It has been a long while since I last posted on this blog of mine, having truly only used it for course requirements back in the day. I have had a great deal happen in the time since then, from leaving a long-term, unhealthy relationship in order to recover my own mental faculties, dropping out of my graduate program for related reasons, and eventually moving into an apartment in order to work for a time. I’ve been lucky in some regards, having found a job that utilizes the skills I picked up over my design education and it being a relaxed atmosphere. I’ve been unlucky in the fact that it took me around two years (arguably longer) to recover enough from depression back into a background melancholy, and that the work I’m employed in is bereft of meaning. 

Only within the past few months have I truly started to feel more like myself. It began with a friend providing the means to have a spiritual experience, which melted away my mind’s build-up of mental plaque and reminded me of what it felt like to smile naturally again. This wore off with time, as I realized that my core problems weren’t delusions generated by melancholy, they were real. The working world, particularly here in the US, severely lacks a sense of profound meaning. It focuses on short-term gain and individual growth, any sense of long-term sustainability and community left on the wayside of an unwalkable urban shopping district, choking on fumes. I realized that the way I was currently forced to live my own live, out of necessity, was almost entirely in conflict with the principles I follow. The mental plaque was gone, the fog cleared, but the black dog of depression returned. 

Growth was apparent, however. I remembered what being happy felt like, what satisfaction truly was. A large chunk of my melancholy was replaced with anger, the sort that makes people strive to better themselves. Fighting with the thoughts plaguing my mind I slowly began exploring again; reading, taking time to enjoy nature, chatting with friends. Doing things for my own sake, not the sake of others, for once. I began writing. A book idea I had, Hardwired, was still as fresh and pervasive in my mind as the day it was conceived, and it transformed into a war game, then a role-playing game. I found myself able to work on a design with intent for the first time in two years, writing over 80 pages of content for it in a mere month. I take pride in this work, even with it being in-progress still. One day I hope to publish it for others to enjoy. 

With this rediscovery of writing and design, I’ve been having a series of epiphanies, mostly too individualized to myself to be of any use to you, dear reader, but they’ve been essential all the same. My drive is back, and as I relearn how to work with my body and habits I am getting stronger. I plan to continue my pursuit of writing Hardwired, and additionally plan to seek out meaningful employment, where my contribution fundamentally matters to my society. I have three fundamental goals which I will be prioritizing in the coming months while my black dog is on its leash: continuing the design process of writing Hardwired, seeking out meaningful work in either a useful design field (one that isn’t purely profit driven) or in writing useful discourse, and finding a means of leaving this country to one which will better suit my desires to truly make a difference. America is my homeland, nothing can change that, but I’d rather leave now before I become completely enslaved by debts and ties, unable to purchase land or start a community service. 

I’m thinking Eastern Europe (provided the war calms down) or South America. 

I’ll be using this blog again as a means of recording project progress, uploading what is useful or interesting to me and letting my thoughts develop further. This will be a good experience. 

To finish up my project, I righted the wrongs I committed to Mendelssohn by adding in a few more stages to the design. I made a final ruination, in which the monument is all but lost, and then a miraculous uncovery, in which Mendelssohn has been excavated underneath and people are beginning to rediscover his work. 

With this, I felt that I could place the model into Lumion, to see how it would work as more natural terrain. I converted everything to landscape, and made the space grassier and more overgrown as it progressed from left to right. The model left a bit to be desired; after critique I realized that clearly establishing the nature of the site’s weathering and the materials that would be used to create it is necessary to fully explain explore the concept in a timeframe suitable to the human lifespan. Additionally, I was informed that I should have created a specific setting for the space, something which would be key to the weathering and erosion of the site. Finally, I believe that this sort of project is probably best left to 3D animators, who cold have simply shown the passage of time in one site, instead of generating an abstraction of a site made to be read from right to left to depict time. I learned quite a bit in the process however, and shook off the rust I had from a summer of little design work, so I’m happy with my work. 

Moving on ahead with the Mendelssohn model I produced, I immediately thought of what I wanted to experiment with as a medium for a memorial: time. A few years ago, while still completing my Interdisciplinary Design degree, I was fascinated with an art/music scene called Vaporwave (I’d recommend looking up either the artwork or the music, its a bizarre blend of nostalgia and technology). In one particular class, “Drawing the Impossible,” I made a series of pencil sketches of Vaporwave inspired drawings, one of which was this particular piece. 

The second I had access to a model of a bust, this drawing came right to mind. The idea of colossal, human sculptural forms, slowly crumbling and fading away while still hinting at their former perfection has always been an aesthetic I’ve enjoyed immensely, and now I had the chance to make a 3D iteration of the concept. 

I began by placing the mesh model into a block, sinking it in similarly to how the head appears in my drawing. I then used MeshToNURB to create a solid version of the mesh. [NOTE: Make sure your computer can handle this! I didn’t realize just how many polygons were in the model, and didn’t account for the fact that I also had other applications running. At best, this will simply take Rhino a long time to process and complete. At worst, like what happened to me, it fries your laptop because of the strain it puts on the device. Remember to always be careful with complicated commands.]

Once I finally had a solid to work with, I began to break apart the model. I would use WireCut and Split commands, along with the CageEdit commands to slowly deteriorate poor Mendelssohn, until he was smooth and broken on the surface. As we needed to generate four abstract landscapes, I used the various stages of dilapidation for each site. Here are the four linear iterations:

I wished to represent Mendelssohn’s prominence and subsequent fall from favor in the music world by quite literally allowing him to fade away from memory with time. A bit too Ozymandias in nature, apparently, as I was informed it might not be a good idea to design a memorial that is intended to be forgotten eventually. I would play around with amending that later. 

As a side note, I also experimented with trying to generate a rough landscape that represented small portions of Mendelssohn’s music, but making polylines based on the musical note placement in some of his sheet music and then using Rail and Sweep commands. Unfortunately, the result wasn’t what I had in mind and would have made the site impossible to navigate, so had to be scratched, but this is what was generated from that.