Remix Culture

Remix Culture

We were introduced to the concept of remix culture this past week, a concept that I was relatively
familiar with, but was excited to check out nonetheless.

The concept of remix culture as I understand it, is a culture that follows the dogma of "nothing under the sun is new". It gives artists the opportunity to re-design a concept without changing the inherent value of that concept to begin with. The fact that one can be allowed to add onto a structure without changing it's original form is significant, because it demonstrates the capability for human beings to grow or change, or even to show adoration or contempt for something that already exists.

In order to demonstrate our understanding of remix culture, we were assigned to creating ten "remixed objects from the 3D object publishing site, "Thingiverse", which allows people to download published objects and "remix it" to add value to it.

The first object I designed was an "Realistic Cubone" from the popular Cartoon "Pokemon". Basically, Cubone is a dinosaur looking creature with a giant skull on it's head, which I've replicated using a tyrannosaurus body and a ram skull. I chose a T-rex and a ram skull because I thought they would make a pretty aesthetically pleasing pair, although the ram head ended up a tad too large because or it's shape.

 Remix number two is called "Western Dragon", which is a slightly dramatically ironic name. This remix calls back to the ancient Chinese belief that they were the center of universe because they believed that dragons could not exist too far from China. This is because they depicted the Chinese Dragon having five claws in China, four in Korea, and three in Japan, which is a bit farther from China in relationship to Korea. So the Chinese naturally assumed that if dragons stray far enough from Asia they end up losing all their fingers. I chose the snake body with the dragon head because that is what asian dragons supposedly were made of, snake body, eagle's talons, and deer horns. The chicken legs were added for comedical effect.

The third remix came to me as an idea for a snail having an actual house on it's back. I was originally going to use a turtle, but I really didn't like any of the turtle designs on Thingiverse, so I ended up going with the snail.

Again, I chose the snail because the turtles just weren't as good, and I specifically chose this house because its bottom and room were detached from the house for it's block parts, so I found it very easy to keep the bottom of the snail visible while putting the house on it's back.

I continued with the wordplay on remix number four with the Dragon Millipede(Centipede). So yes I used a centipede model for the dragon millipede, but the only millipede I saw on Thingiverse was going to be too large for Tinkercad, and at this point Meshmaker had actually crashed my laptop once, so I decided to play safe and run with the centipede diagram.

Why Dragon Centipede? Well because I ran a study on it in grade nine and really like the animal, so I still remember it. The other choice was the Inland Taipan, but I couldn't think of any wordplay with that name.

Remix number five was inspired by a biblical verse that I happened to come by on Sunday.

It reads, "Do not be decieved, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this also he will reap."-Galatians 6:7

So the thing a tree that grows garbage cans as it's fruit, because humans really like to just put garbage everywhere. So that's my response to that verse.

On a much lighter note, remix six was an inverted mermaid; still half fish and half human, but as one can tell, the head to body diagram doesn't look like a regular human...

This human body was actually really nice, because of the low polygon count, so I didn't have to do much tinkering with it. At this point I really didn't want to deal with mesh maker, because of the previous crash situation.






I called the seventh remix "Definitely a T-rex". It looks really silly because it was partially a screwup between me trying to create a t-rex/human hybrid, but I guess it got my original idea through better than the original mesh.

I wanted to make a mesh of some dinosaur and human for comedical effect, and also because I find that humans make every other creature on the earth to be like themselves, so in essence we force our ideas upon other animals (how many of you dress your dogs?)

The Eight remix is a cross between a pig and a cow. I edited the mesh to make it as fat as possible, going back on the meddling with nature theme. I also added a giant udder to the cow to show that the modern cow has essentially become a food/milk dispenser. I think the pig demonstrates this pretty darn well, because it is a symbol of gluttony. Interestingly, the shadow of the mixed mesh has the head still looking like a cow; I noticed this when taking the screen shot, so I zoomed out to include the shadow.


I went back to "Fat'n Depressing for the ninth remix. I mixed a cat with a skull, along with a bunch of pizzas, but to be honest, I could have chosen anything to be the base, I just settled with the cat because it made the mesh look cute.

Originally I was going to use a fat face for the head, but because the cat itself was already so fate I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose a skull instead of the human face.

The last mesh was my all-in-do-it-try-hard mesh. It's a 3D rendering of a character I designed named Tzaravak. I used a combination of the ram skull, elongated t-rex jaw, as well as wings from a dragon and centipede body to make it, topping it off with a skeleton. I'd say it was pretty neat, and its a pretty cool testament to remix culture.





These are the links to each of the objects that I used for remixing. They were all found on www.thingiverse.com

ram cubone
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:473590
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:624615

Western Dragon
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1372964
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:547968
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:182377


snail house
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:88464/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1700233


Dragon Millipede
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:328253/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:182096

You reap What you Sow
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:621711/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:845449/#files

mermaid?
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1095845/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1008753/#files

Obviously a T-Rex
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:308335/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1528540/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:330220/#files

Gluttony
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:224314/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:182114/#files

Fat'n Depressing
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:967868/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:445805/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:518109/#files

Tzaravak
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1224280/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1465430/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:278633/#files
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1086833
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1726984
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:308335
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:182096

Good Design is Innovative

"At the end of the day, and you're looking around at the objects around in your house, and you're deciding 'What really has value here', it's going to be the objects that have some meaning in your life." -Rob Walker

         Watching the feature-length documentary "Objectified', I was drawn towards Rob Walker's speech near the end of the documentary. Throughout the duration of my second viewing, I really couldn't help but ask myself, "What would I grab first when the Hurricane is coming?" Looking at my phone, my first thought was that I would probably grab that on a whim: after all, the modern phone has been the most value to the modern individual. Thinking through the question again though, my eyes drifted onto the pen on my desk, right on the other side of my phone.



          How important is a pen to it's artist?



For me, surely, it must have the greatest value of all the objects that one can perceive, for it is the identity of the artist. Interestingly, throughout the entire duration of the documentary, the pen only appears once, which is at 55:23, when the lady is observing a pen in a store.

This was the thought that pierced my mind when I decided that the object I was going to design would be a pen.

The overall idea of the pen i designed was that the pen was supposed to relieve strain on the hand when pushing on the ink. This was an idea I pulled from the documentary when Dan Formosa is talking about the design of a peeler for people with arthritis.

Pens are sometimes really annoying to deal with, the actual pen is held from the front, near the tip, but the button that pushes the pen out is all the way at the back, or as a lid on the cap that has to be removed and put in a safe area so it doesn't get lost. Similar to the potato peeler case, that can become really dawdling to some people.


The concept behind my pen is that applying pressure to the rings when your fingers slip into them will cause ink to naturally flow out, which removes the requirement to open the pen from one side or the other. You can just grab the pen and push, and you can start working.

In the documentary, Dieter Rams notes that
"Good design is innovative." I feel like that is the crux of design fundamentals, and that was the overall concept I followed when making my design.