Friday, December 7, 2012

Summary


Summary 

From my Research I have discovered several things. I really enjoyed all of Andrea Zittel’s works. I had originally picked her for two reasons. One, her name was also Andrea, and two I saw some of the furniture that she has created and really liked it. I respect the fact that she does her artwork in order to better the world and make it more useful. She attempts to make living every day life easier by her creations. She is also a very accomplished artist as well. She has been a part of over a hundred exhibits and won several awards.
What I have found is that her main focus is on A-Z West and A-Z East. A-Z West is located on thirty-five acres in the California high desert next to Joshua Tree National Park.  Since it's inception in fall 2000, A-Z West has been undergoing an ongoing conversion into our testing grounds for "A-Z designs for living". Current structures and projects include our two original homestead cabins that serve as Zittel's primary residence and guest house, a studio/shop facility, a shipping container compound, Regenerating Field, and the Wagon Station Encampment.  This desert region originally appealed to Zittel because it seemed that one could "do anything here" - which she later learned isn't exactly true! (For more about this read about the AZ Homestead Unit and the AZ Wagon Stations).
A-Z West is also the historical site of the five-acre Homestead Act. In the 1940s and 50s legislation gave people 5 acres of land for free if they could improve it by building a minimal structure. The result is a seemingly infinite grid system of dirt roads that cuts up a very beautiful desert region. In the middle of each perfect square of land is a tiny shack - most of them long since abandoned. The area and its history represent a very poignant clash of human idealism, the harshness of the desert climate and the vast distances that it places in between people.  
The AZ Enterprise first took root in 1991 in a tiny 200 square foot storefront on South 8th Street in Brooklyn New York.  In January of 1994 the project migrated to a small three story row house with a ground level storefront at 150 Wythe Avenue. Wares and prototypes rotated in and out of the space as Zittel’s experiments evolved, the storefront serving as both a showroom and a test site.  In 1996 and 1997 the A- Z Personal Presentation Room opened to the public for Thursday Evening Personal Presentations at A-Z East. These cocktail parties facilitated socialization amongst Zittel’s Brooklyn community of artists and neighbors, alleviating the absence of intimacy and familiarity in metropolitan life. 
Earlier in the twentieth century, the Wythe Avenue space had served as a storefront business with a home upstairs that sheltered three generations. An awareness of this history led Zittel to conceive of the space as an arena of both professional and personal interactions, where the sleeping arrangements and furniture (A-Z Bofa, Ottoman Furniture, Pit Bed, and Platform Bed, among others she designed) would inspire socialization as well as private retreat. 
The sense of community fostered among the participants in the A-Z lifestyle experiments and gatherings spurred the creation of the A-Z Personal Profiles Newsletter (1996-1997). Zittel invited those who used her furniture to provide testimonials in this newsletter and also profiled new retypes in development. The expanded following of A-Z East, fueled solutions to the new problems created by this ongoing social activity.  
Her fascination with furniture has inspired her to create several interesting pieces for everyday use that can be found at both of these sites. 

http://www.zittel.org/az-east.php?a_id=4
http://www.zittel.org/az-west.php?a_id=3
Posted by at No comments:

Introduction


Introduction

Andrea Zittel was born in 1965. She has been described as a relational artist, American Sculpter, and installation artist.Her pieces intermingle real life and art and can be seen through her home and her clothing. In the early 1990s, Andrea Zittel began making art in response to her own surroundings and daily routines, creating functional objects that fulfilled the artist’s needs relating to shelter, food, furniture, and clothing. Blurring the lines between life and art, Zittel’s projects extend to her own home and wardrobe. While some of her modernist-inspired products were designed with the intention of making daily routines easy and efficient, others, such as the pod-like “Escape Vehicles,” appealed to fantasies of isolating oneself from the outside world. I choose her because of her wide variety of mediums and artwork. She has created everything from Mobile homes to clothing. Andrea lives and works in Joshua Tree, CA. Zittel teaches at Columbia University in New York and the University of Southern California. Andrea Zittel began thinking about sustainable, economical living well before there were dozens of magazines and publications dedicated to recycling the cardboard from toilet paper rolls and harvesting organic fruit.
In the early '90s, the California-born Zittel was a young artist living in typically small digs for a cash-strapped New Yorker -- 200 square feet. How could any financially challenged artist maximize such a small space, but also, Zittel thought, everything else that human beings need for daily living, including clothes, food and furniture? The American artist (who could also be described as an inventor, clothes and product designer, architect and life coach) has spent the past two decades developing solutions for an overcrowded, time-conscious, debilitating world. Since she set up her lifestyle solutions company-come-artistic identity, A-Z Administration in 1992, her custom-made designs have included everything from the A-Z Dishless Dining Table, doing away with washing up worries, to the A-Z Chamber Pot, relieving users of the trouble of plumbing. Building on the artist-as-designer model established by Bauhaus, Zittel takes an individualistic approach to utopian design. Rather than rolling out utilitarian products for the masses, she's gone about revolutionising lives with a view to independence and individualism. Her efforts to improve the world always begin with herself. For instance, her A-Z Personal Uniforms from 1992, an evolving clothes range largely consisting of pinafore dresses crafted in everything from crochet to wool-felt, were originally a response to the demands of looking presentable for a gallery job in New York's East Village, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Zittel first established A-Z in a Brooklyn store, using a corporate identity to forge a non-conformist path through the 1990s. In 1999, she moved back to her native California to create A-Z West, her current HQ in the Mojave Desert, a wilderness punctuated by eccentric, ramshackle dwellings. The first project she realised here in 2001 was her Homestead Unit, an example of the various shelters and structures for which she is best known. This simple geometric construction of steel and birchwood seems ideal for the hippies, drop-outs and freewheelers who've congregated in the area. Intended to exist off-radar, it's too small to require planning permission and easily packed up to suit the traveller life. Similarly resourceful, her sleeping module, the 2003 Wagon Station, a futuristic curved pod of steel and MDF, collapses the safety of the family station wagon with the frontiers spirit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/24/artist-andrea-zittel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Zittel
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/andrea-zittel
http://www.zittel.org
Posted by at No comments:

