30.11.20 - Gathering Items and Deconstructing

Now that I have a better idea of what I want to do, I have started gathering materials to produce experimental work out of. I started with discarded wires and other objects from the workshop and began cutting them open.

 

I was really surprised at how beautiful the insides of many of these cables were, containing colourful wires in a dull grey casing. This ethernet cable was easy to take apart and retrieve the coloured strands from, and I held onto the offcuts of the grey cable to use in future experiments.

This cable contained copper wires which are very hard to cut through, but I was able to cut away the outside to reveal the beautiful metallic colour inside as if opening a rock to find a fossil or amethyst.

I discovered that the cross section of this cable had a flower shape inside and it reminds me that allusions to natural forms appear throughout much of the artificial world, and I wonder how I could involve this in my project.

The next thing I dissected was this unwanted wind-up toy. I cut the fur off and then the plastic body easily opened up showing the mechanism inside. All of the pieces were simple to take apart and I arranged them on the page to show the toy's anatomy which included a metal coil, a spring and some cogs - all very old fashioned technologies that have been used in toys over many generations.

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