Martine Arranz
Attention to Detail
Class of: 2024
Major: Product Design BFA
Medium: Book, video, essay
Faculty: Seminar: Brie Bouslaugh / Studio: Rachel Urkowitz
Prompt: The assignment for Integrative Seminar was to write an essay about Memory and ideas that were talked about in class as well as including the artist you chose from Studio. For Integrative Studio the project was to have an artist to research about and make a handmade book connecting to your artist and your essay from Seminar.
My Artist was Marcel Duchamp and my essay topic was about how there is no reliable witness because 1. everyone interprets things differently and 2. the court manipulates your memory to reinforce their calm, this leads to doubt. My idea was to make the entire book filled with my own ready-mades, manufactured objects that are modified. I also wanted things to have different colors connecting to the idea that each person looks at things differently.
Originally I thought I would go around my house taking photos of random manufactured objects and then Photoshopping them together. I wanted to see how it would look so my first experiment was a step ladder and half of a pen. I ended up realizing that I needed to make my ready-mades in person because slapping together things on Photoshop looks superimposed. I thought making ready-mades was going to be easy because I had all these ideas in my head. I knew what I wanted to use but I didn’t know how to put them together. You can slap 2 things together but are they interesting?
There are no titles on the pages until the very last page because I want the viewer to have their own interpretations of the ready-mades before they read what I think.