Table of Contents

Table of Contents:

Beginning of Blog to End

Beginning:
Short Background
Biography
Works
Lateral Research
Summary Statement
Introduction
End
Posted by at No comments:

What is a Gouache


Gouache

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gouache paints come in many colors and are usually mixed with water to achieve the desired working properties and to control the opacity when dry.
Gouache[p](/ɡuːˈæʃ/; French: [ˈɡwaʃ]), also spelled guache, is a type of paint consisting of pigment, a binding agent (usually gum arabic), and sometimes added inert material, designed to be used in an opaque method. It also refers to paintings that use this opaque method. The name derives from the Italianguazzo, and is also referred to as opaque watercolor or bodycolor (the term preferred by art historians).

[edit]
Gouache paint is similar to watercolor but modified to make it an opaque painting medium (non-transparent). A binding agent, usually gum arabic, is present, just as in watercolor. Gouache differs from watercolor in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, and an additional, inert, white pigment such as chalk is also present. This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities.[1] Gouache generally dries to a different value than it appears when wet (lighter tones generally dry darker, while darker tones tend to dry lighter), which can make it difficult to match colors over multiple painting sessions. Its quick coverage and total hiding power mean that gouache lends itself to more direct painting techniques than watercolor.[2] "En plein air" paintings take advantage of this, as do works of J.M.W. Turner and Victor Lensner. It is used most consistently by commercial artists for works such as posters, illustrations, comics, and for other design work. For example, comics illustrators like Alex Ross use mostly gouache for their work. Industrial Designer and Visual Futurist Syd Mead also works primarily in gouache. Most 20th-centuryanimations used it to create an opaque color on a cel with watercolor paint used for backgrounds, and gouache as "poster paint" is desirable for its speed and durability.Overview

As with all types of paint, gouache has been used on some unusual papers or surfaces.[3]
One variation of the medium is gouaches découpées created by Henri Matisse, cut paper collages. His Blue Nudes series is a good example of the technique.

[edit]History

"Guazzo" was originally a term applied to the early 16th century practice of applying oil paint over a tempera base.[4] The term was applied to the watermedia in the 18th century in France, although the technique is considerably older. It was used as early as the 14th century in Europe.

Posted by at No comments:

What is a Chamberpot?


Chamber pot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Potty" redirects here. For Georgian seaport, see Poti. For toilets in general, see toilet.


Ancient Greek child seat and chamber pot, early 6th century B.C., Ancient Agora Museum in Athens, housed in the Stoa of Attalus.
Japanese chamber pot from the Edo Period.

Japanese chamber pot, early 19th century. Unusual oval shape, lid missing.
A chamber pot (also a chamberpot, a jordan,[1] a jerry, a po (possibly from French: pot de chambre), a gazunder (likely a contraction of "goes under"), apiss pot, a potty, or a thunder pot) is a bowl-shaped container with a handle, and often a lid, kept in the bedroom under a bed or in the cabinet of a nightstandand generally used as a urinal at night. In Victorian times, some chamber pots would be built into a cabinet with a closable cover.

