Midterm Proposal

If inanimate objects had emotions and could express them, how would they do it? What would they say? And how would an audience react to these messages? These are questions that I have wondered recently, which have brought me to my idea for my IP project: I want to give inanimate objects the ability to display their emotions through facial expressions and possibly dialogue and then note physical and emotional reactions from the public. Inanimate objects embody certain traits through their material, their aesthetic appearance, and how they are used. These attributes can give the object a human-like personality. I have decided to take these thoughts and bring them into reality by actually putting specific, large-scale facial expressions directly on objects out in public.

            My project will have a social aspect through the relationship between the objects’ emotions and people’s emotions. I expect that people will have a strong reaction, whether it is through laughter, surprise, disgust, or anger, every time they see everyday inanimate objects with faces communicating a very human idea. By exploring these physical and emotional reactions from the audience, I will get a better understanding of the connection between human emotion and material objects. Will the viewers feel an emotional connection to the object the face is placed upon or will they simply feel an emotion from the large-scale facial expressions?

            In order to accomplish my project, I will use paper, pens, and colored pencils that I already own to draw the facial features, but I will need to purchase magnetic sheets in order to attach my drawings to metal objects. I also need money to laminate my drawings or to make them into window clings. To pay for these materials, I will use money that I have set aside for school supplies, and I will create these in my studio. My projects will be displayed around campus and downtown Ann Arbor on many different objects.

6 Important Sources and References

1) Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

            This couple is important for a few different reasons. Their large-scale works of objects bring about the topic of material culture. Having them so large also makes them humorous in a way that my giant faces are. Also, more recently, their public work has a relationship between object and site, which my faces will have with the objects to which they are attached.

2) Terry Borders who makes Bent Objects

            The way he creates a personality for the objects is a bit different than my idea, but I love his style and humor that he incorporates into his art. He attaches wire limbs to the objects and sets them up in a scene to display a type of emotion and personality that the object might have or a situation that they might be in.

3) Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright

            I have been reading this book for my Visual and Material Culture class this semester. It has many topics that are relevant to my work such as interpretations of images, advertising to people on the go, pop art’s social critique of consumer culture, and commodity fetishism. This book makes me think about material culture, which is very interesting to me, in ways that I never thought about before.

4) French Artist JR

            He puts photographs of eyes and faces on buildings and structures. It is a much different concept from mine, because he is bringing recognition and confidence to people around the world who need it most. He makes people living on the bare minimum models for the day in his artwork. The similarities of our giant faces and the differences between our concepts have made me think about the possibilities of taking my concept in a different direction.

5) Tim Burton

            His illustrations and creativity have always been an inspiration to me. His dark humor really shines through in his drawings of characters, as they are distorted, odd, and very intriguing. I have always respected and related to his creepy humor very much.

6) Real faces and facial expressions

            I do not think it would be fair to draw human faces expressing emotion without looking at real people expressing real emotions about real topics.

Week-to-week timeline:

Oct 8            make a sad face and put on Borders

Oct 15            make more faces and put on other sites

Oct 22            think about interactivity and displaying dialogue

Oct 29            think more about the documentation of reactions to my project

Nov 5            think about statements the faces could make

            *Nov 10 Grant Application Due

Nov 12            explore other ways to communicate dialogue

Nov 19            explore other ways to attach the faces to objects

Nov 26            explore other materials to draw on than paper

Dec 3            explore different drawing styles

            *Dec 5 IP Faculty Consultations- Materials Due

Dec 10            formulate ideas, where do I want to go with this?

            *Dec 15 Presentations

Dec 17            over break, put my faces on things in Grand Rapids

            *Jan 5 First Draft of Written Thesis Due

Jan 7            2D vs. 3D

Jan 14            try an even larger scale

Jan 21            think about other body parts (hair, nose ears)

Jan 28            still think about other body parts (arms, feet)

Feb 4            try just humorous

Feb 11            try just seriousness

Feb 18             indoor vs. outdoor

Feb 25            campus vs. residential areas

Mar 3            older people vs. college students vs. children

Mar 10            think about the possibilities of using these as advertisements/posters

Mar 17            make more faces, display, document

Mar 24            make more faces, display, document

Mar 31            make more faces, display, document

            * Apr 3 Work Due to Gallery Installers

Apr 7            displaying my documentation

Apr 14            formulating thoughts, writing

Apr 21            finishing writing

            *Apr 22 Final Written Thesis Due

                                                                           My drawn face on a dumpster 

                                                      Claes Oldenburg, Dropped Cone (Cologne, Germany)

