For the first inflatable, I cut out pieces from the given plastic bags and attached them together randomly. I wanted to see where it would take me if I tried to think and plan as little as possible while creating it to truly embrace the idea of improvisation. However, as I progressed the pieces got increasingly harder to tape together neatly because of how they curved. Especially towards the end when I had to close up the inflatable, I no longer had an opening large enough for my hand to fit through and support the inside of the inflatable to better stick the pieces together. I also found it very challenging to work with this inflatable when I decided to add the thin white tube-like structure. It made the inflatable harder to hold and fold around as I built the piece.
The second inflatable was a bit more planned out than the first one. I wanted to work with only cubic or rectangular pieces and also incorporated the corners of the plastic bags. At first I vaguely imagined that this piece would turn out like a large cube. But as I pieced it together, I realized each part I cut out was very irregular in width and length, so making a perfectly symmetric structure was not going to work out smoothly. Instead, I just tried to embrace the imperfections and continue piecing edges to edges until my inflatable was fully closed. It’s definitely not a cube, or cube-like, but I like how the freedom of improvising allowed me to create this abstract fish-like inflatable.
My last inflatable turned out to be the simplest looking one because I thought maybe a little too little. Knowing that I had to improvise, I didn’t think too much about my process and what I was doing. However, I still wanted to make a star-like structure using the existing structure of the plastic bags. I let my mind drift away as I cut and taped together the plastic pieces, and before I knew it I had created a “pillow” in the shape of a cross rather than a star-like structure. This was a strange improvisation process where, unlike the first two, my unplanned building process led me to a simpler, easier to handle structure than I had imagined.
Overall, it was challenging trying to get the pieces to tape neatly and have the tape perfectly seal all holes and gaps. I have naturally pretty sweaty hands so some of the tape pieces I placed would unstick, especially while I inflated them. I could fairly easily tape remaining holes up, though, by inflating them and checking for any leaks as I blew.