“And after all, I thought, what kind of Sunday is a Sunday where you pour gallons of coffee down a bottomless coffee cup?
I have reasons to suspect not a regular one.”
I was asked:
Create two separate but relating pieces on your own thoughts and feelings about limitations and rules within a creative context.
Comply to the set of rules listed below.
Write a few lines about the experience doing the brief and your feelings on the subject.
Rules:
The piece for the magazine has to be A4.
The piece for the exhibition has to be any A format except for A4.
Both pieces have to be in Black and White (grayscale).
You can team up but to a maximum of two people.
You can not spend more than 4 days working on this brief.
Set yourself an additional 2 rules that you have to follow and include these in your writing.
The first additional rule was to produce something three dimensional, since this is the terrain I feel more comfortable working into lately.
The second additional rule was to present objects that followed the rules of common sense, mixed with my personal understanding of it.
Once I clarified these points everything started to work smoother.
I thought about my relationship with rules and constraints and I came to the conclusion that I actually liked them. The starting point for all this was the sentence “I like rules. Not having them makes my days feel like if it was always Sunday, and if everyday is like Sunday then Sunday isn’t Sunday anymore”.
With such confusion I embarked in this journey, and I have to admit that angst struck me more than once, let alone the way my relation with weekdays evolved. And what did I think about Sunday after all? One fine morning, dozing in front of a coffee, I understood that rules or not rules, it was time to put my act together and forget about all these problems between me and my perception of days. Thus I set off starting with the following point.
Rules, arguably, are intended to make sense to most people most of the times, apart from few, many exceptions.
And of course this is not a safe point, but it is a starting one. So, if rules most of the times followed common sense, what would it happen if my common sense was peculiar rather than common?
I figured out that rules in design, especially 3D objects, excluded my all too personal vision of the problem. What followed was the production of a paper bag that although appeared to fulfill its primary function (containing and carrying something) at the same time invited (or rather instigated) to get rid with your own hands of that very characteristic cutting along a perforated line. This way the bag turns from being an object following the standard rules dictated by the common use of the object into an object following the standard rules with a vengeance: the possibility to turn it, at pleasure, into a personal, megalomaniac vision of uselessness. With the exhibition piece I followed this principle to the very end, and I got myself a beautifully crafted bottomless coffee cup. And after all, I thought, what kind of Sunday is a Sunday where you pour gallons of coffee down a bottomless coffee cup? I have reasons to suspect not a regular one.
The bottomless coffee cup
Shopping bag trying to look clever