Exercise: Art and Design Inspirations

We would like to explore the existing body of work in art, architecture, and design for inspiration. This is potentially a vast scope, so it may be helpful to remember our overall objective is testing ideas from the soft technologies literature within art and design, especially those involved in kinetic elastomer devices. Locating existing soft kinetic sculpture would inform our discussion, but so would other works which could be meaningfully extended to include technological elements.

Objectives

1. Become familiar with the tools of academic art and design literature research.

2. Locate artists, works, materials, and processes which could inspire new work.

Steps

1. Familiarize yourself with the formal literature resources:

   1. Skim through the course notes on the libraries: Art Literature and Library Search Resources.

   2. Skim through Bibliography of Soft Art (S22).

   3. Skim through the S21 course art bibliography.

2. Using both formal and informal resources (e.g. Google), locate documentation of an art or design project which you think could inspire work for this class. Documentation could include artist web sites, videos, published papers, review articles; the space is much broader than we been using for robotics research.

3. Write a short blog post and be prepared to make brief comments in class.

Deliverables

1. Short blog post.