Post by Jon Malinowski

“One must conform to survive, but one must rebel to live.” - Anaïs Nin As a dual focus major in digital media and graphic design, I found myself taking classes with these two very talented graphic designers. It was a reassuring feeling to see familiar faces when walking into a new course, even when that medium was not our main interest. This was the case when I enrolled in Installation Art and both of these designers were in the course. While building structures was not something I would pursue alone, I wanted to push myself in this course. During one assignment, one of these designers brought in an aquarium, mirror, fish, and a projector. His piece was a video that would project through the aquarium onto an adjacent wall. The images would be distorted from the ripples of the water and the shadows cast from the fish. The second designer brought in a seven foot by seven foot wooden frame, spool of metal wire, and pliers. The finished piece was a metal spider’s web inside of the wooden frame that was laid against the wall. My piece consisted of three boxes, each with an item obscured by a tube of fabric, and different fabric curtains your hand had to pass through to feel these objects. It was a physical manifestation of how my thought process and memories work. At one point the second designer stepped away from his work in progress to ask me what I thought I was doing. He told me to look at the two-dimensional works they both created, and that I should do something like they had. I pushed back stating that this was Installation Art, and that our work should make the most of the gallery space. Outcome: Whenever I take on a task or learn something new, I want to do or tack on just one more thing. It was not enough for me to learn to just design webpages in Photoshop, but I wanted to learn how to code functional buttons and text boxes. It was not enough that I learned to model, unwrap, and apply textures to three-dimensional models. I wanted to also learn how to create bones, weight paint, and animate those same models.