Modular Madness Self Critique

The materials I used for my modular madness project were Snapple bottles and caps. The form ended up looking like some kind of chapel or shower type thing. I don't think the same meaning of the piece could have been achieved with anything else because I wanted to emphasis the facts on the caps and use them to draw people into it. I think the fact that each cap had a scientific fact on it yet the end product looked like a chapel was interesting. The only difficulty with the materials was the fact that bottles don't want to be anything but bottles and I had to work around that. Also the fact that the bottles were made of glass presented a problem because I was afraid I or someone else was going to knock over the piece and destroy it, so I worried about it when I was and wasn't at the WASH building.

I feel like the project was ambitious because of the frailty of the objects. Also the height of the piece was a little ambitious i felt because it was taller than me by just a little bit and it turned out taller than I had originally planned. My original idea was the build the piece purely out of Snapple caps, but I decided that they wouldn't be stable enough and wouldn't meet the height requirement I had set for myself. The initial piece wasn't more ambitious because the size would have been smaller and less fragile also I don't think it would have achieved the same meaning.

I had originally started putting the piece together with epoxy, but if i had used it on the bottles I would have had to move the piece in and out of the building. This wouldn't have been wise, so I decided to use hot glue. I feel that the glue wasn't exactly noticeable due to its transparency and it didn't really detract from the piece. I had a few places where the bottles didn't line up right, so I had to improvise. I didn't discover a better way to glue them together until the very end of the project.

I feel like the dominant formal elements in the piece are line, point, shape, and space because each column created a line that came to a point at the end. The shape was smooth all around yet it seemed kind of geometric. The bottles created negative space. The dominating principles were repetition, balance, and continuance.

The piece is chapel like in form and it almost seems like a place of meditation. This is kind of amplified because the "facts of life" kind of surround you if you were to sit in the space. I put it where it was because I wanted it to be viewed from all sides. It  could have been moved over slightly. The piece may be transparent, but it ignored the pieces around it because your eye is so focused on the little facts and the Snapple colors and such. Perhaps I could have left some of the bottles filled, but that might have created weight issues or even worse problems if some one had knocked it over.