Re-Fresh: Gravity in a Virtual World
Gravity is the force that influences all physical forms, gravity is so fundamental that we don’t even notice it. My presentation, ReFresh: Gravity in a Virtual World, investigates how kinesthetic learning can help students employ and integrate perception/mind/body connections, how they can literally ‘feel/see’ more. Ironic really, just as we fall headlong into digital technology, we discover the benefits of thinking through our hands and bodies. Observations and insights gained from works including: Henry Petroski’s To Engineer is Human, the role of failure in successful design, Frank R. Wilson’s The Hand and Sandra & Matthew Blakeslee’s The Body has a Mind of Its Own, prompted me to develop ways to teach embodied cognition.
The One-Day Cantilever Project for Foundation Students:
This project, a series of fundamental physical experiments remind students what they intuitively know and provides insight into how artists and designers use their dynamic physical awareness to inform their visual compositional choices. After grappling with gravitational reality, students quickly translate the lessons of imbalance to asymmetry. Now more prone to experimentation, their 2-D designs become more active and engaging. In the future the draw of technology will be as pervasive and fundamental as the pull of gravity. As we increase the hours we spend in the virtual, it is vital that we continue to understand the parallels between fundamental physics and the fundamental abstract principles underlying art and design.
Associate Professor
Otis College of Art and Design
Linda Hudson is currently the program director for the Building Form and Creative Practice and Responses programs at Otis College of Art and Design. Initially a graduate advisor and coteacher for the MFA program, Hudson has also taught Experimental Drawing, Sculpture/New Genre, and Senior Studio in Fine Arts and wrote and directed a program for Product Design called Integrated Studios. For the past 12 years, she has taught primarily for the Foundation Department. In addition to writing curriculum and mentoring faculty, Hudson also gives talks about the creative process and other topics. As an artist, Hudson has shown work in museums and galleries internationally. In her most recent work, which is textile- and process-based and at times uses historical sources, Hudson investigates line and color in weavings that use and fight against the grid and pattern.
