Assignment 1 – Josh Durham

Reflections

My main goal for this project was to explore a variety of different forms and techniques for designing and creating inflatables from plastic bags and tape.  I am always very interested in the various ways you can assemble and create objects from different media, so I wanted to practice a variety of techniques and methods for creating inflatable objects.  Instead of being focused on creating a particular shape or form, I wanted to mostly create shapes and objects that vary due to how the shapes are assembled and created.

The main materials I utilized were the colorful plastic bags and tape that were provided for this project.  I decided to stick to these materials as I felt that there was enough opportunity for variation and exploration within these materials by changing how I built forms and worked with the plastic and tape.  Each piece created is driven by a particular process or mindset while creating that piece, and I mostly wanted to make sure that each piece was unique in some way from the other forms.

I learned a significant amount from this project about the difficulties and successes of building inflatable forms from these materials.  I quickly learned about the difficulties of cleanly assembling these plastic forms since taping thin, irregularly shaped pieces of plastic together is difficult to get perfectly right.  I also learned how to shape and modify different panels and pieces that make up the inflatable form to create surface and volumes with different looks and feelings.  If I were to continue working with this media, I would spend more time focused on making clean tape lines or potentially hiding the tape entirely from the inflatable forms, such as only placing tape on the inside surface of the plastic.  This is because I believe that some of my pieces could be improved by having cleaner tapes lines that distract less from the overall shape and form of the inflatable.  Similarly, I would be more conscious of how the shapes of different plastic panels affect how easy or hard it is to tape the form together.  While some plastic shapes with curves and many corners are more visually striking, they are much harder to tape together with other pieces when trying to create a clean plastic form.

1

The goal of this first piece was to learn how to create basic plastic forms as I became familiar with the materials, while also exploring the possibility of nesting one inflatable inside of another.  The union of red and clear cube creates an interesting dynamic as both inflatable forms depend on one another, and varying the volume and pressure of the air within the form adds animation to the form as the two shapes don’t inflate and deflate at the same rate.

2

This next piece focused on creating a shape that contains various holes rather than being a single cohesive surface.  The form was created from two large plastic sheets and then 4 large holes were cut within the form in order to create a grid-like structure.  This form is quite modular and could be easily extended to larger grid-like sheets, and this form is structurally interesting since it becomes much more rigid and is able to hold its shape nicely when inflated with air.

3

After creating two relatively structured and planned pieces, I wanted to create a truly improvisational inflatable.  I randomly cut different pieces of plastic, and I then taped these different pieces together without modifying the plastic shapes in any way.  This creates a much more varied and interesting surface, but it also seems a bit more cluttered less clean due to the fact that it wasn’t quite as organized as the other pieces.  I like how utilizing the corners of the plastic bags allowed for an easy way to add sharp corners and spikes to an inflatable form

4

In this piece I wanted to focus on merging two circular forms to create a more complex form from standard basic shapes, and then also how to create different spikes to add variation to an inflatable.  I combined two circles together into a single base form, and then made a large spike and smaller spikes to explore how to add spikes and additional shapes to the surface of existing forms.  The color choices for this piece are also very striking and aggressive in comparison to the previous improvisational piece.

5

Finally, the last piece was mostly an exploration in how to make an inflatable with bold, clean tape lines.  Since several of the previous inflatables didn’t have the nicest tape lines, I wanted to explore how to create a clean pattern of tape that improves the look of a form rather than takes away from it.  I created several similarly shaped rectangular shapes, and then taped them together in order to create a large form with a relatively plain yet still interesting shape overall.