Assignment 1 – Min Lee

For my first inflatables project, the soft sculptures that I molded out of plastic and tape were shaped out of already existing objects that I had pictured in my mind and that I wanted to create. Unfortunately I tried to start off by creating something too complex for my skillset and experience: the green spiked ball that you can see below. I severely underestimated just how difficult it would be to tape the spikes and to still faithfully keep the original dimensions that I had cut out, which left many holes in my inflatable that wouldn’t let me inflate the finished product. In the photos below, you can see that my deflated spike ball (the first photo) is not much different from its inflated version (the second and third photos).

For my second and third inflatables, I wanted to create a pair of jeans as well as a t-shirt to pair together. The way I approached these two was a bit more utilitarian by trying to use the closed seams of the plastic bag to my advantage. For the pants, I used the closed seams of the bag as the outer seams of the pants, and for the shirt, I used the bottom seams of the plastic bag as the shoulder seams, limiting the amount of messy taping that I had to do. Although the pants and shirt were able to inflate much better than the green ball, I was still unsatisfied with the plumpness of my products.

Moving onto my fourth inflatable, I decided I wanted to take it back to simpler shapes and to use simple geometry to create an inflatable that would be able to blow up much better. So I settled on a simple house shape, with triangles and rectangles. And this was my first inflatable that turned out exactly how I had expected it to: tight geometrical shapes that would insure that there would be no air holes.

Because I was more confident in my understanding of how the inflatables worked, I decided to recreate the spherical shape that I made in my first inflatable. So I created a simple smiley face and this time, instead of simply attaching two circles to each other, I attached the two sides of the sphere to a long strip of plastic in the middle, giving the plastic more leeway to blow up and create a nice spherical shape. This time, I succeeded, and there were no air holes, making this the second successful inflatable from my collection.

Overall, from my first small project experience, I had a lot of fun tinkering with the plastic and tape to come up with different ways to make my ideas succeed. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that the geometry for each shape would most likely end up changed by the tape, and to always prepare for that.