Update

I've really been enjoying our assignments so far. I'm also really excited to start using the vast resources available for my own projects, though. My second round of dough came out somewhat uninterestingly, but I had fun making aluminum foil gadgets.

While working on my foil, I rediscovered a few interesting shapes I thought I'd share with you guys:

Gömböc - the only known convex and homogeneous shape with just one stable and one unstable point of balance.

Yoshimoto Cube - actually two stellated rhombic dodecahedrons (mouthful, I know) that fit perfectly within each other to form a cube.

Sphericon - a three-dimensional shape with one side and two edges. Can fit together to make interesting systems that rotate around each other called lattices. It uses a trick similar to moebius strips (rotate and reattach) and klein bottles (invert and reattach) to get its one surface from a bicone.

Also, here's the animation of a universal joint I modeled my aluminum foil piece from. I think it's quite pretty.

First Impressions

First of all, I had a blast today. The four-and-a-half hour class, as expected, shot by in a blur.

I'm not going to say much about the recipe assignment, since I didn't try any of them besides Ashton's candies out of fear of possible nut contamination. It was a lot of fun though, and I enjoyed seeing what everyone came up with.

I really enjoyed the environment our class created during the dough project. I felt that we were exploring the properties of this material as a group without fear of judgment or failure. It was the perfect ambiance for constructive play to occur, and we had all of the materials necessary to do so. This was the second thing that struck me - the unexpectedly vast array of available materials. Copper piping, brass chains, cement, glass, string, aluminum foil... since many of my projects are inspired to a large degree by interesting or unusual materials, this bodes well. I feel that these resources will allow me to expand my projects into new directions.

I also appreciated the attitudes of Richard and Ian overall. They both participated in the experimentation, and I believe that this alone contributed substantially to the feeling of group exploration without judgment. I really enjoy juggling, and I tend to juggle most everything I can a bit - I was dying to juggle the dough as soon as I had made my first ball. I didn't at that point because I felt that it would probably come off as showy and inappropriate. I was later very happy to find that some of my classmates had some interest in juggling, and decided then to share my passion for it with them. I was delighted to discover that Richard and Ian did not think it was inappropriate, and even supported the notion to some extent. This sort of general openness is really great to find in an art class, and I look forward to exploring many new things with everyone this semester.