                             Terry Borders' Bent Objects, Kiwi Getting Ready for the Beach

 

JR,  Favela Morro Da Providencia, Rio de Janeiro

 

                                                               Tim Burton, Untitled

10/11 critiques and suggestions

All and all I received some really good feedback today with good suggestions of where I should take my project. The people in my group liked the site-specific aspect of my project. Some exciting suggestions that I received were to make my faces more interactive. Magnetic words that go along with the magnetic faces would be a good idea so that people can come up with their own sentences that relate to the faces and they would also be able to move the face in whatever configuration they choose. Other exciting things that came up were to make more faces that could go in either funny places or in places that don't have people just walk right by in a hurry. Suggestions were a yawning face in a library, an energized face in a coffee shop, a nauseated face on The Cube, and a throwing up face in a bathroom such as NYPD where people would be getting food late at night drunk.

All of these exciting suggestions are also challenging for me. It was harder than I thought to put my faces up in public, because I felt very awkward. I think that it will be harder yet to engage with people to make them interactive and also to put them in places where people will be sitting there for a while watching me put up my work.

I am really trying now to break out of my shell because I would love to create these specific projects to both further my project as a whole and to test different methods in order to narrow in on what I intend my purpose to be.

Beginning to Go Public

What I Did:

This week, I drew more faces and put them up in the bathroom at the Art School. Then I came up with a plan to go even more public.

Here is how long I spent on each topic:
3 hours drawing more eyes and mouths on notecards
1 hour coming up with dialogue for the faces and places to put up each one
.5 hours spent in the bathroom putting up faces on the mirror, towel paper dispenser, and inside the bathroom stall and then noting people's reactions to them
.5 hours researching artists
6 hours drawing large facial features
1 hour talking with people about how the faces and dialogue makes them feel


These are faces with very different expression that I wanted to put on specific objects in public places.

This one is intended to be a public computer...

This one is intended to be on a trash can...

The next three were (or are intended to be) on a public bathroom mirror...

This one was on a paper towel dispenser...

And I have not yet decided on this one....

Here are pictures from inside the bathroom. They are not good quality, because I wanted to do it fast so nobody would see me. I had a strong sense to have nobody know that I made these, because I wanted to see their true reactions. I did not want them to think that they were being tested by the person beside them carefully making glances in their direction.

From here, I got some good feedback and suggestions. One of the suggestions was to make the faces large scale so that I can put them on large objects such as the shower that I illustrated before. I did some research and found large stickers of faces from nouvellesimages.com. Here is a sticker that you can place on your wall for a decoration.

                                                      Mona Lisa by ARTHUR

 I decided to make my own large face that I can put on a wall or a large object. Each facial feature is a little over a foot wide.

What I Accomplished/ Discovered/ Encountered:

After experiencing the reactions in the bathroom of the Art School, I realized that I love to get big reactions from people, whether it is making them laugh, gasp, be disgusted, confused, or angry. There were a few reactions in particular that were very strong. One girl laughed, took a picture of the faces on her phone and told me she just wondered who made these. Another woman read the paper towel dispenser, which said "You better not use too much paper towel," and then turned around to use another one. Someone else took down the sign in the bathroom stall that said "What did you eat??" alongside a disgusted face. This experiment made me want to go even bolder and try to get even more reactions from the audience. The experiment along with suggestions from others made me want to go bigger scale, which brought me to my large scale face. I felt that the size and the detail of the large scale face would really shock people and evoke more of a reaction than the small eyes and mouths. I was right in this assumption when I brought classmates into my studio where the face was displayed and all of them basically had a surprised reaction at first and told me that it creeped them out a little bit. I also want to go more public with my faces to get a bigger audience.


What I Think I Should Do Next:

With my large scale face, I want to make them into huge magnets and put them onto metal things in public. This will allow me to be able to take them down with ease in case anyone yells at me for it. With this disgusted face, I want to put it on a dumpster. I want to make a few more faces to fit other objects. I walked by Borders today and thought how great it would be to place a giant sad face on the doors. Since I used to work there, I thought it would be even more fitting, and feel that not very many people would be opposed to this. I want to make statements with my faces and make people think about the decisions that they make. Americans throw away so many things because we are such a consumer society, and it is partly because of society that Borders went out of business.

