073/101 Stories with wire

Snow White

This is a picture I took last summer in Berlin. There is wire among leafs and trees. I named the picture Snow White. The wire is quite common background in Berlin as its growing here like urban jungle. This picture is inspiration to my wire work.

Here is my plan for the mobile made with wire. I need to buy to tools like pliers.

I keep a blog called  www.dayforadventure.com  where I publish this kind of photo stories about the adventures I find near or far. Today I was thinking if I should just try to go to Spreepark for the sake of design101 and take some interesting photos. Its an abandoned GDR fun park in Treptow Park and a bit like zone in Stalker. It would be a challenge to do which I have also thought about earlier. The park is surrounded by wire fence. If I manage to do it I will post some photos and stories about it in my blog. And with picture mobile I can have as well an analog picture library at home.

Ronia the Robber's Daughter

And here is my final project with new pictures from Spreepark. I made the trip there with the same girl that was in the Snow White picture but now the story changed. There is a dog surveillance in the area so we were left behind the fence. But I got the wire I needed for my picture mobile from the fence. Many people had tried to broken the fence and the loose hanging peaces of metal where easy to rip off. So now I have a peace of the Spreepark fence hanging in my kitchen!

Here is my final project with new pictures:

more pictures of this photoshoot can be seen here

072/101 Moving on

These pictures are showing the way from my old house to a new house where we moved in after New Year. There are different kinds of stones in the space between.

First there is an old rolling stone that has always been in our old flat and which will stay there. Its function is most likely that in a case of fire or emergency we can break the windows with it. So far we never had to do that. Instead it has worked for three years as a doorman to our cats who get sometimes crazy during the night. With the help of the stone I can lock them into the corridor to calm them down. You can still see the signs of the struggles on the wooden floor as the cats were pushing the stone.

As I am walking towards my new house I am wondering what kind of stone would be in my new place? Do all Germans have a rolling stone in their house or just the activists?

Stones are always there, everywhere, seasons change, people come and go..

Again some christmas tree thrown out of the door waiting to be eaten by elephants or being pissed on by dogs. Many things are just abandoned and forgotten.

Its not just rock’n roll baby. Things get broken that are not strong enough.

Moving on...and rock’n we roll!

In the new house, there is no stone waiting for me at the door. Is there any rolling stone here?

This place is like its stone. Sophisticated and fine marble.

Actually I would like to have my drink on the rocks. I still have to bring the right kind of glass from my old home!

071/101 Telling stories week

This will be our schedule:

on Tuesday: you will write/design your own story with stones.
Make sure you have a lot of nice stones to play with.

on Wednesday: you will write/design your own story with wires.
Tue with lots of stones, Wed with a lot of wires. Metal ones
are the best.

on Thursday: you will write/design your own story with hair.
Make sure you have a pair of scissors...

on Friday: you will write/design your own story with string.

on Saturday: you will relax, get lost in a dream-like state of
mind or catch up on the week’s homework.

on Sunday: you will relax, explore meanings and metaphors, or
catch up on the week’s homework.

Here is some inspirational photos of different stone gardens from the Berlin Garden of theWorld:

chinese garden

korean garden

korean garden

korean garden

japanese garden

design101/53 - Mirror day

Something to remember: the best inspiration for your design, always comes from other places.

“While in Mexico, Robert Smithson created the Yucatan Mirror Displacements by installing 12-inch-square mirrors on dispersed sites. The resulting series of nine color photographs was published in Artforum to accompany Smithson’s essay “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” The mirrors reflected and refracted the surrounding environments, displacing the solidity of the landscape and shattering its forms. Part Earthwork and part image, the displacements contemplate temporality; while the mirror records the passage of time, its photograph suspends time.”



I am making these exercises as time will allow me. So this exercise was made while walking around my neighbourhood in Friedrichshain in east Berlin and then while going by S-bahn to the west part of Berlin. My battery of camera failed in some point so I could not get more photos but it was still a nice experience.

design101/50 Zooming out and my city BERLIN

When this design101 week happened I travelled for the christmas to Kuopio. It was a busy week and I had no time or tools to do these exercise then. I was on my christmas holiday for 10 days and because of it had a huge gap in my exercises that was hard to catch up later. As you will see I will publish this weeks simultaneously my exercises from different topics. For example I am very happy I managed to do the dressing up weeks purple dress and I have to just document still all Voyage into my room exercises that I´ve done.

