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.