Exploring and Formulating

What I Did:

This week I tried to break out of my comfort zone and explore a few other options that I have with my project along with formulating a plan for where I truly want to go with my project.  Here is the break down of my time spent on this:

4 hours exploring with manipulating pictures and putting faces on objects
3 hours formulating ideas with classmates and alone of what to do and where to take my ideas
1 hour researching different artists related to my artwork
2 hours drawing expressive eyes and mouths

What I Accomplished:

In order to expand my thinking, I tried to get away from drawing for a short time and explore other medium. I started out taking pictures of objects in my house and then manipulating the photos through Photoshop adding eyes and mouths and adding text that goes along with it. I realized after making these pictures, it was not really in the form that I liked and it was not as much fun as drawing the facial expressions. Afterward, I clipped facial features out of magazines and taped them onto objects in my house along with a written-out dialogue of what the object was saying. This was a lot more fun because the objects could then be seen by my other housemates and it made me really excited to see how they would react to them.

After bringing these photos along with my previous drawings into class to talk about our projects, my classmates and I agreed we liked the drawings more. I got a lot of good feedback and suggestions through this talk. One thing that was suggested that I think is a really good idea was to go public with my idea, such as going to Meijer and giving objects there facial expressions and dialogue. I wouldn't think that I would be one to create public art, but I think that this is the best idea for what I want to accomplish for my project. After getting the basics down for my idea, I sat down and took a lot more time to try and figure out why I wanted to do this and how I was going to go about doing this, which is what is explained in my proposal.

From here, I have started to draw eyes and mouths in a very expressive manor and think of objects that I can attach these things to, along with dialogue for what the object would be saying. Certain objects embody certain personalities and I have tried to illustrate these personalities through humor and surprise. 

There are artists that I have looked at who have similar artwork. I keep looking at work by Terry Border, who makes the Bent Objects. I love the way he conveys relationships between different inanimate objects through humor. He really sets up a great scene and photographs the objects in a way that shows a lot of emotion and personality through things like placement of the wire limbs and shadows. The funny thing is, he does not include faces on his objects or dialogue in his work, while my plan is to only use these things. I also looked at artists who make the faces that you can put on trees.

What I Think I Should Do Next:

This weekend, I plan to make more illustrations and then go to a very public place, such as Meijer, as suggested, and attach my facial features and dialogue onto certain objects that I know will be seen by a number of people. Then, I will wait for people to experience these objects and see what their reactions will be. With these results, I will figure out how to improve my project from there.

A new idea using inanimate objects

What I did:

In the second week, I went further with my first idea of documenting my emotions, along with thinking up more project ideas and variables of these ideas. I also spent time researching artists who have worked with ideas similar to what I have come up with. In all, I have completed 10 hours of work composed of:

·      1.5 hours of continuing my emotion documentation, along with trying different styles of drawing (can't figure out how to make them stay rotated)

·      2 hours of thinking up more project ideas and variables

·      3.5 hours of researching artists whose work relates to my ideas through their websites and books. 

·      3 hours drawing examples for my newest project idea.  

What I accomplished/ discovered/ encountered:

Trying a few different styles of drawing was fun and showed me that certain styles can give a different feel for the emotion that I am trying to portray. I had a lot of fun creating characters for my moods for the first few weeks of school and it was nice to be able to get my emotions out in a way other than vocally.

While creating these, however, I came up with another idea that I think would generate better with an audience. Since I was little, I have always attributed emotions to inanimate objects and felt empathy for them when they were ugly or never used. A few days ago, I wondered, if these inanimate objects could talk, what would they say? I thought that it would be fun to illustrate these objects with personalities, giving them facial expressions and writing their dialogue beside them. I came up with a few, but my shower drawing is still my favorite. It got a lot of reactions (good and bad) from people who I showed it to, which is exactly what I wanted.

After thinking about different variables for this project, talking with Juliette, and researching different artists who make inanimate objects come to life, I realized that I should think about alternate ways to communicate my ideas besides drawing, whether it be through photography, solely text, 3D sculptures, or sound where the audience can hear what the object is saying. Here are a few examples from different artists (worth1000.com and bent objects) that express the emotion of certain everyday objects through either manipulating the photograph of it, or creating limbs for the object and positioning it in a way to look like it is a living object with a human personality:

This project could definitely show my quirky personality. And instead of a project where it just displays my personal emotions, this new project would be more for the public and everyone could relate to it. It would be humorous, but some of them (like the shower) would make people feel a little uneasy.