The program for a week called Zoom out was following:

Today, you will complete the quiz and prepare yourself for the
week. Here’s what we’ll be doing:

on Tuesday: you will map your city

on Wednesday: you will create a box with (inside) objects
taken from your city

on Thursday: you will play with mirrors (and your city)

on Friday: you will make a pinhole camera and take and develop
(a real picture) with it

n Saturday: you will relax and sketch things up

on Sunday: you will watch some nice things we are preparing
for you

Picture from my city part Friedrichshain

Voyage into my room 101/43

I will try to update all of my design101 exercises here before the #blaueblumen exhibition that is next Friday 25.4 and Saturday 26.4 at Designtransfer in Berlin. My work will be also showed there and I am very happy about that.

This week this question about the space is very actual in my life. I have currently two houses and while we have been living since January in a bigger house we got it after all only for 4 months. Everyone wants to live in a big house so its much more difficult to get one nice one for a longer term. I have been happy about the balcony. Big house cost more and in the end I have noticed how I had used to live in a small place and now changing a room feels strange. Big house is full of corridors, between spaces and in my case unfunctional kitchen. So I already miss my little house. Luckily we still kept it as it was so cheap. Its compact and nice and all my furnitures are there still in their old places. We got the big house already furnished. Many antique furnitures.

So I ll have to give the keys back 26.4. Its gonna be very busy week while preparing the exhibition (still have not seen that space and will bring my project there on Monday) and moving my stuff to the little house. I have done most of these exercises of this "Voyage into my room" but had not published them. Here is something from the Monday letter:

Xaver de Maistre wrote “A Journey Around My Room” while
spending 42 days locked up in house arrest. 

A delightful little book on one’s own experience of being 

(design101 strongly suggested to read this one, in no more than two hours... + lots of online
versions of it for free).

This book looks very interesting, I had chance to read some of it already.

This voyage into my room makes me think also about last week when I had chance to visit Iweiwei exhibition at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. There was exhibited a room where I weiwei was kept in house arrest for 81 days. It was really horrible place. 

When I think about my room, the one I am gonna live again soon and will also visit today its a creative place. Not anything negative but full of joy and memories.

Floor:

There is black wooden floors with marks and traces of paint as once there was full carpet and when it was taken off it left some colourful marks still to be seen among the black colour.

Height:

The room is high and there is lots of space in vertical direction.

Bed:
There is wooden frames for 2 and on the top I have 2 layers of mattress so the bed is very comfortable. The final layer is double mattress and this was a big thing for us when we got "the mattress". Before that I was always complaining how I could not sleep well together with my boyfriend. Now its perfect.

My working desk:
Its a little corner near window where I have my desk and next to it a shelf where I can keep my design books. There is lavender growing on the windowsill and sometimes I ll open the window and smell the flowers.

There is so much to tell about my room maybe I ll continue to show things in my "Voyage into my room" exercises . Pictures tells more than words.

#design101/020 My diary 16.11 Sketchbook

Yesterday I got finally my long time waited Mac Book Pro. This makes me so happy!!! Here is the happy moment when I open the package. I worked so hard to get it and partly got it too as a christmas gift:)

There is so much changes happening. Wind of Change could be this moments soundtrack.


The world is closing in
Did you ever think
That we could be so close, like brothers
The future's in the air
I can feel it everywhere
Blowing with the wind of change

Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change

We have also moved to a new house. There is even a tv in new home. I am looking forward to see all those german tv films where I played as extra last year.

I can finally speed up posting with my design101 tasks. The platform this MOOC is using was not supporting my old Mac. It made me so sad to see even my answers to the weekly quiz were never gathering any points because the system didn't fully recognise my answers. The design 101 is going to Finnish by end of January and I will do my best that all my works will get finally to the platform.

Here are still some images from my sketch book.