Form & Experience

We experience form through our senses , to experience this form knowing about this form is equally important . We cannot experience something we are not aware of but , things only exist because we can sense them. Senses play a major role in how we experience forms and spaces . Space changes how we look at things. Space has the ability to change and alter our experiences.

STAGE 1 

This stage of the module talks about how we experience space through our senses and how it goes hand-in-hand with representation of these feelings through drawings , where these drawings don't limit themselves to the stereotypical idea of drafting spaces but work on giving us an idea of we feel being in these spaces and these spaces affect us. 

Track 12

                     -J.G.Ballard

He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.

This is a part of a writing from author J.G,Ballard`s story called `Track 12` . Following this text I worked on developing drawings wh​ich where representative of the experience this text gave me..

INITIAL DRAWINGS

My initial drawings were about how I felt reading the text. These drawings represented the speakers and the narrator's experience in the text.

However they here became somewhat literal and illustrative where they lost sense of experience in them.

While exploring the sponginess of the sound which was in a natural form, I observed the slipperiness, the shimmer of the sound. where I reffred to a blob of flesh to get the sense of its form in my drawing. And at the same time how space gets generated/formed.

        THE FINAL DRAWING

STAGE 2

After making these drawings we thought of inhabiting these drawings, so we wrote texts which would give us a sense of being in the space created in our drawings.

These drawings were about how we would feel being in our drawing while using our bodies as instruments to experience these space. These texts were not literal translations of our drawings.

For me I thought of my drawing to be a series of these endless puddles where each one was different than the other. These puddles took me to various worlds and spaces. These endless puddles gave the reader a feeling of being stuck in a infinite loop of situations.

THE TEXT: 

What I could see wasn't really there, what was present wasn't seen, all I could see were ponds puddles voids cracks and hollows of randomness, each telling a different stor....zuppppp!!...down I went into a trench full of darkness, I was too stunned to speak...it took me a moment to realize what was happening... I groped around, trying to find my way out. Undulations inside the puddle acted like a staircase for me to get out of there . To make sure I don't fall back in there, I hopped away from the puddle. Hopping a few steps further I landed on a puddle which was pristine white, softer than  marshmallows , fluffy and densely packed. Keeping my foot on one of the marshmallows another one magically appeared below my foot and started moving . I closed my eyes and looked towards the sun , marshmallows caressing my checks as I moved forward...and tinggg was the sound heard when i fell on my face. The surface was stone cold. It was a large ice sheet , i could barely see where it ended . As I got up I slipped, but this time I went forward gushing! I swirled towards the end and was flushed into a puddle full of trees. It was densely packed with all sorts of flora and fauna insects and birds. A monkey came towards me grabbing my hand, he took me inside the forest by a waterfall . It appeared to be a mystical forest. As I pepped in the ruffling water, my reflection pulled me in. I fainted in fear. When I gained consciousness I was inside a deep hole full of quick sand, slowly taking me in, I threw my legs and arms around but it made things only worse a few minutes later only my hand was seen. The quick sand embraced me in. Drowning in, all I could see were infinite points in a never ending landscape, my body experienced a sudden gyration, faster than any rollercoaster I've been in, I was in the nucleus of a tornado .The wind came gushing in through my  ears nose and mouth. Draining every drop of water from me. That tornado threw my body miles away, the pain was bone cracking. A strong pinning smell pierced through my nose, everything around became sticky and stinky , things around got more slippery with every touch. I got some of that slime on my fingers too. My foot slipped into a deep hollow, my legs then normal, had now started to stretch like an elastic band. They were definitely longer than 10 feet!. I went slithering down the hollow, ouchh..thorns . Stabbing me from all four sides. With bare minimum movement, on top of my lungs I screamed and  cried in pain and anguish . The pain was so forceful, it opened portals to a new realm. The moment I passed through the portal, I was human again, only to find myself in a mirror maze. I saw hundreds..no..no.. thousands..no..no. but millions of me. I was exhausted, blood dripped and oozed through my bruised hands It took me 10 years to break all of those mirrors , but one survived shining and glowing golden. It would be rock solid when struck but became cheese soft when pinched. The mirror twisting g and turning looped my body. Its radiations grew brighter every second and blinding the next moment. Everything around was gold . It was the Midas's city of gold.  Every step produced a sonor sound sending vibrations throughout my body and soul. The place started to feel hot. In this golden yellow radiant land, I saw a flaming hot fire, blazing and swallowing everything around.  

While writing these texts we also designed prosthetics and enclosures which would help us inhabit the spaces we had created.

I took the idea of these endless multilayered puddles from my drawing and text and compared it to an ant colony. Hence creating this enclosure.

We were making/putting together acts which would represent our movement and interaction within these spaces. 

The act we were setting up was about being stuck in this very gooey stick and elastic medium. We used our bodies as instruments to inhabit and create the desired space.

Along with designing these acts and enclosures we were also developing costumes/prosthetics to inhabit the spaces.

The initial costumes we made were using cycle tubes, these were crude in terms of design, and the material did not respond well since it did not stretch after a point.

So we used woven elastic which had the perfect amount of stretch and strength required. Later on we stitched these elastics to our clothes , making it easier for us to wear them each time.

Our act was about being stuck in a medium which is endless, it keeps pulling you in while you try to get out of it. Its gooey and elastic nature makes it impossible to break out of.

The space here formed through all the interconnecting elastics we had . The line between the medium and body had blurred,  while there where times where we acted as foreign bodies in a medium , we at times became the medium we were stuck in.

The Final Costume

In the end our class had put together a play where all the groups  merged into one and we hand an almost 30 minutes long performance . 

This act took us to various world , each with a different story , where spaces defied logic and the idea of normal never existed .