John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

down and took a couple of weeks out and learned what I needed to know about
Rhino. I had a fairly good knowledge already. I was coming from animation and
bringing it into Rhino and getting rapid prototyped at the Hothouse in Stoke, so
they were missing bits, cutting into each other, everything. The computer never
knew it wasn’t meant to do that - it was almost giving me a very real aesthetic…
the machine didn’t like and I quite liked that. The Hothouse said; “Oh, there’s a
few red bits on this and all the triangles are inverted” and I said if that’s what it’s
meant to be like then do it and I’ll re-build it afterwards, I’m fine with it, which
got a bit of criticism from my tutors who said “You should leave it, because if
you’re talking about the purity of the machine, then leave it – don’t fix it”. I
thought it was another interesting side to it and I was more interested in getting
this form out. Doing these large pieces, using the new technology and starting to
use digital animation. It was a basic cup and saucer and then a ripple goes
straight through it. It’s very beautiful. Three simple frames, you hear something
blowing and see the cup getting blown and the water rippling. A nice research,
development and design kind of thing. So it’s been going on and off, but it’s
never been the catalyst for my work. When I look back at Gray’s I think that if
there was no way to make it by hand, there’s no point in doing it. Now, if I can
make it by hand I will make it by hand, but now my work can’t be made by hand
and I need a computer to help me with it. So I think that’s my earliest reflection
on computing.
29. How have computer technologies had an impact on your
practice?
30. What (for you) is the key benefit of using these technologies?
31. What (for you) is the key limitation of using these technologies?
It keeps me going. It’s a very fresh way of working. If I come up with something
in my mind…like when I first made the birds, I knew roughly what I wanted to
do, because you see birds flying about, but I didn’t know exactly what it’d be like
but using the computer it materialised the invisible and I was like; “Fucking
hell, that’s good!” I was interested in that, and seeing it in three dimensions was
a completely new experience, so the key benefits for me were...it’s obviously a
matrix. I can see the different way I am. It keeps you going, gets you up in the
morning. This sounds stupid, but I can walk about, if I’ve been working with the
computer and am still thinking in that way, I start imagining things moving and
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