Author: AdamWojtowicz

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Course Summary – Adam Wojtowicz

 

For me, this course dissolved the boundaries of the senses. Here I map the relationships revealed between the senses. The Bouba Kiki effect that gives form to sound, or how music invokes colour. How the directionality and temperature and intensity of light can invoke textures from a distance. That taste, the mother of all senses, the first of our experiences in this world blends, in fact, all five together. And then, the outlier and most sensitive of the senses (only 5 molecules to trigger a nerve): Smell. I drew smell as a poche line that runs through all five as it bridges the senses through memory.

 

This gave rise to an image in reaction to DaVinci’s rationalist icon of western civilization, the Vitruvian man.

 

I instead, drew the Sensorial Vitruvian. Not just thinking, but feeling. Not just measuring, but sensing. Not just living, but being.

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A 10 – Taste

I found this incredible snakefruit, or Salak, or Salacca zalacca. Native to java, this fruit had an incredibly spikey texture that made look as if it was floating. The spikiness seemed to enhance the distinct muskiness of the fruit’s smell  was: musky, sweet, floral, pungent, sacherine, umami with a finish of banana, cinnemon, rose, leather and persimmon.

The outside was hollow, spikey, brittle. The inside of the husk was slimey, oily, fibrous and sticky.

In order to understand the spikiness of the shell, I decided to look at it under a botany microscope

The outside spikes have a mid-ridge that creates a kind of tinny-feeling structure to the spikes.

The inside of the shell was layers of waxy, fibrous material.

 

I drank a cup of green tea and tried to describe the spatial relationship between the taste and smell of the tea as it cooled using the cube method.

 

I tried to eat a delicious almond croissant (and somehow got so hungry that I forgot to photograph it).  This resulted in a drawing to describe how the softness of the bread bridged the crunchiness of the almond and the stickiness of the marzipan.

Finally I tried three weird and not so delicious macrons. One was bacon, one was fig balsamic, and the final was pear passion fruit and elder flower. I would describe all three as gross, and perhaps the least interesting of the experiments i did into taste. Over-all i found the texture across all three identical (of course) and the flavor overpowering. It was also the last of my investigations, and likely I was too tuned in to the details of my tastebuds for such a candy-like cookie!

  

 

I started designing for the taste of coffee…

But I didn’t like the way that the taste analysis visualized. it didn’t really invoke any formal design, so a srated again, with what was once my favourite indulgent drink: Diet Orange Crush.

I used to love this stuff, until I got a horrible stomach virus. Now i can barely handle it. The taste of aspartame when this stuff comes up has scarred me for life.  So I tried to design a vessel that would allow for minimal traumatic barf memory.

         

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A 9 – Smell Notes

These wonderful Actaea racemosa at my parking spot smelled like synthetic grape, one of the strongest pockets of smells on this cool, overcast autumn day.  I could smell it from five full paces away.

When i got to the beach, I wanted to investigate the mixing of the sea rocks, which had a briny, faintly fishy smell, the woody debris which had the musky, warm scent of decomposing conifers, and the cold, and slightly floral scent coming off of the granite seawall.

 

So I drew what I smelled in section with oil pastel and then used my finger to imply the directionality of the mixing airflows.

 

Then I noticed hippo was checking out a stump. Inspired by the warm spicey musk of the wood I had just smelled, I went to sniff what Hippo was sniffing and see the world in his way. Turns out it wasn’t wood he was smelling, it was definitely urine. Tangy, acrid, wet, amonia with something that reminded me of turned meat.

We stopped by a memorial, where I noted that the airflow of the space created a microclimate in which visitors could smell each other. As empathy is partially transmitted through body odor ( see de Groot, Jasper H. B., et al. “On the Communicative Function of Body Odors: A Theoretical Integration and Review.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 12, no. 2, 2017, pp. 306–24. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48591546. ) I thought this was a clever design move activating the vegetation and topography to this end. 

I also tried smelling a tree to track the decay of scent over time. I wanted to try visuallizing in quanta the preceptual experience. I find this method maybe less evocative than the impressionistic approach.

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A 8 – Windplay

Tuning In

I sat in Tea Swamp Park, which has a beautiful mature arbor of multiple kinds of persistent winter fruit. There are a lot of song birds that flit between the trees and the community garden, however, this site is wedged between two different construction sites and the busy traffic along 16th avenue.

I tried to draw the sounds using linework to express each instance of the chop saw, each blaring of the security alarm. the echo of the hammer and the doppler effect of the traffic beyond.

Wind Play

Across the street from Teaswamp Park, there is a building going up that has been pumping ground water out of the site continuously for six months (really). When they pulled down the church that stood across the street, the construction exposed the old piles that the original houses before the church used as foundations because this was a peat bog.

Peat bogs are particular ecologies that have a specific hydrological requirement. They both shed a lot of water and received a lot of water.

