ENVIRON-MENTAL

Environ-mental Part 1:  In this first part of the 2-part, collaborative “Environment-mental” project, youth will create an enclosed mini-environment installation. Thinking about how elements like color, texture, and light affect a person’s mental and emotional state, they will fabricate a space that conveys a certain mood or atmosphere to the viewer.

Environ-mental Part 2, Soundscape:  In this second half of the 2-part, collaborative “Environ-mental” project, youth will create a computer-generated soundscape to accompany the installation they fabricated the previous week.

Working on this project with the Art Brainers was pretty incredible. It was one of the most stressful projects I've done so far with kids, simply because there was so much to complete, but I am so proud of how it all came together, and I know the campers were too. 

We talked again about different kinds of installation art, and about how artists use elements like light, color, texture, and sound to affect the viewer's mood and emotional state. Working collaboratively, the campers aimed to create a small enclosed space that made the viewer feel a sense of magic, mystery, beauty, and excitement. They painted the walls of the little cardboard room (about the size of a telephone booth) in swirling sections of  slightly metallic blue, red, and orange, and covered sections of the wall with colorful stalagmite-like forms, flowers, reflective plastic jewels, and more, while glitter-encrusted colored balls rained down from above the viewer's head (along with a lone bat!) where light entered through small holes cut in the ceiling.

THEN, using Garage Band, we also created an accompanying soundscape for the installation, which reminds me of the inside of a watery, shimmering cavern filled with undulating light. We first looked through the sound libraries to pick out a selection of sounds we felt fit the mood we were trying to convey, and then each camper individually selected from these sounds, playing notes on the keyboard to record multiple layers of tracks. Please play the video below to hear the campers' soundscape - they did a fantastic job. Between this project and the kindergARTen Brains Belly of a Whale project, I think the Fall 2011 ART BRAINS Camp had an outstanding season finale.

Play the video below to hear the Environ-mental soundscape!:

BELLY OF A WHALE

 

kindergARTen BRAINS, Belly of a Whale:  During this session, the Education Lab will feature a small round tent that has been transformed into an open-mouthed whale. Youth will fabricate objects and cut-outs to place inside that represent things they imagine the creature may have swallowed in its travels, making a temporary and interactive installation simulating a whale and the contents of its belly.

I feel like I say this a lot, but this project really was SO much fun. The campers had a great time imagining and making drawings of things they thought the whale might have swallowed: fish, sharks, lizard-creatures, shoes, a tire, a trash can, a necklace from a sunken ship, an anchor, a submarine... The drawings were cut out and attached to the tent's domed interior (aka the roof of the whale's mouth) and were also hung with yarn from the same surface.

I was pretty anxious about the making of the whale before class (tent + plastic tablecloths + various stuffing to make it look slightly less exactly like a tent draped with plastic tablecloths), and may have once or twice accused it of looking like a wrinkled muppet made of blue trash bags. In the end though, I thought it was a perfectly friendly DIY creature for the kiddos, and the more they added to it, the more excited everyone was to crawl inside and check it out. Belly of a Whale, we <3 you! Come see us again sometime.

Help! We've been swallowed by a whale!

Oh wait, it's actually pretty cool in here.

RAMBLING SIDEBAR ABOUT CARTOONS / PRELUDE TO BELLY OF A WHALE

I watched a lot of cartoons/animations as a kid. A lot. And I watched them over and over again, thanks to my dad's studious VHS recordings of the good stuff. Though I don't plan to let my own future children spend quite so many hours in front of the tube, there are a lot of magical, beautiful, surreal, and mysterious occurrences that left long-reaching impressions on me (alongside some recurring childhood nightmares, not to mention THIS), and I'm often surprised at the frequency with which certain scenes from animations surface in my mind still today. It's hard to say how often, maybe because the frequency isn't as high as it seems. But I think it's more likely that it's hard to say because these images are part of a deeply-ingrained, visceral image bank that, decades later, still influences what I find interesting, frightening, and beautiful.

Of course cartoons don't make up the majority of my strong childhood memories (I think) - I also played outside and read a lot of books! That said, I've noticed the influence of some cartoons starting to creep their way into my curriculums, and I will say that I'll always find this Rupert Bear adventure magical, the death of Azlan sickening and potently corporeal (seriously, how intense is this for kids?), and the idea of being swallowed by a giant whale terrifying but still totally livable for at least a short amount of time. 

Had I been raised more religiously, it might have been Jonah who I first saw being swallowed by a whale (and I might have had more complex feelings about Azlan). Instead of Jonah, though, I had Mickey Mouse and in particular, Disney's Pinnochio. I watched Pinnochio almost every single day after school for about a year when I was in pre-school, and needless to say, I did not forget Monstro. Impressions of Pinnochio's time spent in the belly of Monstro was the main inspiration for the kindergARTen Brains' (much less terrifying) final project - Belly of a Whale, which I'll post about next, all self-indulgent reminiscing aside!  Working creatively with kids has been a fun opportunity for me to think constructively about childhood impressions like this that I think are neat, and the Belly of a Whale project, with the awe-inspiring notion of being inside a giant creature's stomach combined with the unrivaled fun of just being in a secret-feeling tent,  turned out to be one of my favorites. 

Up next on make/believe: Belly of a Whale. For the moment, take it away, Monstro!

p.s. one last YouTube link down whale-animation-memory-lane...very 1986, the same year the former crew of the USS Enterprise traveled to earth to help save humpback whales!

kindergARTen BRAINS FOSSIL-MAKING

Fossil Makers: Campers engraved designs and embedded small objects into shaped pieces of self-hardening clay to create their own collection of fossils.

Again, I love this self-hardening clay, and the kids did, too.  This was a great project for the one-hour, 5-6 year old class, and I think it could be expanded upon for a longer class too. We had a little french fries toy in the classroom that day, which resulted in multiple french fry fossils (FFF's).