Charlotte
Can Blog
Charlotte Westburg's 4D design blog
IDENTITY
Is our identity in the vibe we give off?
This movement, in my four-part exploration on identity, was the spring board for the rest of the pieces. About a month ago, I went to Mexico to visit my boyfriend. While I was there him and I, along with all his friends, got into an involved conversation about what a vibe is and whether it exists. My contribution to this conversation was that scientists have been able to make the electromagnetic waves of plants into audible outputs that create music. Each plant has a vibe which can be characterized by its music. I represented this concept by treating my plant like a literal capsule for music: a vinyl record. The needle left little punctures in the leaf but no sound was detected. You could hear the scratching of the turntable against it.
For the portion of the assignment that asked us to draw on an object, I created the above image. I drew a COVID world map onto the main light source in my room. Admittedly, I was feeling very angsty at the moment this idea was formed. I had spent hours cooped up in my room and had missed almost the entirety of the day. This meant I noticed, like a frog in slowly boiling water, that my room had, at some point, become too dark for functioning and I flipped on my brightest lamp. It didn't feel bright enough. I think the assessment was mostly emotional, I started to consider how life post- COVID-19 outbreak had, in some aspects, seemed dimmer. This is when I decided to impose a map of the COVID outbreak onto the lamp as a way to materialize that mental reality. By drawing this map, I was effectively dimming the amount of light the lamp could emit. I was also tainting the hue it cast. It paralleled my mentality towards the state of the world at that time. It was therapeutic and I found it helped me move on in some ways.
Jesse Darling, Untitled
Karl Haendel, How long will it be until I'm forgotten>
Here I was inspired by the connection made between humanity and the natural world- specifically between humans and plants. The simplicity of this drawing gave me some type of release to be more playful and less concerned with being technically advanced in my mark making.
The rapid-fire questioning from this piece was similar to the questions that rose within me while I was working on this project. Here, I found it intriguing that the questions themselves was the art.