Monday 4 November 2013

Supplementary#4 'The Ambivalent Extruded Outdoor Ampersand'



It occurred to me that you might like a permanent outdoor sculpture to place within the groundplan of the building so I have come up with a design based around the cultural centre's ideas of taste, interpretation and influence.

Here is how to generate your unique version:

- Go through your computer packages and identify a font you really don't like. Maybe one you find ugly, poorly thought out, unispiring or with bad connotations.

- Check if it has an ampersand character (the figure of eight style symbol for 'and') - if it doesn't choose another font that fits the above criteria.

- Scale it up to your physical height.

- Extrude its width to the length of your arm.

- Scale it into your design, choose whatever material you like to make it from, though it should suit the outdoors.

- Please position it upright and directly on the ground, but wherever you like.

Above are two versions I made in SketchUp (Font choices 'Gigi' and 'Bauhaus 93', both 189cm tall by 66cm deep.) but you only have to do one. 

Somewhat inspired by website www.shitampersand.com I have a feeling that sometimes that which we in practice dislike visually has for that same reason a kind of isolated internal beauty to it, and that the process of analysing why something is not fit for purpose is in itself purposeful. Also that ideas of cultural exchange should not only be about the most palatable. The Ambivalent Extruded Outdoor Ampersand may also function as a kind of inert public attraction, a graphic Henry Moore, with the ability to make a sentence with whatever or whoever is placed either side of it, ever instagramed for posterity.

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