Monday we had open work time. Tuesday we worked on our astronomy hit list. On Wednesday continued on our hit list. On Thursday we started epoxying more pictures and had open work time. On Friday we epoxied more photos and made our tent groups, packing lists, figured out tents, and food for our camping trip. Humanities/ChemistryThe object that my group is going to capture is the milky way. The milky way starts rising at 11:00 and will be fully over head at 3:00. We will need to be facing between NE and E. We will locate the milky way by finding the constellation Cygnus.
Link to packing list
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Monday we had open work time. Tuesday we started a writing piece for humanities and made slime in chemistry an started a writing piece about that. On Wednesday we printed more photos. On Thursday we watched an episode of the Cosmos and had a writers workshop for our writing piece in humanities. On Friday we had work time and debriefed the episode of the Cosmos and started a writing piece about it. HumanitiesHow does the work of scientists, artists, and philosophers lead to wonder and curiosity? Their work leads you to wonder what their thought process was when they created it, what they were feeling and how all of that contributed to and affected their work. The creations made by these people can provoke a wondering of the motivation as well. Philosophers and the questions they ask, make you think deeply about an answer that may or may not be there. Scientists look at something they don’t understand and try to understand it further, making new discoveries in the process. Artists paint, draw, sculpt, etc. what they are feeling and push the mind to view the world as the artist. When you see something so complexly built, whether it be a piece of art, a research paper, or a philosophical thought, you wonder, How long did this take? Can I do something like this, how long will it take me? There are some works that are designed to make you wonder. For example, there are certain philosophical questions designed to make you wonder, about you, your life, and everything. A couple of these questions are, What is the meaning of life? Who am I? What is time? What happens after death? And Does God exist? Are just a few questions posed to make us wonder. Abstract art is made for you to interpret. It gives you a chance to “choose” what you see in the piece. There is usually something given by the artist to “guide” your wondering, or push you in the right direction, helping to give you an idea of what the artist wanted you to see. Science in general is something to be wondered about. There are constantly new things being discovered leaving you to wonder how they discovered it, there are things being proven false, where you could wonder how they figured out that it was false. Everything that happens in science, circles around curiosity and wonder. Matter of fact, not just in science, nothing would get done if no one was curious or no one wondered what would happen. If no one wondered, we would not have a lot of the things we have today. ChemistryHow does epoxy work
-What is a polymer? -How does the polymerization process work? -Can you describe the connection to the polymerization of pva that we did in class? -How can this help with our project? In order to work correctly, you need to use a 50/50 ratio of resin to hardener. On a chemical level, what is happening is the hardener, or catalyst in this case, is altering the chemical chain of the resin, letting a chemical reaction ensue, setting the resin. In order to visually see and know what was happening, we took PVA (elmer’s glue) and added boric acid. Mixing the boric acid into the glue made the glue sort of curdle, or at least that is what it looked like. Once it was “curdled” if you worked with it enough(stirred), it would turn into a putty/slime. In this case, the boric acid acted as the catalyst, altering the chemical chain in the glue, making the chemical reaction start. The glue experiment that we did was similar and relevant to the resin work that we are doing because it showed us how the hardener and resin were reacting when they are mixed together. The chemical chain in this is made up of a monomer that connects repeatedly to create a chain. The monomer has 2 carbon atoms, with hydrogen surrounding them on all sides except for one, in the one open position(the vinyl position), there is an acetate atom. This monomer is called polyvinyl acetate, or school glue(PVA). The monomers all connect, through a process called the polymerization process, creating a chemical chain called a polymer. During this process, all of the monomers connect together creating macromolecules in all different shapes and sizes. What can we learn from light? What information is in light? From light, we can learn what elements are the make up of different things, we can tell the make up of planets lightyears away by what color/type of light that it gives off. We can tell this by what “shadows” different elements give off in the spectrum as well. Light lets us see. When we see color, what is happening is the object that has color is absorbing the opposite color of light and reflecting the color that we see. This week was quite interesting and slightly stressful. Monday we had the day off. Tuesday we immediately got back and had work time for the whole day. Wednesday we started a writing piece and learned how to do the resin coatings. Thursday we coated and printed quite a few pictures. Friday we started coating some pictures, but we messed up, we learned what not to do and how to avoid the mistakes that were made. HumanitiesWhat role does each step play? In the process of taking, printing, and coating the photos, each step is equally important. And every outcome depends on the previous step and how well it was executed. The first step was to make sure that your camera had the right settings, we needed to do this in order to get a high quality image that would meet the standards needed to print on the metallic photo paper. The second step was to physically take the photo, you had to have the conditions right. The right lighting, the right time of day, and the position you are in/the objects are in. Next was processing. We processed the pictures in lightroom, the most important thing that we did in the processing step was de-noising the picture, if it was slightly blurry or had any “hot pixels”, with the paper we were printing on, it would be very noticeable, we also had to amp up the brightness and bring down the contrast to get the picture to print the way we wanted it to. After processing was printing. Printing was probably the easiest part, all we had to do was load paper, press a button, and make sure we liked the way the picture came out. Next was mounting. Mounting was extremely, not difficult per say but hard to get it 100% perfect. We sprayed a piece of wood with spray adhesive and carefully laid the picture down as straight as we could. From there we used a roller to make sure that it was good and stuck and flat on the wood. After we were finished mounting the pictures, we started to mix the resin. In order to get the resin how we needed it to be, we had to combine exactly a 50/50 ratio of hardener to resin and then stir slowly, making sure not to mix any air bubbles into it, for 10+ minutes. Once the resin was completely mixed, we poured it onto the mounted picture, carefully spreading it around the photo evenly. After the photo was completely coated we had to take a blowtorch to it to pop the air bubbles. We had to move the blowtorch relatively fast across the photo to avoid burning it, but we had to torch it for at least five minutes to make sure that all of the air bubbles popped. Once we finished torching it, we covered the picture up so it wouldn’t get ruined and to minimize the amount of dust that could get on it. Roughly 30 minutes after we covered the picture we took it back out and torched it one last time and got rid of any lingering dust before covering it again. ChemistryWhat is the relationship with light?
-How does each step of the process change/involve light? -Why is it important to frame and exhibit work? Each step of the process involves light in a very different way, light also reacts differently to your picture depending which step of the process you are on. When you are taking your picture, it is important to take into consideration the time of day, so you can take it during your ideal hours of light. Sunset and sunrise. These times provide the best light because the sun is low in the sky, emitting a soft, diffused light that produces better pictures than the harsher sunlight. When taking the photo you also need to take into consideration that when you process and print your photo, that part of the process depends heavily on what the lighting is in the photo and what the light is focused on. When processing you need to take the brightness up or down and make adjustments to get the light to translate how you want it when you print. Once you print the photo, you need to mount it and then cover it in resin. Light reacts to resin in a unique way. It adds depth to your photo. It does this because the light goes through the resin and bounces off the picture back out of the resin, but every time it does that some of the light bounces back off the surface of the resin back onto the picture, creating a loop of light. Light is also plays another role in the resin process. When we look into the glare of the photo we are able to see dust and anything else that made its way into our photos and are able to remove them. We also use the glare when we are blow torching the picture to make sure that we pop all of the air bubbles. There is a certain pride that only comes when you exhibit your work for other people to see. Framing a piece of art that you made, making it look better, gives you a feeling of accomplishment. When you put your work out into the open for people to look at and critique, it can help make you and your work better. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2017
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