Week 07 | Sequential

This class teeters on the divide of teaching software and delivering you an aesthetic history and technique. You cannot choose one or the other to be a well-rounded designer. You may not necessarily master all programs you use, but must master the understanding of how to use them intelligently. Rhino could allow you to model the hand or the leg perfectly and actually document it in motion, however we are not interested in recreation. The visual representation of motion is indicative of more than just a re-creating of what we can plainly see in front of us.

At the advent of film and motion picture, art movements were striving to attain a similar aesthtic of life in motion. Artists were in search of movement as more that just the body in space, but rather the body in time. Expressionist film and dance were working toward the same goal, using extreme contrast and layers, to express and heighten the complexity of movement.



In this piece, Boccioni puts speed and force into sculptural form. The figure strides forward. Surpassing the limits of the body, its lines ripple outward in curving and streamlined flags, as if molded by the wind of its passing. Boccioni had developed these shapes over two years in paintings, drawings, and sculptures, exacting studies of human musculature. The result is a three-dimensional portrait of a powerful body in action. You can see in the multiple directions of this image, that Boccioni projects multiple dimensions onto the figure. Being able to read this image in several ways is what makes is a successful. The multiplicity of movement was a feature of the body and of time that was an important notion of the Boccioni and his contemporaries – the Futurists.



As the project is called ‘sequential’ we will be confronted with the fact that a certain amount of overlap in motion and that the instance of time, or the photo, is only defined by what immediately precedes and follows it. There are several scales that we will think about while working on these drawings. Quantitative, or the scale of multiples – here we measure by numbers or amount. Relational scale, or a way of organizing information so that the user perceives it according to surrounding data – like a set of tables or bar graph. Lastly, the time scale will be the most difficult to notate.

Your images are documented in a linear – motion, similar to a film strip. But, the aim of this assignment is to map information, not just diagram it. That said, the mapping of your movement may not be best described in chronological order. Remember that your will be creating a multilayered drawing – not a comic strip. This complexity will be of a level similar to that of Boccioni’s charcoal drawing. Movement atop movement.



Let’s think again about the futurists. Their understanding of the visual universe – was the first aesthetic system to break almost entirely with the classical one – their images could properly be understood only in the language of waves, fields, and fronts. The type of movement it was obsessed by were those that created shapes in time, not only in space.

Submission: One 11x17 print, generated in Rhinoceros, composed in Illustrator, saved in .PDF format. You will need to post process the line work in Illustrator to emphasize information you find critical in your study. Use lineweight and linetype to notate these conditions. You may uses shades of gray to assign values to your lines, but may NOT use color. Again, use the filing nomenclature: for student BobSmith, “A06_Smith_B.pdf.” All .pdf files are due in your backpack by 12:00 PM on Tuesday 25 March. Late work will not be accepted.