One of almost 150 projects now featured at the Design | Media Arts undergraduate exhibit, Kristel Brinshot’s “New Mut3″ demonstrates the vast range of work and media that Design | Media Arts students are exploring.
For her senior project, Brinshot was requested to create a piece based on the perspective of a human imagining Earth’s atmosphere from space. She designed a book with sedimentary rock-like layers that you can wear.
“We had to create this new nature because everything here is so green, but imagining it from space it would be shiny and metallic.”
A self-described “total art kid,” Brinshot came to UCLA and was overwhelmed by the technology used in the Design | Media Arts department, but she has learned to adapt to the different forms of expression.
“The computer is another paintbrush, another medium,” she said. “Some of these projects are so sophisticated that you need the help of a machine.”
Now in her last year as a Design | Media Arts student, she has done a lot of print work, breaking information down to make it more enjoyable and readable.
She has also worked with video, doing narrative and experimenting with the technology itself without telling a story.
Only part of “New Mut3″ is on display at the exhibit, though.
The rest of the project aims to play with the dimension of internal and external experience. It is a gigantic box; a person sits inside the box, attached to a heart monitor, blindfolded and listening to a sound track created to evoke fear and excitement. The person’s heart beat is transferred into a graphic that is projected outside the box.
“The heart is so much a part of being a human,” Brinshot said. “For the people outside the box, they have no idea what they are actually seeing, but they are seeing a mutation of that person’s feelings.”
Brinshot created the piece to be very interactive, a common trait among many of the other pieces in the undergraduate exhibit.
“If something is well-designed, it can be for anyone,” she said. “(The show) is more immersive than in the past. It is something that should inspire conversation. You should want to touch things and ask questions.”
The exhibit, titled UNDER_, was completely organized by students for the first time and is three times as big as the graduate students’ show. It is open from Jan. 17 to Jan. 31 in the New Wight Gallery of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center and gives young designers a chance to show off their work to the public. Opening night was on Thursday and included bands and a DJ.
The show has a variety of pieces, from videos projected on walls, to clothing, to posters about social issues such as AIDS and war.
“Projects incorporating technology and design are a staple for the students,” said Victoria Vesna, chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. “They are working on everything from graphic design to motion graphics to lettering to sound to computer programming. It is a very unique department because we blend art with science.”
Brinshot agrees that the combination is sometimes hard to balance, or even to describe.
“It is hard to define what that is,” she said. “We are just undergrads trying to figure that out, figuring out what
“˜DesMA’ really means.”