Activated sculpture : Invitation and discovery, fit and flow

In this studio we will explore the hands-on skills, tools, and dynamic process of transforming organic natural materials into choreographed sculpture objects and affordance based interactive design. 

Getting our hands dirty, and engaging our bodies, the studio offers an immersion into the physical actions of directly shaping materials found in nature, such as wood and stone into tactile and active sculptural objects. We will work from our own direct personal experiences in contact with artworks, as well as considering both contemporary and historic art and technological references. 

We will take intensified focus on how the craft and rigors of taking a project through the final stages of finishing, with an eye toward extending the time and ways people will interact with it. We will work in the non-digital wood and stone carving and shaping techniques (digital in the definition of fingers as digits) of the hand making process. We will be considering also how the strengths of both hand and computer techniques interconnect and work to benefit each other effecting final use and adding meaning though-out the entire making process. 

Physical Goals:

• Create a fully finished, tactile, and meaningful sculpture work carved in wood or stone.
• Create a project with these new processes and techniques that includes an additional interactive dynamic.
• Relate drawing in 3d to drawing objects in the analog hand process.
• Explore creative movement excercise as a method of generating ideas, gathering from our personal experience, and also taking constructive breaks.
• Introduce precedents of artworks and natural forces and phenomena relating to our course activities.
• Direct development of physical relationship to sculptural objects through field trips and tactile research.
• Creating studio set-ups for working with water and dust.
• Sourcing and working found materials.

Conceptual Goals:

• Explore how material choices, tactility, and the traces of nature in organic materials create meaning.
• How to develop and lengthen attention span... in both the action of craft and final finished work.
• How does craft itself read as time, and invite extended time with a piece?
• Working towards embodiment over illustration
• Increasing connection with nature and the Environment
• Forward and backward, additive and subtractive processes and connection with both old and new technologies.