[edit]History

Chamber pots were used in ancient Greece at least since the 6th century BC and were known under different names: ἀμίς (amis),[2] οὐράνη (ouranē)[3] and οὐρητρίς (ourētris,[4] from οὖρον - ouron, "urine"[5]), and χερνίβιον (chernibion).[6]
The introduction of indoor toilets started to displace chamber pots in the 19th century but such pots were in common use until the mid-20th century.
Chamber pots continue in use today in countries lacking indoor plumbing such as rural areas of China, and have been redesigned as the bedpan for use with the very ill.
In North America and the UK, the affectionate term "potty" is often used when discussing the toilet with small children – such as during potty training. It is also usually used to refer to the small, toilet-shaped devices made especially for potty training, which are quite similar to chamber pots. These "potties" are generally a large plastic bowl with an ergonomically-designed back and front to protect against splashes. They may have a built-in handle or grasp at the back to allow emptying and a non-slip bottom to prevent the child from sliding while in use. Some are given bright colours such as pink, red, blue and purple (generally depending on the child's gender), and some sort of cartoon. In many cases they are used since it is difficult for children to get up onto the normal toilet; in addition the larger opening in the regular toilet is much too large for a child to sit over comfortably and not fall in without some type of aid. Their size means they can be discreetly packed away in a bag for days out or camping with young children, and can be placed near or under beds for sufferers of nocturia or some other form of incontinence.
In the Philippines, chamber pots are used as urinals and are commonly called "Arinola" in most Philippine languages, such as Tagalog and Cebuano.
In Korea, chamber pots are referred to as yogang (요강). They were commonly used by people who did not have indoor plumbing to avoid the cold elements during the winter months and are commonly used in North Korea to this day.

Posted by at No comments:

How to Make Clothing


making clothes visual


I’ve been talking about making your own clothes using flat patterns and darts and all this business.  Yes, a cut is required to make a flat pattern become three dimensional, but visualizing this often escapes me.  Once you get an eye for darts, seamlines and how they conspire to make a particular garment, then you are on your way to creative freedom in the realm of making clothes.
If you are a visual learner like myself, this picture will perhaps help you to visualize the process of making clothes:how to make clothes
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

how to make clothes

February 16, 2008
Many think that learning how to make clothes will be expensive, but this is not necessarily the case. Even though the amateur will make many mistakes, certain techniques makes the financial cost of these errors minimal. And the time you spend messing up and the correcting your mistakes will make you a superior designer.

Flat Patterns

The approach I take to learning how to make clothes is called the flat pattern method, and is the easiest and most fundamental of the three basic methods. Drafting (the first alternative) is highly technical, and draping is the more fluid and creative route. Draping is how dresses that are gathered and rippled like a Greek goddess are made, but knowledge of the use of patterns makes the transition to draping much easier. Check out this page from my blog for more information about different techniques.
The flat pattern method is based on the manipulation to the cuts and folds (called darts) needed to make a flat pattern curve and conform to a three dimensional body. I won’t go into the details of darts and pattern manipulation here, just the material setup one might use to cheaply and effectively implement designs.

What you will need

So, you will need a sewing machine. You will also need a pattern. You can buy a pattern from a store or scale it up from a book. At first you won’t even need fabric, just a roll of thin (tissue) paper large enough to trace your pattern onto.

What to do

The pattern can be traced onto this thin paper and then cut out. Rather than cutting the darts out, as one would do to a final garment, they can be simply folded for right now. This way, a model can wear your tissue paper mock up, the seams temporarily held by pins, and you can make adjustments. When a final design is reached, the darts on the paper mock up are marked and the new pattern is cut out of thin cardboard (not the type used for boxes, but the type resembling thick paper). This is called a sloper.

Why a sloper?

This way, you have a copy of a pattern you know to work well that will last for a long time. Also, a sloper is used to generate new patterns in the future. Check out this page of my blog about using a sloper.

And then came the fabric

Then, the beginner (and the experienced designer alike) will want to make a trial out of cloth, which will fit differently than tissue paper. I suggest using old sheets, which can usually be found around the house or bought cheaply. Even discounted new sheets are often cheaper than new fabric.
Cut the pattern out of the sheets. Make sure to leave excess for the seams! You can pin it up on a model again and see if any changes need to be made, and then sew it. I’ve actually seen many beautiful sun dresses that were made from recycled sheets, so you may consider this your final product. Though, you still have a sloper from which to make many more designs with the same fit.
Finally, you can safely move on to using a fabric bought from a store (or the internet). Embroider, face the edges, silk screen, add pockets and buttons, do whatever you like. Your clothes will fit you or your friends or children or clients like only custom clothing can.
web statistics
I think this process is part of a wonderfully affordable way to learn how to make clothes, and what you can create may surprise you.

 http://howtomakeclothes.wordpress.com
Posted by at No comments:

Deserted Island


Deserted Islands

A desert island or uninhabited island is an island that has yet to be (or is not currently) populated by humans. Uninhabited islands are often used in movies or stories about shipwrecked people, and are also used as stereotypes for the idea of "paradise". Some uninhabited islands are protected as nature reserves and some are privately owned. Devon Island in Canada is claimed to be the largest uninhabited island in the world.
Small coral atolls or islands usually have no source of fresh water, but at times a fresh water lens (Ghyben-Herzberg lens) can be reached with a well.

