A DAY WITHOUT ART

Lost In Space: Robyn Baker

This week I built a website that explores the idea of being lost in space. The animated gifs, made from scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey, layer on top of one another as you progress through the site, creating the feeling of losing a place of origin or relativity to other things within space. The site exists as an allegory for one of the warnings in Kubrick’s film about the idea of technological development and dependency as dangerous; that  advancement can end in destruction.

See it here.

9.12.62

I refined my topic for my senior thesis this week. I am now investigating how our fetishism with outer space informs our vision of utopia, and how this is a dangerous investment of interest that has always ended in destruction.

For this project, I made a zine that explores the colonial and ominous backdrop behind the USA’s position in the space race by using excerpts from JFK’s speech about space exploration at Rice University in 1962, and formatting them like utalitarian propaganda posters.

-Robyn

IN RESPONSE TO THE REJECTION OF PROP 19 : BY STEPHANIE & ROBYN

We chose to respond to the rejection of prop 19 which proposed to legalize marijuana. The results were 46% to 54% in favor of the prop to not pass. We discussed and decided that the aftermath is not that impacting.  Sure, the crop would bring in millions of dollars to help our economy, but at the end of the day, pot heads will still be pot heads and they'll smoke the stuff regardless of whether or not it's legal. In the truth of the matter, most people who believe pot should be legalized are more in favor of the way it makes them feel rather than to save the economy and within this event this same population probably got too high to get to the poles to vote.

We wanted to speak the language of that population and got influence from rolling paper packaging and some psychedelia. The entire poster is hand drawn by the both of us and is 22 x 34 inches.

'Cap'italist: Robyn's Trash Typography

I created the word 'build' by stacking bottlecaps, as a response to the way that these small objects help build the empires of their companies by advertising them long past the consumption of the beverage they were attatched to, while simultaneously building an empire of waste. I photographed them in the sliding refridgerators in the cafe of Otis, to show how we, as consumers, help build this empire.

Robyn's Rebranding: Caterpillar

For this exercise, I investigeted Catepillar's involvement with Isreali groups that use Cat bulldozers to demolish homes and lives of Palestinian citizens.

This Means This, That Means That

These were my top 3 out of all of my wordplay explorations:

by Robyn Baker

From the Future: A Blueprint

Robyn Baker: The following is a poster that combines all of my interests/inspirations into projects that deal with the formulation of past, present, and future prediction through mixing elements from each period and scientific/mathematic methodologies.

My inspirations:

Film-Fantastic Planet

Book-Brave New World

Song-"Walkabout" by Atlas Sound & Noah Lennox

Person-Albert Einstein

Artwork-Collage by Agnes Montgomery

Food-Mongolian BBQ

Ay Ay Cap'n!

I took this neo-retro throwback box of Captain Crunch (my personal favorite cereal) and turned it into packaging for when big brother takes over our lives and tells us what to eat nd when to eat it. Really utalitartian, modernist, systematic packaging, and very different from the expressive box I started with.
-Robyn

Robyn & Ji's Modern Wear

It was interesting to think about clothing in a completely functional way. We decided right away that we would make shorts because a dress is completely sensless when it comes to even light activity during your day if you want to avoid flashing everyone. We added a pocket in the front, not only to cover up the gaudy design below, but to add storage options that would replace the need for a wallet or purse. The shirt also has the ability to fold up in the back, to hold your lunch for example, and can also fold down in case it's a little chilly.

Robyn Baker: A "Self" Portrait

Identity is constructed, meaning that what defines us is determined by signifiers other than the "self" such as objects we carry, the clothes we wear, the music we download, even the cigarettes we smoke; and all of it eventually ties in with consumerism. Keeping this in mind, I approached this self portrait project in an ironic way. The series reads "I am one of a kind" yet is composed of bar codes and repetitive patterns from some of the objects that I had on me at the time (for instance, the type is composed from receipts found in my wallet). All other graphic elements are repeatedly used across the whole series even though the scale shifts make you think otherwise. It is all just different arrangements of the exact same elements, creating a stealth congruency between them that brings home the point that we are all a version of something else and disrupting, if not dissipating, the notion of individuality and selfhood all together.