Play and Materiality

Context:  "Artist Share Their Alcohol Ink Tips"

Play and experiment with ways of creating texture. "It is mostly created through the way that the ink dries. You can achieve different effects from using different items to move the ink around. There are so many different ways to play with alcohol inks. Using a straw, hair dryer, heat gun, just blowing on them, using a brush, squeeze bottle and more".

"Perspective of Ink Animation from the Perspective of Non-semantic Communication by Ya Jie Lin, Yangg Huang and Xiao Cheng Zhou".

"Performance of an environment play a show to convey the aesthetic feeling of different concentration.

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Method: We are going to use Acrylic ink of different colors and drop it into a jar of water. We will see how ink is spread and dissolved into satisfying results. We will record it on using dslr camera to capture the results.

First of all, we are going to buy the acrylic ink from the arts store and then we will borrow the camera and tripod from the technical room. 

As this exercise is called play and materiality, we are going to play with material and immaterial. Material in this case is our acrylic ink colors and immaterial is the digital camera that would be capturing our results.

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Response/Reflection: It was our first time to use a DSLR camera. We didn't know the basics on how to use the camera and how to record a video. We had no idea on how to set up a tripod. We were afraid our camera would fall because of the unstable tripod. We looked at the youtube tutorials and followed it. We were so happy to get the camera working and the tripod standing very steady.

We did some tests with one of the acrylic ink color(red). At first, we didn't know how we should drop the ink into the water, if we titled the whole bottle, the ink would come out too fast and there would be so much color inside the containter. So we used the help of tweezers to squeeze in the ink and drop it into the container. When we did that, the result came out so good. The ink spread all around the water container like a cloud shape. 

The next time we tried was to use two colors in which I was going to drop in a red color ink and Rhea was going to drop in a blue color ink. We wanted to do this one together and see how two ink colors are dropped into the water and how they mix in together. When we did that, my red ink color came out really good, but Rhea's color didn't come out onto the container. At this point, We faced many difficulties. We had to start everything again, fill the container to the clean water and bring it back onto the table. We again started putting both the color inks inside the container again. We squeezed the ink onto our tweezers very hard and waited for eachother so that we could drop the ink at the same time. Finally we got some really good results. Both the colors were mixing very well. The container shifted to purple color as red and blue mixed together. We continued on putting more and more colors and it was looking so good. The mixtures of all the colors together in a container looked very interesting as the ink moved around the container.

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This exercise is related to play because we did a lot of tests of not knowing on how the results will be and how the video would be captured. We played with different colors, concentration and positions. When we dropped the ink from the top view we could see the ink fall in and spread. When we saw the final video, it actually turned out so good and it was so satisfying to watch the ink move and blend in with the other colors. It felt like as if we were watching the ink move around the container in slow motion.