I thought a kind of aeolian pan flute might be a nice addition to the noise at Teaswamp Park. This initial sketch was exploring the relationships between the pipe depth, water levels and resonating lengths of the aeolian flute.  These would be long brass tubes installed to the same depth across three typical heights of the topography of the park. When the wind is blowing and there is no birdsong to mix with the anthropogenic noise of construction and traffic, then there would be these tubes, vibrating as the wind cuts across them, in harmony with each other, and the note would be set by the level of the groundwater, celebrating the undergrounded hydrological history of the site. 

 

 

This was my initial thought when sitting in the park.

 

Then I went home and thought about the beautiful canopy of the arbor that I drew in assignment 1. People sit under this arbour all summer long, where it is a good 10 degrees cooler than the open field.

Using trace, thread and scissors, to keep the profiles as simple as possible, i thought about two simple moves to create a spinner to hanging in the canopy of the arbor, as a marker of the airflow boundaries that keep the cool air under the canopy

 

 

 

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A 7 – Movement

Skateboard as Sensory Device

 

The Site

 

This is an alley I love to skate for it’s fun mixture of textures and heaved surfaces. I particularly like hitting the metal cover to the buried electrical. It feels like electricity.

 

The Media

I am riding independent trucks (stiff, wide axil, not loose and squirrely) on spitfire 99a wheels (hard, not gummy). My skate shoes were Globe, reasonably cushy.

When you skateboard, you see the terrain under your feet. It lives in my mind like a glowing trail. I wanted to try giving the things that I see with my feet form and colour.

 

 

The Textures

 

 

The Result (scroll down for a ride)

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A 6 – Tactile, Body, Space

Sighted Touch Investigation:

First I lead my partner, blindfolded into a 3-storey high covered courtyard, and deliberately sat him on a bench that was 2 inches too high. With his feet dangling, I documented the space:

Then I took him to a bench that was 2 inches too short, with an overgrown woody planting looming from behind.

Blind Folded Touch Investigation:

My partner lead me by the arm to the space. Even through the jacket, I am sensitive to the touch of another human being, especially another man. Even though I know I am safe, I am on alert.

I know that we are in the orchard commons. My 32 year-long develloped internal map of UBC is inescapable. It’s the same 3d model that lives in my dreams. It’s a physical conceptual space.

Drawing from the blindfolded drawing exercise, I tried to use my senses to draw the sensation through form as I would use shade values on paper to draw form, but this time at a scale far beyond the palm of my hand. This ventured into the diagrammatic,  and scaled between 1:100 ish and 1:500 ish.  This made me wonder what the spatial limits of human sensory perception are…

 

At Home Exercise:

As I was writing it became clear that sensing the environment included an emotional overlay… and though it presents itself as “reading the marks left by others”, I realized this was actually a way of reading the self I projected into the marks left by others. Much in the way that when we dream of another person, it is not in fact that person entering our dreams, but rather the part of ourselves that this person represents. In this sense, the textured experience through sight is about an extension of self into the environment.

 

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A 5 – Using our Hands – Adam Wojtowicz

A map of numbness on my dominant hand due to a traumatic injury. I use to love drawing, and stopped after this injury because the pins and needles was too triggering emotionally,  and my line had became alien to me.

 

Drawing blindfolded, I immediately knew that I had a string of pearls. So I started with a zoomed in drawing of the clasp, trying to understand the details of the mechanism. Then I tried to draw the pearls resting in the palm of my hand. I tried to draw the motion of thumbing the pearls through my hand like a rosary.

Then i tried to draw the sensation of the pearls at my palm as one might draw the dark values of an object in order to define its form.

When I went to draw the pearls sited after the touch experiment, I thought to draw the dark values, rather than the perimeter of the pearls.

 

At a family dinner, i was given two objects: a half-glazed teracotta sombraro (souvenier?) from Mexico was the first object. No idea what it was. I tried to capture the form and the transition between the two surfaces: glazed and unglazed. I attempted a section, and tried to understand the geometry of the embossed writing, which said “MEXICO” in block letters.

The second ojbect was a pinapple, which i tried to draw from above and below as well as in elevation. Again, i tried to use the sense of touch  of my left hand to define the form of the object.

This was an attempt at drawing an object by touch while having a sighted paper. Seemed less about the form of the object, and it became all of a sudden an exercise, once again, about line.

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A 3 – Mapping – Adam Wojtowicz

 

First I mapped the movement of pedestrians, noting that the people climbing the hill on site tended to take the center of the path, and stairs were preferentially used for descent .

I then wanted to zoom in and map something in an extremely small scale, so I looked at the edge between the lawn and the pollinator meadow.

At home I mapped the triadic relationship between airflow, evapotranspiration and reflected heat across the threshold of these two planting schema.

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