Exercise: Locational Gesture¶
New for 2025.
Our final project objective is an outdoor performance of kinetic textile artifacts. This could take a lot of possible forms, including but not limited to puppetry, sculpture, installation, wearables, wind sculpture, or kites. The show could potentially run for as little as ten minutes are as long as several days. It could be human-operated, wind-powered, or motorized, but in every case must involve some element of movement.
A default scenario might be a group show of free-standing sculptures on the CFA lawn in daylight starting at 4PM for an hour. Some operating modes might be wind-powered, performed as puppets, motorized with battery power, or visitor-operated. But this is just a starting point for discussion.
Pieces created for outdoor locations by their nature inhabit a location and will be read in that context. They may be site-specific or universal, but there will be a semantic, dynamic, and visual dialogue with the environment in the viewer’s eye.
The objective of this exercise is to explore exterior locations on campus to begin to visualize the possible dialogue between the site and a kinetic textile piece you will eventually create with a group.
Process¶
Please select a fabric swatch to take with you and return. You may optionally also take: a length of monofilament line, bamboo strips.
Please scout three exterior locations on the main campus to consider. It’s fine if you overlap with other members of the class, you’ll each have a different interpretation.
Please try to imagine the following at each location:
a textile form capable of movement
the chosen size and scale of the form as related to the space
the exact positioning and gesture within the constraints of the location
the kind of human or machine affordances for interaction or control
the needed structure or adjunct mechanism
the interaction with ambient light and weather
Using your fabric swatch as a prop, please capture a 10-second video clip which suggests an implementation of your vision. Please do your best to create a meaningful moving image. You might consider temporarily tying the fabric in place, puppeting it by hand, or using forced perspective to suggest scale (i.e., hold the fabric very close to the camera).
Deliverables¶
Each person should please:
Post three short video clips taken in different locations.
Please use a named subfolder within the Shared Drive folder for the assignment so we can keep them straight. We’ll watch them in class and you’ll be invited to make a brief explanation.