Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 6 - A design for a new monetary system that reflects global, national, and/or indigenous use.

Chipboard, cigarette boxes, paper, string

I was wondering what product is known worldwide and instantly recognized, no matter if someone lives under a rock or not. I saw my parents’ pack of cigarettes in the hallway, and I thought: that’s it!

So I took three empty boxes from my parents’ cigarettes and filled them up with pieces of white paper that I rolled up and made to look like cigarettes. On each cigarette I wrote one of these values: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 1000. In each box I included a “FREEBIE” cigarette.

I made a box out of chipboard to hold the three boxes, and I printed out a paper that said: “Dear consumer, Here is this month’s paycheck. In each package you will find one “FREEBIE” cigarette. Please use responsibly. Thank you for smoking.”

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 5 - Doppelganger.

Chipboard, paper, photographs

This one was probably the easiest to make… I looked up the word “doppelganger,” and basically the origin of the word is German, and it means “double walker.”
I took the idea of the “double” and ignored the “walker” part. ;) I made a book with 9 pages—on each page was a photograph I had already taken with my Holga. Each photograph was a double exposure, and each one was something different: one was a double exposure of my best friend, another of my sister, another of flowers, one was of a gravestone and the flowers on it, etc.

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 3 - A view up a steep incline.

Transparencies, marker, beads and string

I had a hard time coming up with this solution, but once I thought of it, it was fairly easy to make.

I printed out a simple topographic representation of a mountain. The mountain had a steep slope on one side, and a gentle one on the opposite. I traced each line on a separate piece of transparency and once I finished that, I stacked them up, one on top of the other. I had about 7 or 8 transparencies, 4x6in each. I sewed up all the transparencies together at the corners, but I made spaces between each transparency, stopping them from sliding down all the way with beads. At the very end I tied up the strings to a tiny jump ring.

The effect: when the transparencies are stacked flat on top of each other, it looks like a topographic map, so it’s apparent that it’s depicting a view of a mountain with steep and gentle slopes. Once you lift up the whole stack, though, and let it hang in the air, you would see that it would be a few levels of the mountain, and if you twist the hanging stack at a certain angle, you could see the actual mountain and how steep one side of it is.

I made a yellow paper box as packaging—presentation counts! :D

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 1 - Three distinct pieces of furniture. Create a new piece of furniture from a combination of these three drawings.

Watercolor paint on watercolor paper, tracing paper, marker

Furniture meant a bunch of things, mainly household stuff, but it also includes, benches, lamp posts, road signs. Pretty interesting, right? So I printed out 3 images: a road sign, a rocking chair, and a credenza. I traced each image (tracing is considered a drawing, haha! Anyone who knows me would know I’m not so fond of sketching/drawing…) on separate pieces of tracing paper. Then I took 4 papers of watercolor paper, and painted 3 of them each of the primary colors. The forth I painted the 3 colors, but I made sure they didn’t mix so much on the paper. I took one more piece of tracing paper and arranged the 3 previous pieces of tracing paper with the separate pieces of furniture on top of each other until I got something really funky-looking, and I traced that onto the 4th piece of tracing paper. After I finished, I taped over the 3 distinct pieces of furniture onto the 3 primary-colored pieces of watercolor paper, and the combo-furniture onto the 4th mixed watercolor paper.

All packaged in a neat portfolio. :)

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 5 - Doppelganger.

These are the pictures that are in the book I made.

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 4 - A sequence or series of images that depicts observed changes in water over an extended period of time.

Chipboard, tracing paper, marker, string

On my point-and-shoot camera there’s the “burst” option, which basically takes a bunch of consecutive images, so for this one I took pictures of drops of water in a clear bowl, top view and side view.

I printed out 10 of the pictures I took (there were too many…). There were 10 top view and 10 side view, and each top corresponded with a side one. I made two very long covers and bound them together. On the inside I put four piece of white paper, and taped them together so that it would first open horizontally, then vertically (if you would first open the book covers, that’s how it would go). On that I just glued traced drawings of the 20 views.

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Assignment/Solution

Question 2 - An averted self-portrait with emphasis on the ear.

MP3 player in iPod case with instructions

For this one I decided that Coopz would get a lot of the cliche “profile view of person, showing their ear.” I looked into the dictionary and looked up ear. Of course I know sound is associated with the ear, but it didn’t come to mind when I first read the assignment, so I’m glad I picked up the dictionary for this one.
When I was reminded of this, my idea kinda just instantly came to me: make a sound piece.

I decided to record an mp3 of me talking about myself. Here’s the catch: I spoke in English and Polish. I made the two tracks in the file in such a way, that if anyone were to listen to it on an mp3 player, he/she would hear me speaking English in the left ear bud, and Polish in the right. In both ears I would be saying the same thing, just in two different languages.

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph triptych

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph

Cooper Union Home Test Portfolio - Original Work

Photograph