Some richly expressive thumbnails and a really succinct summary of Ernst and his ideas. As your OGR is missing your travelogue, it's difficult to discern how you might be applying Ernst's interrogative, war-wearied vision to the idea of the city. Very obviously, Ernst's city won't be a celebration of modernity and technology or progress, considering how ww1 was the first 'modern war'. It sounds like it might a place of fractured hopes and angsty self-reflection; a place of random collisions and discontinuity. A lot of my advice to students for this OGR has been to try and avoid simply dressing up buildings or structures in the clothes of their collaborators, but asking the more challenging design-led question which is 'how would my collaborator design a city?' What would 'irrational architecture' look like, for example? How would he seek to convey his artistic philosophy through form and through function?
That said, I am liking the idea of you working up structure forms by inhabiting Ernst's techniques. Another interesting way - which might evoke the Dada cut-up disordering idea - would be to actually collage architectural elements together as Ernst used collage. You could very simply photocopy lots of early 20th Century architecture and objects and cut and paste them together to create structures, before taking them back into Photoshop to work-over and explore: as the Tate observes:
"Ernst often re-used found images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities, all the more disturbing for being drawn from the known world."
So, let's learn something about your Ernst-inspired city and let's see you embrace collage as a workflow for creating architectural/real world assemblages in addition to your frontage experiments.
OGR 06/11/2016
ReplyDeleteHi Rachael,
Some richly expressive thumbnails and a really succinct summary of Ernst and his ideas. As your OGR is missing your travelogue, it's difficult to discern how you might be applying Ernst's interrogative, war-wearied vision to the idea of the city. Very obviously, Ernst's city won't be a celebration of modernity and technology or progress, considering how ww1 was the first 'modern war'. It sounds like it might a place of fractured hopes and angsty self-reflection; a place of random collisions and discontinuity. A lot of my advice to students for this OGR has been to try and avoid simply dressing up buildings or structures in the clothes of their collaborators, but asking the more challenging design-led question which is 'how would my collaborator design a city?' What would 'irrational architecture' look like, for example? How would he seek to convey his artistic philosophy through form and through function?
That said, I am liking the idea of you working up structure forms by inhabiting Ernst's techniques. Another interesting way - which might evoke the Dada cut-up disordering idea - would be to actually collage architectural elements together as Ernst used collage. You could very simply photocopy lots of early 20th Century architecture and objects and cut and paste them together to create structures, before taking them back into Photoshop to work-over and explore: as the Tate observes:
"Ernst often re-used found images, and either added or removed elements in order to create new realities, all the more disturbing for being drawn from the known world."
So, let's learn something about your Ernst-inspired city and let's see you embrace collage as a workflow for creating architectural/real world assemblages in addition to your frontage experiments.