Vision Machine cont.

I've created the two viewing machines necessary for the project. The one to view the model reflects the idea of Cubism through the breaking up of the image by reflections of mirrors.  The other to see nothingness was a little more difficult to come up with but the model was easier to construct.  I decided to go with the idea of 'nothingness' meaning 'emptiness' and created an empty space to view through the machine.

Vision Machine

So its a couple hours before architecture studio and I still have no idea what to create for our new project.  The new problem is to design a machine that can make you see like a Cubist artist sees his painting, and the second part is to design a machine that makes the user see nothingness.  I've thought of illusions with water, but I don't think that will achieve the Cubist vision, only a blurred distorted vision.  I'm looking into mirrors now and maybe that will reveal some of the "better" answers since there is only better and worse responses.  As for seeing nothingness its obviously a trick question that is open to interpretation of what nothingness is...maybe trying to define it will help.

Excercising Cubism

After completing our study of the Cubist paintings themselves, although the art is always up for debate, we moved on to a more architecture-related topic.  Designing a landscape and building based off of the Cubist painting with an influence from a Corbusier building.  I decided to combine my Violin and the Glass painting with Le Corbusier's Villa Shodan.  I started with Corb's idea of the ramp in architecture acting as a Cubist mechanism allowing a person to experience multiple spaces at one time.  I derived the landscape from the basic shapes of the painting and gave them different inclines.  I continued to reference Villa Shodan through my monumental walls that direct different views just like a Cubist painting and that took similar form to the Bris-Soleil.  It is very basic, two building masses separated by an open entry in between them.  The building form is very solid and gradually "dissolves" as it reaches the other end.

Cubism Completed

We have finished the direct analysis of our Cubist paintings today and I definitely gained farther insight into how to experience Cubist artwork.  Hearing and seeing other people's ideas prove that a Cubist painting can never be looked at in the same way; it's a different experience each time.  A very interesting discovery I made with my painting of the Violin and the Glass was the possibility that Gris used color to distinguish the changing views of the same object, such as the violin being white and orange on one side and then black and blue on the other.  This concept helped me start to see the overall composition better as a whole and even distinguished the objects versus the space better.  Below are the diorama model and the layering model.

Continuing Cubism

I have now completed a few more models based on space, objects/form, layering, and a diorama.  These models have definitely helped me in my understanding of Gris's cubist painting The Violin and the Glass by getting a better feeling of his composition's space by trying to develop the 2-D painting into a 3-D model.  I am having trouble really understanding the layering though and am not quite sure how I should go about determining the importance of the layers, what belongs on each layer, and why one layer should be closer to the viewer rather than another.  Some pictures of the various models are below.

Cubism

Viewing the model from the side abstracts the painting even more

To start off architecture studio this semester we were asked to look into cubism and try to understand the way the artist, in my case Juan Gris, saw the subject.  I chose to study The Violin and the Glass by trying to turn a 2-Dimensional painting into a 3-Dimensional model.  There are a few pictures from my first attempt at a model but there is still many things I need to look into now after critiquing with my studio professor, such as basing the forms of the model on the painting's subject shapes or the spaces.  Also, looking into the color significance or light versus dark to determine what is closer to the observer.