Mentor Review: Joel Swanson

Joel Swanson is a professor in the Altas program as well as a digital artist and designer. I thought he would be a great faculty member to give advice on my project, as it relates to art and design. I met with Joel via Zoom to talk about the 'why' behind my project. He had seen my presentation at the end of last semester, so had a rough idea of what my concept was. I described my project as creating organic forms though computational design, a way of creating something that looks as if it was grown, rather than built. I also talked about how I had originally titled my project Not Art, as a sort of reaction against both modern art and engineering. My original idea was that something that was optimized for some set of constraints was really more like engineering design than art, and yet it still created forms that were aesthetically pleasing. So then if that form was used in a context where the thing it was optimized for was irrelevant, and only the aesthetic form was important, did that make it art? or design? As we were discussing this, Joel pointed out that calling a project 'art' leads it to be interpreted in a certain way. It implies that there is some kind of meaning or concept that the art is trying to convey rather than just being an interesting form. He encouraged me to think about my project less as an art piece and more as a design exploration. It's a new way to use 3d printing and computational design to make an organic looking light. It doesn't have to take a grand stance in the art world. After establishing this, we talked about my plan to use Arduino controlled LED lights as the light source. He was questioning what role the LED light animations actually played in my project. And I didn't really have an answer for him The more we discussed it, the more I started to realize that the important part of my project is the form of the lamp itself, and that the LEDs weren't actually adding very much to the project conceptually. He recommended refining my design and using a simple light bulb. That way the form of my design would show through better. Also LEDs don't have great light quality compared to an actual bulb, so the project would function better as a lamp with the bulb rather than the LEDs.