Author: Reya Ahmed

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desktop webpage

Feedback notes

1. Subversion of the formal qualities of the newspaper works.
2. There is experimentation of different formats.
3. Clear progress from original object to its own publication.
4. The format of the book clearly allows the illustration of individual positions within the group.
5. Emotional quality of the project.

About the objects (sourced from V&A gallery descriptions)

1. The metal-free bra and a non-underwired bra are the type worn by women working in electronics factories in and around Shenzhen. One bra is made with plastic supports, the other has no wire support at all, meaning that they are not picked up by factory metal detectors at security checkpoints located at entry and exit points. The market for metal-free underwear has arisen because these garments allow female workers to avoid invasive (and possibly abusive) body searches from male security guards. Rates of abuse are high and access to help is limited. The choice of the type of bra worn is a consequence of the sexual politics of Shenzhen manufacturing.
2. On 24 May 2020, the front page of the New York Times marked the harrowing milestone of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the United States. A list of some of the people who had died from the disease included their name, age, location and a poignant line from their obituary. The New York Times’ design director Tom Bodkin stated that, for the first time in at least 40 years, the paper chose not to illustrate the front page. In an image-led culture, it demonstrates the difficulty of representing the global pandemic with a single picture.
3. The colour ‘nude’ is often used in fashion to describe a light peachy-beige tone representing the colour of Caucasian skin. In autumn 2013 the French fashion house Christian Louboutin launched ‘The Nudes Collection’, a range of shoes in five skin tones. This was one of the first times that a major fashion house had adjusted its definition of nude to include skin colours other than white. Window displays used elaborately mounted mannequin arms to show how the new shades matched various skin tones. Arms were used instead of legs to avoid sensitivities in countries where the unclothed leg is taboo.

If the work I was doing was ‘unprofessional’, at what point does it start being industry-standard, and who decides those parameters?

For week 02 I wanted to challenge my skills and how much I had retained from my previous explorations. I kept everything the same but lowered the time limit per iteration to 15 minutes.

I found it unexpected that although the time was shorter, I was creating more complex animations this week. Furthermore, the iterations had more meaning and narrative than they did previously.

Blender is an open-source 3D software that has become increasingly unavoidable in the design landscape. A vast number of still and moving images that are created through it imitate the imperfections of real objects as perfectly hyperrealistic counterparts. A tool such as this can be seen as an objective entity, entirely composed of code.

But how is one’s personal ability to master this tool influencing its output?

I followed a popular Blender tutorial and quickly realized that an enormous amount of time is spent on making something small. This led me to more questions:

What can I achieve through this software within a time limit? Can I value its output if it is not hyperrealistic?

Through my iterations, I realized that just as I was trying to fully comprehend the rules and admire the rendered images, the process itself was revealing a lot of the shortcomings. The software was only as good as I could manipulate it to be. Although my iterations looked different from each other, they were bound by a set of movements and materials. When placed side by side, they told the story of someone’s inexpertness and also indicated a uniform level of effort invested. They also started from the same point – the Torus shape, which may have led to similar conclusions. I set myself certain constraints:

1. Each iteration would be done under 30 minutes
2. I would only use the steps I remembered from the Donut tutorial.

It became important for me to record my screen – almost as a parody of the sea of Youtube tutorials that exist. The iterations became more about which features stuck, which animations were the quickest to do, spontaneous artistic decisions, and becoming more comfortable with the software.