Forging Ideas: What To Leave In, What To Leave Out

With the addition of Cody Dickinson and Meredith Gilligan, the Bluff Heads again met at the Mark Making studio. We were greeted by a 1 to 10 scale model of the Furnace stack that will be used for our future design mock-ups.

Frances McDonald proudly presents the scale model

Then, led by Frances McDonald, we collectively confronted the Redundancy Paradox. After an interesting discussion, a consensus eventually emerged:  the redundancy drawbacks (i.e., limits on content, possible viewer boredom) outweigh the benefits (i.e., emphasizing important information) and hence should be avoided--or at least minimized.

The next task was to create wording for an information panel or sign that would explain what the installation is. Since the finished Furnace design will likely be puzzling to many first-time visitors, this simple element is actually pretty important; it's also a requirement of PAC approval. Starting with "You are looking at...," we each finished the phrase and then we eventually merged our suggestions into the following statement:

YOU ARE LOOKING AT AN ARTISTIC INTERPRETATION OF A 
BLAST FURNACE THAT HELPED FORGE THE FUTURE OF CHATTANOOGA

The majority of our studio time was spent sketching, cutting, and pasting our "high priority" images and messages onto the wall to start getting a preliminary sense of the scale and balance of this thing we are making. We also worked up a rough historical timeline and a schematic of the smelting process. At this point, the Bluff Furnace design is truly a work in progress...

A macro view of our initial design ideas