What I think I should do next:

From here, I will take my new project idea and think about different ways and different media that I can use to portray the objects best, and to give it the feel that I really want the audience to see and respond to. I will also try to come up with many more inanimate objects that I can illustrate.

Reflecting on responses

After talking about my ideas with a few classmates and Stephanie, I felt a little better sense of what it is that I am trying to accomplish for my project. It reinforced my thoughts on what is passionate to me, and it also left me with some thoughts that I might not have come up with otherwise.


Stephanie and Kyla both came up with an idea that seemed interesting to me, which was the idea of "what the text says vs. what you see". Stephanie remembered a drawing that I showed in class in which I drew my legs and wrote text that said "I have faces in my knees" beside them. She talked about how she didn't really know how to feel about it, but that is what she liked about it. Thus far, I have been making little illustrations of emotions with certain characters and labeling them with an exact emotion, but after talking in our groups, I definitely will consider using text in my illustrations that doesn't automatically say the emotion that I am trying to display. I think using text that is weird and quirky will get the viewer's imagination going , which will then get emotional reactions going as well. After all, I am a quirky person who likes weird and dark humor, and it would be nice to incorporate that into my artwork even further.

First real week.

This is the beginning where I just stick my toes in the water and explore what it is that really catches my attention and curiosity...

By the end of the end of the summer, I really started looking at artists that I have always been drawn to in my life and tried to figure out just what about their art really struck me and why. I have always loved films by Tim Burton, the way they are geared towards every age group, the slight humor he uses, and his unique style of creepy cool characters. Last week I bought a 430 page book of Tim Burton illustrations and I have not been able to keep my eyes off it. It is basically my favorite possession at the moment. Along with looking at this book, I have also studied artists like Ralph Steadman, Yoshitomo Nara. Besides artists, I have also researched such graphics as beer labels (inspired by the Flying Dog beer label created by Ralph Steadman) and fun and quirky greeting cards by various artists. I took 2.5 hours researching all of these things that I have captured my curiosity. I feel that Tim Burton captures my style the most with human characters drawn in such a way that really shows the personality of the character, which is shown in the first drawing above. Ralph Steadman is also very interesting to me because his style is so unique the way he creates animals and people that usually take a different form than just animals and people. His use of ink is also unique and something that I want to explore. Yoshitomo Nara is another artist who has work that I feel is similar to mine. His usual focus is on children, but he gives them a twist so that the art is geared toward a more adult audience.

After researching, I started sketching people in a more expressive/abstract/surreal form different from what I am used to drawing. I then developed these sketches into more complete ideas of how I wanted to represent certain emotions. I came up with 6 images of certain strong emotions that I have had during the last week or so since classes started. This took me a total of 7.5 hours.

From here, I started to think more about what I wanted to accomplish for my IP project. I came up with a few ideas including things such as greeting cards for every single situation (even angry cards, drunk cards, flirting cards, etc.), trying to display every type of emotion or state in a distinct way, and documenting every emotion that I have. Coming up with these ideas took me about half an hour.

On top of trying to create something for my project, I also took about half an hour to start setting up my studio. I know that I want a place that I can feel comfortable in and which can also inspire me to create new things. I have not gotten so far with this yet, but I have ideas that are in progress.

Here are images of the emotions/states that I have felt lately and represented through an illustration. I had so much fun creating the 6 images. Personally, I am horrible at expressing my emotions vocally. I think anyone who knows me well can agree with this fact. It felt great to get these emotions out visually, however. I am so used to drawing realistically because it is basically the only style I have used when drawing and I have a lot of experience doing so, but after getting inspiration from artists who use a lot of expression and loose styles, it was really surprising to see that I could go this route also. I used colors that I wouldn't have normally used, got crazy with exaggerating the facial expressions, and even incorporated nonhuman elements into my drawings such as a leaky pipe to represent how I feel when I am sick. Drawing this way feels a lot more personal since I can use whatever style and color that I want and that I feel seems to get my exact feelings across. I also feel it is a lot more fun and interesting to create and view these types of drawings compared to more realistic drawings.

For next week, I plan to add more characters to my collection to represent my emotions for the beginning of the school year. I also plan to experiment more with my style. I want to see how crazy I can actually go, maybe to the point where you can hardly recognize the object as a human and you can just see a great amount of emotion being conveyed. I want to play around with more medium also, such as pastels, markers, and ink with brushes.