Monday, May 28, 2012

Cardboard Jungle


The biggest projects I have ever been a part of were the projects in our Design 2 class. There were only four students, but it was the best class I've had. The biggest project of all was the 3rd one. It took us weeks to plan and build, but it turned out great.

Every year the Design 2 class does some kind of an art installation in the Reiver room at the student center of Iowa Western for Earth day. We all decided right off that we did not want to try to make some sort of political statement with our project, but we wanted it to be something more about appreciating earth. Eventually we came up with the idea of doing a project that you did not see with your eyes. The idea was to make chambers that mimicked different environments. We had many ideas but in the interest of time we narrowed it down to two, The Jungle and the Arctic.

The cardboard structure in my LAST POST was the first stage of design. Eventually we tore off a bunch of that and rebuilt it. I took pictures along the way as we worked on these for a couple weeks.




Finally after we had finished building, came the day of the installation. We arrived early and were at school all day.


This was the first one. You can't tell by looking, but it's actually a jungle. :)



When you were inside you had headphones playing jungle ambiance on a continuous loop, while there was a humidifier running, and a bucket full of water and dead leaves for smell.


The second chamber is the arctic.


Inside here was an air conditioner and a fan, while the headphones played the sounds of a blistering wind.


We took turns pushing each visitor in on a rolling chair while they put on headphones and closed their eyes. I had brought materials for blindfolds, but no one wanted them, so we stopped offering, and just made them promise to keep their eyes closed.

One of the ladies from the offices heard about our project and came by to try them and take our picture. She went back and told others that she worked with, and we were kept busy all day.


Left to Right: Deb, Joel, Sonoka, Me, and our teacher, Jesse.

We had a lot of fun, and everyone loved our project. Over and over we were told that ours had been the best Earth day project the school had had.

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