Creative Experience
The Amazon: Graphic Visuality, Poetic and Imaginary
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Celia Kinuko Matsunaga Higawa
The experience proposed by the Research Project “Amazon: Graphic Visuality, Poetic and Imaginary” has favored the process of learning and the poetic creation of Masters students in Design, and undergraduate students from different areas of the University of Brasília - UnB. The creative process has been involving students and teachers in a permanent dialogue with the work of the Brazilian anthropologist and founder of the University of Brasilia’s Darcy Ribeiro, with Nucleus of Amazonian Studies of UnB (NEAZ), and with the reality perceived in the experience in the Amazon, in study trips to Alter do Chão, municipality of Santarém, Bragança, municipality of Belterra and in the communities of Coroca, Arapiuns, Pará, Brazil. This project is exploratory research based on creative processes in the design, an approach in which the ethnographic and iconographic study of the traditional population of the Amazon is the main focus. Collaboration takes place on several levels, both conceptually and at the level of action planning, and on the ground of artistic practices themselves. The research group moved to Alter do Chão and captured on-site images and prints using analogical and technological devices. From the records were born the works, the product of dialogues and individual and collective insights adding to the Amazon Project's knowledge and rich poetic production.
“Is This the Real Life, or Is It Just Fantasy?”: The Image as a Critical Tool in a Diegetic Studio
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter James Baldwin
Long established as the key means of communication within the Architectural Studio, drawing is not only a key means of communication. It also serves as a means of thinking, exploring and generating new understandings. Speculative image making is not a new phenomenon within the Architectural Studio; however, its re-emergence in recent years has been marred by accusations that these drawings are created purely as graphic exercises rather than offering meaningful contributions to the development of critical thinking so essential to the evolution of a design project. Within a Diegetic Studio, these drawings are essential in that they offer their creator the opportunity to express tacit knowledge explicitly. This brings into providing a student the opportunity to simultaneously engage in the subjective act of creation and the objective act of narration. Creating and developing new ideas that are both intuitive and considered and which allow the project to react to serendipity and objectives that frame it. This paper critically reflects on such drawing practices in the work of Studio C, and explores an emergent typology within these drawings, dubbed Schema.
