Like I’m sort of chiseling away my own habits of creating while chasing something that I can’t exactly describe.
One thing that has eluded me is 3D art. I have a basic knowledge of it, but I have a hard time sitting down to learn it the same way that I have learned other mediums. I’m using 3D software (Unity) for my project, so I’m definitely confronting this elusive topic head on with this project.
Maria de Los Angeles’ drawings naturally become visual metaphors—“...without trying, she had united the drawings with a common language: skeletons for migrants, a border like a stage set, law enforcement represented by a range of satirical figures. They were coherent.”
When you think about your topic, what metaphors come to mind? What visuals? Are there additional readings or interpretations that you can identify?
An obvious metaphor for bridges might be the concept of “bridging the gap” between abstract concepts rather than physical locations. This idea can be used in the context of education, where teachers bridge students’ knowledge from one concept to another.
I have honestly been taking this pretty literally though. My content and interviews are going to be centered around physical bridges, but I am so excited to see if the interviews might reveal stories that could somehow connect to other metaphorical “bridging".
Project 01 progress
I am working on making a video game (but not really a game) in Unity. The user will play as a nameless, speechless first-person character as they navigate across a series of bridges. While the user walks over each bridge, my goal is to have a sound byte of an interview that I have recorded during my own interviews. So the player gets to walk over a bridge and listen to stories.
The way that I design the bridges in the game is dependent on how the stories come out; I don’t have a very strong image of how I want them to look, but I have several tools that I might use for designing a bridge (Unity assets, 3D modeling, photogrammetry)
I met with Margaret and we briefly chatted about using the NYU Library website to gather materials. She also pointed me towards some NYC open data resources, which contain lots of interesting historical records about NYC bridges.
