Visit to the V and A

First Lesson

You may be familiar with this fun kids game, you start by fold up a piece of paper, usually into 3 sections or into sections equal to the number of people playing. Each person then draws what ever comes to mind; human, animal, cartoon, alien, real or fictional. The first person starts with the head, then passes the paper to a friend who draws the body of anything without  looking at what the previous person has drawn, the outcome is usually a ridiculously funny creature. As a warm up, to get us thinking about our briefs we put ourselves in groups of 5 and played this game and created Five amusing hybrids. So that our creations weren't completely random we first named our creations by each writing down a noun, an adjective and a verb and putting them into piles. We each picked  3 one from each pile and whatever we got we wrote at the bottom of the paper.

Heavenly Doodling Buddha

The first one came out looking quite spiritual. My favourite part are the angel wings attached to the head, making this creature look like a cross between human and bird. The skinny crippling legs of the creature contrast with his muscular torso making it look very entertaining. This could be improved by adding colour and by adding more detail to the background.

London Lively Jumping

I love the head of this hybrid as it makes the whole piece look very animated. The creature follows the theme of London, for example the head is a drawing of Big Ben, and there is drawings of the London sky line in the middle. The feet are comical and represent a kangaroo as the verb was jumping.

Screaming Stretching Jellyfish

This was by far one of my most favourite outcomes. When we revealed the finished creature, by unraveling the folded paper everyone burst out laughing. This cute underwater scene of a jellyfish stretching and screaming while other sea creatures stop and stare made my day. We could have improved this by adding a bit more colour to make the outlines more clear. However our peers also really enjoyed this outcome when it was time to present our work, it got the best feed back.

Healing Sweets F*!?ing Amazing

This peace is all about sweets, the hybrid hear looks as if it is the product of human and sweet coming together, the sweets all have human personalities and features. The candles are there to symbolise the healing power of these magical sweets and it is generally F****ing Amazing.

Quietly Unique Priest

The name of this piece is well suited as this is definitely the most unit priest I have ever seen

The queen B

unraveling the paper was my favourite part

A New Hybridity: Brief

Today I received my new project brief... how exciting! The tutors at London Collage of Communication- part of ual, have come up with an interesting and thought provoking proposal and I have three weeks to come up with an outcome to present to my uni. I am required to create 10 hybrids, provide names or classifications for them and present them to a professional standard. I have decided the format of my final piece will be 3D design. the brief contains examples that should influence and enspire my ideas:

'Cabinet of curiosity'
Popular during the 17th century, they where the personal collection of wealthy individuals. The objects where both natural and man made object from strange far awe places. Each object in the collection would have been optioned during a voyage and would be represented as a trophy that the proud owner would show of to his/her guests symbol of the owners wealth, as well as they briery during the ships exploration, the more extravagant the pieces the richer the man who owned them. The main function of the cabinets was to provoke a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer.

The first thing that came to mind was Pandoras box. I thought about how the Greek Myth describes a box that provoked curiosity in Pandora and was said to contained the worlds secrets, similar to the concept of 'Cabinet of curiosity'. After, I thought about how I could represent my final 10 outcomes, taking inspiration from Pandoras box and the 'cabinet of curiosity'. Firstly I thought about containing the 10 hybrids in a box, however I thought this would be to constricting and wouldn't be a good use of space. A good idea would be to incorporate a box in my piece that could possibly be decorated with jules to hyten curiosity and then have the ten hybrids hanging out of the box as if they are escaping. I then thought about what my hybrids could look like.

This made me think about Greek mythology and how most of the stories contain hybrids, for example a Centuar- half human, half horse; Faun- half man, half goat; Harpy- half woman half bird. I will make this a point of research as this topic interests me. Greek  Mythology is also mentioned in my brief which says 'Psycologically, humans formulate supernatural creations within the gaps in language.' this gave me the idea to look at something that is both unknown and creepy... and whats more creepy than a new bread of insects that have been cross bread with human features. The insect world has been highly unexplored and there are thousands if not millions of spices that have been yet to discover so this could add to the curiosity of the viewer. I will keep the scale small as I have a limited amount of time this will also allow me to make them look more realistic if my creations are small in size.

Typology
Typology is the classification of things according to their characteristics. According to Ian Noble, Typology is -"The study and interpretation of types- for instance, a person, thing or event that serves as an illustration or is symbolic or characteristic of something. the phrase also relates to the organisation of types and their classifications for the purpose of analysis." I have been asked to name my creations and classify them into groups, In order to do this to a professional standard so that the names don't sound completely ridiculous and made up 10 minutes before my final presentation, I will research the Binomial nomenclature. This is the formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name of two parts, the first name is the genus and the second name identifies the species in the genus. The name is in Latin although they can be based on words from other languages.  Carl Linnaeus invented the modern system of Binomial nomenclature, I will do further research on him later on.

Genetic engineering
As I read through the brief for the first time one of the many things that crossed my mind is Genetic engineering, and how we live in a modern day wold driven by technology. As humans we strive to create things with desirable characteristics that benefit us, for example testing cosmetics and medicine, increasing food production or simply for entertainment and personal use. We are in a modern age where we can take apart an animals DNA and extract useful genes to crete a new bread of animal with desirable characteristics. I want to create a piece that makes the viewer question the extent of genetic engineering.