For this project, we were to keep a collection and find an appropriate way to display what we had collected. I chose to collect secrets, and made an interactive piece where the viewer was to pick up this tin can, a childhood communication staple, and hold it to their ear. Once this action was completed, the viewer would hear anonymous secrets that people used to keep, but no longer keep, most of which had to do with childhood.

You can hear the a secret collection by clicking on the playlist below:

To make this book, I collected card games from several rounds of Estimation. Each player’s hand was recorded into the booklet as well as the cumulative score after each round. I made the decision to collage faces into the book in order to highlight: 1) The strategies and moves that we employ during a card game can be extended into daily life and 2) Reaction to loss, upset, gain, and domination appear to be universal. Although the text of the book may be too cryptic for a viewer with no knowledge of Estimation, the faces provide something that the viewer can relate to/empathize with: the players.

Buzzfeed Title Generated Postcards

This hand-bound book collected images that referenced objects from everyday life, like a deck of cards or a hair tie.  The images were abstracted or obscured by an opaque cover sheet.  My intention was to add an element of intrigue to personal, commonplace objects.

Skydivers
By Swetha Kannan

As Logs, trees, and leaves begin to decay, as they do with every passing of seasons, it’s interesting to see the adventurous skydivers that can begin to take root in the decay and, with it’s force, pull trees, leaves, and others down to the ground. These skydivers are the fungus and bacteria that begin to swarm and ferment in the roots of dying organisms. They are beautiful and interesting to behold, and in a final effort to give a tree a glorious ending, pull them down to the ground where they will be consumed and eaten by the bacteria.
The Skydivers project was my way to attempt to memorialize these events that happen outside of our notice. The falling of trees and leaves are events that we feel do not matter or that we ignore all together. I’ve tried to integrate this aspect of nature in our every day lives in a whimsical fashion so that we may appreciate this small part of nature that we seldom even think about.

My collection plays with the recognition of the ridiculous advancement in biological engineering and how people mutate organisms often for entertainment. Some of the items I found and recreated seemed like they could have been extracted from an alchemy or witchcraft book. So I constructed my piece into a molecular form, having each object as an important makeup for this new molecule. Each little item has a description and instructions on how much to mix. The bottom cup is empty because we are still searching how to combine all these creations and inventions into something catastrophic.