AIDAN KIM DESIGN
ON REMINISCENCE
POST - DIGITAL CRAFT
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
CRITIC. FERDA KOLATAN
PARTNER. AIDAN KIM
2016
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Reminiscence is defined as a story told about a past event remembered by the narrator, implying a flawed narration and compression of time. The object began with an engraving by the artist Juste-Aurèle Meissonier from the Rococo period typified as a Rocaille, which is a decorative cultural piece from the 18th century that acted as a base piece for artists, architects, and craftsmen.
The nature of the engraving presents itself immediately as subjective. Originally a three-dimensional object then interpreted as a two-dimensional image, the Rocaille gives a distorted perspective of a scene that is neither space nor object, but always a work of fiction – a piece that is full of contradictions and ambiguities among its own internal relationships of parts, componentry, and features. The joining of the pieces are illegible and often presented in a painterly fashion, while also confusing the reader with added peculiarities such as the frame, flora, and water.
Interpreting the engraving as a digital model, we emerge with a new form and reference image, which results from the contemporary affordance to pivot and manipulate perspective in the digital modeling space. Utilizing this manipulation of perspective, we locked the view from a specific vantage point that compresses and condenses the object and severs its relationship to the initial engraving.
This new image yields possibilities of new relationships and ambiguities and presents us with what we call Reminiscence. Details and qualitative specificities are lost, misconstrued and fictionalized yielding an object that is estranged via the affordances of mediation between medium, technology, and purposeful misinterpretation of ambiguous qualities inherent in the original Rocaille.
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JOSEPH GIAMPIETRO