A structured guide to help you take apart, evaluate and learn from the creative works of others.
1. Find projects related to your research topic
Find a project among the recommended repositories that are linked to your research topic or from your current research.
Capstone Recommended Websites
2. Description. What can I see?
Let’s limit yourself to an objective, accurate pure description of the project.
- What is the medium?
- Are there interactions? What are they?
- What materials / equipment did the artists use?
- Composition, atmosphere, style, shapes, color, light, and other techniques
3. Analysis. What is the artist trying to say? How they did it?
Understanding the artist choices, purpose and context.
- Who is the artist?
- What are the intentions of the artist to create this work?
Whats the purpose? Theme? narrative?
- In what context (historical, cultural, social) does the artwork exist?
- What does the artist communicate with its medium choice?
- How does the title and the piece relate to each other.
4. Subjective Interpretation: What does it Communicate to Me?
Overall feeling and understanding of the artwork. What did you understood and how did it make you feel.
- Emotions / associations: Does it communicate calmness, melancholy, tension, energy, or anger, shock? What do you associate it with?
- Do you think the artist has succeeded, through his formal, technical, stylistic choices, to communicate a specific idea?
- Which aspects of this work could be useful to me? How could I mimic or implement these for my own project?
Case study
The Eternal Return, Pre-Hispanic Interactions
https://vimeo.com/713536430
Artist: Cristhian Avila Cipriani
Short description: The Eternal Return is an art installation that seeks to impact on the private and collective imaginary using 3D impressions from pre-Hispanic musical instruments that are “played” again by the wind with technological assistance. The intention is to hear random interpretations of someone else's past. This process makes us wonder about how we understand time and, as in the paradox of Theseus' ship, whether we can confirm that the sound is the same if the body changes?
Year: 2022