Terminology


One of the uninhabited islands inLakshadweep
In the phrase "desert island," the adjective "desert" connotes a "desolate and sparsely occupied or unoccupied" area and does not imply that the island was previously inhabited and later deserted.[1] The term "desert island" therefore typically refers to an undiscovered island.[2] Note that a desert island does not have to be a desert.

[edit]List of some currently uninhabited islands

[edit]In literature and popular culture

The first known novels to be set on a desert island were Philosophus Autodidactus written by Ibn Tufail (1105–1185), followed by Theologus Autodidactus written by Ibn al-Nafis (1213–1288). Theprotagonists in both (Hayy in Philosophus Autodidactus and Kamil in Theologus Autodidactus) are feral children living in seclusion on a deserted island, until they eventually come in contact withcastaways from the outside world who are stranded on the island. The story of Theologus Autodidactus, however, extends beyond the deserted island setting when the castaways take Kamil back tocivilization with them.[4]
William Shakespeare's 1610-11 play, The Tempest, uses the idea of being stranded on a desert island as a pretext for the action of the play. Prospero and his daughter Miranda are set adrift by Prospero's treacherous brother Antonio, seeking to become Duke of Milan, and Prospero in turn shipwrecks his brother and other men of sin onto the island.
A Latin translation of Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus appeared in 1671, prepared by Edward Pococke the Younger,[5][verification needed] followed by an English translation by Simon Ockley in 1708,[6]as well as German and Dutch translations.[7] In the late 17th century, Philosophus Autodidactus inspired Robert Boyle, an acquaintance of Pococke, to write his own philosophical novel set on a deserted island, The Aspiring Naturalist.[8] Ibn al-Nafis' Theologus Autodidactus was also eventually translated into English in the early 20th century.
The quintessential deserted island novel, however, was Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. It is likely that Defoe took inspiration for Crusoe from a Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who was rescued in 1709 after four years on the otherwise uninhabited Juan Fernández Islands; Defoe usually made use of current events for his plots. It is also likely that he was inspired by the Latin or English translations of Ibn Tufail's Philosophus Autodidactus.[5][7][9][10]
Tom Neale was a New Zealander who voluntarily spent 16 years in three sessions in the 1950s and 1960s living alone on the island of Suwarrow in the northern Cook Islands group. His time there is documented in his autobiography, An Island To Oneself. Significant novels set on deserted islands include The Swiss Family Robinson, The Coral Island, The Mysterious Island, Lord of the Flies, The Cay and The Beach.
The theme of being stranded on a desert island has inspired films, such as Cast Away, and TV series, like Lost and the comedy Gilligan's Island. It is also the driving force behind reality shows likeSurvivor and the Discovery Kids show Flight 29 Down.
In the popular conception, such islands are often located in the Pacific, tropical, uninhabited and usually uncharted. They are remote locales that offer escape and force people marooned or stranded ascastaways to become self-sufficient and essentially create a new society. This society can either be utopian, based on an ingenious re-creation of society's comforts (as in Swiss Family Robinson and, in a humorous form, Gilligan's Island) or a regression into savagery (the major theme of both Lord of the Flies and The Beach). In reality, small coral atolls or islands usually have no source of fresh water(thus precluding any long-term human survival), but at times a fresh water lens (Ghyben-Herzberg lens) can be reached with a well.
  • The BBC Radio 4 program Desert Island Discs asks well-known people what items they would take with them to a deserted island. The program has inspired many similar articles, contests, and projects, including "desert island books," "desert island movies," and so on.
  • A message in a bottle is a form of communication often associated with people stranded on a deserted island attempting to be rescued.
  • Desert islands also figure largely in sexual fantasies, with the top "dream vacation" for heterosexual men surveyed by Psychology Today being "marooned on a tropical island with several members of the opposite sex."[11]
  • A man on a deserted island is also a hugely popular image for gag cartoons, the island being conventionally depicted as just a few yards across with a single palm tree.

[edit]Historical castaways

See also: Castaway
One report describes a Frenchman who went mad after two years of solitude on Mauritius. He tore his clothing to pieces in a fit of madness brought on by a diet of nothing but raw turtles. Another story has to do with a Dutch seaman who was left alone on the island of Saint Helena as punishment. He fell into such despair that he disinterred the body of a buried comrade and set out to sea in the coffin. Another castaway, the Spaniard Pedro Serrano, was rescued after seven and a half years of solitude. In 1820, the crew of the whaleship, Essex, spent time on uninhabited Henderson Island where they gorged on birds, fish, and vegetation and found a small freshwater spring. After they depleted the island's resources most of the crew left on three whaleboats, while three of the men decided to remain on the island and ended up living there.


Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)