cricket trophy + thoughts on documentation

I think this may have been my first comission. The project took far longer than expected, but I have become used to this difference between expectation and reality. If I seperate the work I do into things done for love and money, this is in the latter category. 

Before I recount the build processes i'm going to talk about documentation. With access to a smartphone there is no excuse not to document a project, but the act of breaking a build into chapters often interrupts the flow of making. Documentation of the build process has always felt like an afterthought to me for this exact reason. It's a tangential project in and of itself and incredibly time consuming to do well, and in this way it's a lot like a blog post. However, unlike a blog post it exists parralel to, and in competition with, what you are making. There is of course the opportunity to change ones perspective and view both building and documentation as part of a larger whole. 

I started blogging because I wasn't talking about the work that I was doing. I graduated in 2020 at the height of the first lockdown. We didn't have a ceremony, and we didn't have a show. I'll talk more about why I started blogging, although I hesitate to state the obvious, but for now I think it can be summed up in a quote from Doug Mccune's talk, Desperately Trying to Remove the Air Quotes Around the Word “Artist”; 'Make things. Tell people'. To paraphrase, 'doing the work isn't enough... You can't be a dandelion that makes thousands of seeds but hides them away from the world... don't stress out as much over whether what you are making is good enough, or if it is "done" and polished and ready for the world to see... make as much as possible and send it into the wind"

Telling people is done through documentation and i'm trying to take it as seriously as making. In the case of commisioned work it is the only part of the whole project that remains with me. To that end i've started treating the shots of my work as precious things, worthy of consideration. These images were shot on fujifilm superia 200 with an Olympus XA. I will talk more about photography, why i'm shooting film, and what my goals for these shots are in a later post. 

If you had any doubts as to what I said about documentation (or lack of it) the sum total of four photos I took should convince you. To be fair i'm sure some have gone missing, I remember doing a very basic sketch of the trophy and feeling very smug about going with my first idea for the first time in four years as it's illegal to do this at university. 

Ingredients:

1. Bat and ball provided by the client
2. Pallet wood for the base
3. Carbon fiber rod left over from a hiking pole project. wood dowel would have probably been better. certainly easier to glue
4. Astroturf samples for free! if you ever need to turf a desk sized area out of random patches of astro you shouldn't be paying for it. 
5. Brass plates were from a trophy store. The battery plate was left over stock of my own. 
6. Mixture of red and yellow flicker LED's
7. Switch from RS components 
8. Some 3D printed housing stuff
9. Cotton wool 
10. Hot glue 

Why is the next bit of text all the way down here? Ask the developers of the compose interface. 

Construction of the bits should be fairly self explanatory. bit of glue, bit of solder, make a circuit, add a battery etc. This wasn't a particularly interesting project in terms of process but I think the result is quite compelling.