Models, Simple Environments Model Making Basics in Scenography and Exhibition Design
winter semester 2023/24
supervision: Philipp Schell
Participants: Leyla Tavas, Julia Heinze, Philipp Kern, Jiayu Liu, Emily Hugger, Ruby Richter, Birke Beyer, Laura Waterstradt, Bettina Bessenyei, Peter Oellerich, Sarah Elena Kratzl, Yunsung Lee, Lorena Karn
Support: Julian Kuf, Vera Gärtner, Mark, Alexander Knoppik
Models are essential tools for giving shape to spatial ideas and translating them into a haptic experience. Claude Lévi-Strauss already identified in every work of art a kind of „scaled-down model" of something else, which reduces its totality and allows it to be captured at a glance, understood and held in the hand. But instead of being mere representations of final projects, models can also be understood as projection or working tools with a speculative character.
When opening a new project, CAD software often have a reference figure as a starting point, standing alone in the endless digital space. In this basic course we developed spatial concepts and models of simple environments for such „default objects“.
The term „simple environment“ is borrowed from a 1984 scientific paper in which four scientists developed a model for comparing rendering software results with real environments. They designed and built the so called „Cornell Box“, both digital and physical, in order to simulate and prove light reflections correctly. In the beginning we built such Cornell Boxes which served as a display for the final spatial models and where interpreted in different scales. Part of the exercise was also to find real heterotopian locations within the city of Karlsruhe associated with the default objects and to analyze them. Such observations informed the designs of the models of the environments.
The seminar was organized around a weekly structure in which we developed and tried out techniques of model making, which were presented and documented in a small exhibition at the end of the semester within the Big Studio at HfG. Part of the seminar was also a two-day excursion to Munich at the beginning of the semester, where we visited the exhibition „Inside Other Spaces“ at Haus der Kunst München, showcasing radical environments of the 60s and 70s in the scale of 1:1.
https://softcopy.hfg-karlsruhe.de/ModelsSimpleEnvironments/ModelsSimpleEnvironments.html
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