Coming out of Quarters, we felt empowered by the positive response from the faculty about our prototypes so far. However, it was clear to the four of us, and to our advisors, that we were struggling. This first phase of the semester is our ideation phase and we were stalling on new ideas; the two ideas we had prototyped were the ideas we brought into the semester from our pitch. We had ideas but they felt out of place and didn’t have the same grandeur as the other projects. Moreover, the faculty was telling us that they were hearing different directions whenever they spoke with different members of the group. There was something wrong, but we couldn’t identify it precisely.

Concurrently, we were looking ahead to fabrication and had planned a meeting with a professor from the ArtFab facility on main campus. We had anticipated speaking with him about fabrication but the aforementioned issue quickly came to a head. Being a professor in the School of Art, he immediately articulated the gaps in our project, providing us with both insights and references to other artists. It became abundantly clear to us that we would have to define our artist statement.

Anisha led the charge, sharing artist portfolios, videos, and statements with us. In our group, she is the only one with an artistic background and that has proven to be invaluable as we turn our attention toward artistic self-examination. Meanwhile, Elwin dug into the interactions that the jar could have, exploring the mechanics it could have to provide for our experience. As mentioned last week, we were having technical issues with the recording and Jason has been pushing ahead on that trying to clean up the audio. His technological success this week was successfully recording audio onto an SD card through his circuit.

Shifting Gears and Looking Forward
The artist statement is crucial for us to move forward because it will harmonize the way the four of us think about the project. We identified themes for the project in the pitch phase but we’ve left them vague and thus each of us interpreted them differently and prioritized them differently. Along with the statement, we’re also changing our path leading to halves. Instead of prototyping four different installations, we’re going to spend the rest of the time until halves just coming up with ideas. Our advisor, Ruth, pointed out that we’ve proven we have the capabilities to manufacture and there is no doubt there. At this point, we should be focused on ideas, perhaps spending one week per idea to really flesh them out.

Current Challenge
As previously discussed, our challenge this week has been team identity. The advisors noticed a difference in our enthusiasm between when we pitched the project and now. We’ve spent time this week deconstructing our themes in the context of what we currently want to explore, and we are getting closer to a specific wording for our artist statement.