AA Visiting School 2025: "Turbulence"

AA Visiting School was a two-week subject in which we had two separate projects to complete. The first one is shown below, and the sculpture above was the final project. We only had three full days to design and build the sculpture in our group of three, which ended up requiring 20-hour days down in the basement of the MSD, doing a ridiculous amount of work under a lot of pressure.
In one day, amongst a series of other tasks, I drilled 450 holes in timber slats, during which time five separate men came along to mansplain how to use a drill. This project was the first time I was engaged in a physical design project where I wasn't relying on technicians and teachers calling the shots about the project. It was up to me which machines we used, the method for suspending the structure, and how we sourced the materials. This was a fantastic learning experience, although it was pretty intimidating because it was the first time in a long time that I had the opportunity to do a large-scale, physical project. I learned a lot about working under pressure in this project, and I was really happy with the product of our work.

Over the two-week course, my group examined weather patterns, particularly those related to wind and turbulence. The first week was engaged in data gathering and documentation, while the second week was spent experimenting with sculpture, representation, and intervention.

Throughout the course, we produced two key products: in the first week we made a video, plus video documentation, and a map, while the second week was spent producing a dynamic installation artwork that interacted with turbulence and the body.

We used the video to experiment with methods to make the wind tangible, using paint as a medium to visualise the patterns created by various things that blow in the wind. This created two distinct products: a series of painted marks on canvas and a video documenting our process. We used these marks in combination with data compiled about wind speeds to create a textile product in the form of a tufted rug that overlaid our paintings, coloured in accordance with the speed of the wind. We presented these paintings along with the rug as a map, visualising wind according to variations of location and speed.

In designing the sculpture, we slightly varied the scope of our project so that it analysed turbulence rather than wind, and made movement tangible both visually and audibly. We achieved this by suspending hundreds of lightweight bamboo rods which would be slightly disturbed by micro wind currents in the space, but also invited participants to become agents of turbulence by disrupting the sculpture to create movement and noise.