WIP Project 2: Commercial Play

For the final project, I’ve continued with putting together animations. I have a small TV and several laptops that I can use to display my project. I’ve gone with a theme of self-portraits and want to do a “portrait” showing different sides of myself on each screen. The small TV The electronics I plan to use I put together a collage in the shape of a human head for one of the portraits focused on my entertainment interests and the apps that I use in my daily life. I also recorded a little bit of the beginning of one of my League games which I regularly spend time playing in a group with friends and will be incorporated in this portrait. To make the collage I clipped many logos and symbols representing different interests of choice onto a layer below in the shape of the head with glasses. Another one of the portraits I’m including will have some more “surface” qualities like my school major, birth date, and name. The base background I’ll be using to represent a more grim mood:

My final project will be an interactive sculpture; a laser harp. I will laser cut an enclosure but instead of including strings, I will be using 5mW green lasers. How it will work is that when someone "plucks" the lasers, the corresponding photocell sensors will read the disruption in the laser and trigger servo motors to strike glockenspiel bells residing on top of the harp. Thus, I will be creating an instrument with a digital format that emits physical sound. The glockenspiel notes (there are six) will also be in a combination of notes that when improved on, it sounds like there's never a "wrong" note. I want to play with the ideas of digital music as an accessible way to get into music while also as a limitation to others more versed in musicianship. So far, the project is coming along, the enclosure is completed and the code is almost complete. The only issue is that the original lasers were not of high quality and I had to replace them.

Almost exactly a year ago, I started writing poetry. It was a project that started with the simple thought of "what would happen if I wrote a poem a day?" So on April 18th, 2017, I wrote my first poem. Over the past year, I have written 180 more. It quickly became deeply personal and cathartic to externalize my thoughts on my changing spirituality into words and rhymes. So, partly because the timing is perfect, but also because these poems have become a documentation of my emotions from the past year of my life, I decided to compile them into a book. I brought the total down to 150 (to mirror the biblical psalms) and paired each poem with a quotation that is about a similar concept from the poem. The book is called "Between Prose and Poem. It is organized by the months that I wrote them all in, starting with April, obviously. From there the book is split into three smaller "books." These three are 1.) Broken Psalms, 2.) Blue Hymns and 3.) Darkness Dancing. I am currently working on a book file in Adobe InDesign. Here is the table of contents: For the Show on the 28th, the book will be projected onto the wall and viewers will be able to move through the pages freely. I am hoping to have one or two physical copies of the book as well. Here is a link to my instagram, which is where all of these poems live: https://www.instagram.com/drew_wesselhoff/?hl=en Here is a WIP book cover: Example Pages: Namesake for the book title: Namesake for the first book (Broken Psalms): Namesake for the second book (Blue Hymns): Namesake for the third book (Darkness Dancing): P.S. To further this idea, I have been thinking about recording a small explanation of the "story" behind each poem. These would be really short audio clips describing where I was/what inspired it. For example, the poem above was inspired by a random guy in taco bell who was on his phone. He was talking to his friend and said really loudly, "I had a dream where I saw shadows on the wall! What does it mean man?!" I thought that was really strange, so as I was riding the bus home, I wrote the poem above. A lot of these poems have similar origin stories.