Floating Exhibition on YouTube!

This is the video of our floating exhibition. The editing was the biggest challenge purely because PC and Mac don't seem to like each other at all! AAAARGH.

The Floating Exhibition!

We had exhibition t-shirts as well! They were designed by Hayley.

Rat looked bit sad while being trapped on the bench and waiting for the exhibition to start.

Hayley attaching lots of balloons on her caravan and Sonlali with her poster.

Nearly rady to go!

It wasn't that simple and straight forward to walk with my rat. Often it just went all over the place as the wind changed it's direction!

This is nearly the end just after the biggest challenge which was to cross over London Bridge. It really was windy! Rat nearly escaped...

making of the GIANT rat

Testing of the potential light materials:

above: the net seemed to float but was way too seethrough

below: cheapest and thinnest binbag was the way forward!

The head is ready!

And this is the body floating!

Nearly ready...

It floats but is still missing arms and legs.

The morning of The Floating Exhibition: I had stayed up till very late sewing the fingers etc. Empty rat looks more like a roadkill on our floor.

rat patterns

Above is my first attempt to think about rat shape in 3d. I constructed a rat's dead out of card board.

Below are my final rat pattern calculations!

rat rat rat rat....

For our external group project we wanted to do an exhibition that floats...and we did! Well initianally we simply wanted to do something out in public such as graffitti. Floating idea came from the fact that it prooved rather difficult to get permits to paint on walls and we did not need to get arrested either... Air space was the space left and it was free!!!!

Each one of us came up with idea for a floating art piece. Theme was simply "invading space". I got very into rats as I found out that they are the biggest group of mammals in London. They are nearly outnumbering humans yet not really visible. Rats also have a long history with us. Humans don't really like them as they are associated with dirt and lethal diseases. The most famous one was plague calledthe Black Death that arrived to London in 1665. It was spread by black rats but the rat population of modern London consist of brown rats instead.

Above is the first sketch for my giant floating rat!

Soon I decided that instead of just holding my floating rat I would make it into a reverse marionette. Rats hands and legs would be attached to mine so that when I walk the rat would walk above me. This potrays the fact that there are roughly 1 rat per person in London!

even more bottles

I developed my very simple bottle idea a bit by drawing real bottles and ummm...making the design more dark by adding a dark backround. Hooray. Still not happy with the result. I gave up.

bottles, lots of bottles

This spring we were also asked to participate in Penguin book cover competition. There were 2 options: Alice in the Wonderland or Perfume by Patrick Suskind. I chose Perfume as I really wanted to read the book and also felt that Alice was too famous. Perfume was a very good book indeed but I just simply didn't get into designing the cover. Biggest reason for this was that I really wanted to consentrate on Macmillan. Well anyways this is how I started my Perfume design. I cutted bottles out of tracing paper and just played with scanner. Very obvious idea...bottles. Aaaargh!