Sticky Nostalgia

For my third and last Action Project of my STEAM Electives class "Rapid Prototyping," we had to create something for our new school building. No matter if it's a bike rack or a memory foam chair, it just had to be appropriate for a work space or as we like to call it, a "family." The project was supposed to be solo, but there's certain projects that were a bit too much to handle for one person. I had one of those projects. I had an original idea of creating a hammock for the student space, but quickly changed my mind when the required materials weren't available. After a lot of thinking, my partner and I decided to still use the hammock and re-purpose it. We came up with the idea of creating a "memory net," as I like to call it. This just really consists of hanging the hammock up and posting pictures from the past on the hammock. In which the title "Sticky Nostalgia" was born. This was extremely fun, but it did take a while to gather the required materials.

"Phase 1" By DR & TC. Jan, 2016.

It was required that we have an Instructables page up in order for our viewers to fully understand our creation process. Find our Instructables page here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Hammock-Banner/

We were also quite inspired by the original idea of the hammock: http://www.complex.com/style/2013/07/summer-life-hacks/diy-hammock. Before the re-purposing process, this idea was awesome!

In all of my classes, we have something called Field Experiences (FEs). This allows us to go out into the field and understand the content of our class from a working experience; a more hands-on experience. One FE we attended was the Wasteshed in Humboldt Park. A woman named Eleanor said "the best thing about doing something for no profit is the non-stop feeling that you are helping someone else." This quote motivated and inspired me to make my project even more cooler just because there's people out there who work very hard just to give back daily to the community. Thank you Eleanor!

Below are 34 seconds of time-lapsed video, covering our whole creation process. For a every two seconds, our time lapse will capture two and a half seconds of motion being taken for each video.

While completing this project, I picked up on a lot of different safety hazards that, with common sense were easy to avoid. The only safety hazard I could really think of was the spray paint, which can become quite dangerous if you get enough of it into your system, so using that with care was a must.

Our project didn't require a lot of building, just a lot of brain power. There was the hanging of the hammock though. This consisted of hammering nails in the two hung up metal pieces in order for the hammock to be high up on the wall. My partner and I also had to gather spray paint. Generally, we wanted nice colors that would pop out on the rope like fabric of the hammock. We chose red, purple, and blue. We chose these colors because of the simple facts that they're dark and they look nice. We went into a building, not infested with people, and began spray painting our school's initials nice and big on the hammock. This was so fun! The only problem is the dangerousness of the spray paint. So I ended up leaving a lot of space between me and the spray paint. After the spray painting came the photo attaching. This was mildly easy, as all we had to do was attach the paper clip to the photo, then attach the photo to the hammock, but the knots in the hammock made this kind of difficult. The outcome was a lot nice then I thought it would be, which made me much more happy about myself. Here are 5 very important lessons I've learned throughout the entire process:

• Spray paint is easy to work with, with a steady hand and focus.
• Paper clips are quite versatile.
• Coloring is actually really important (seeing how the spray paint came out).
• Wood cannot hold hundreds of pounds daily!
• Your work doesn't always have to be compensated.

Lastly, in order for you to complete this project, I suggest a helping hand because the work load, physically and mentally is cut down the middle and this is such a relief. Remember that this project is not only for me and my school, but for you too, and I hope you enjoy our creativity!

Going Places, Seeing Faces

For the third unit of my Art History Elective, "If These Walls Could Talk," we worked in teams and come up with a mural to put in our new school building. Yes, they are allowing us to make full murals on the walls of the space in our new school building! There's a lot of responsibility and very high expectations, which ultimately makes this project even harder to pull through. I loved the original and creative ideas my group and I came up with. There was a lot of confusion and a bit of arguing, but we pulled through. I'm so glad we were granted the opportunity to help spice up the new school. I hope you enjoy our creativity, we made this for you as well!

Imagine an assortment of different faces staring at you from one collaged face, all on one wall. Also imagine that those faces are pasted on top of very beautiful stenciled flowers. Well, that is our mural. The media used to carry out our project was mostly spraypaint or block-printing ink. The first step in our long process was to go along the stairs that we were assigned, and just clean the walls. This took a bit longer than anticipated, but it was fun, as was the rest of the project, which I will explain more thoroughly. While the wall dried, my peers and I started the taping process. The taping process consists of using tape to cover up certain parts of the wall that you don’t want to get paint on, and it took a very long time to cover all 5 walls. Luckily though, after the taping process, painting wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Painting took 2 or 3 days tops. We chose a light, kind of silver color and it looks very nice in my opinion. After painting, we started with our block printing and spray painting. We used a white ink for block printing the flowers onto the West and East walls. We used black, red, and white spray paint for our stenciled flowers. We decided to create flowers to represent the beauty & growth of our school! We created the flowers by carving material to slap on the surface with paint on the slapped-on side. The other method we used for the creation of the flowers was stenciling, which consisted of tracing and cutting out the flowers shapes and spray painting it on the wall. The good vibes coming from a bigger and better environment was enough to give us the idea of a positive and serene background like a flower. After the beauty comes the uniqueness of the piece. My group and I decided to create collages of people from our school. Each of the collages are unique in their own way, as each collage is made by a different person. The collages were wheatpasted over the flowers on the wall. Wheatpaste is a kind of adhesive mixture of flour and water that allows things to be hung or pasted up on a surface.

The roles in our group were quite simple. There was a Documentarian who took pictures and videos of us while we worked through the project. There was a mule who went back and forth to make sure we had the needed materials to complete our project. There’s the Director of Operations and Artistic Director who worked hand-in-hand together to make sure the project is working smoothly and looks good. My favorite role was Director of Operations because I was the man making sure everyone was on task. I really didn’t like Documentarian because it took away from the experience. I didn’t enjoy filming people doing the job that I helped put together. I wanted be in the field! Even though the outcome was quite nice and I loved how it came out, I would have loved more access to higher places on the walls and more time to make the mural the BEST it can be.

I had an amazing group of people working with me on this project and the overall experience was really cool and life-changing to even get a chance to have such a big impact on the GCE Community. I would like to also thank my school for the chance, and I hope they love the effort we put forth as much as we do.