TIME DISCRETENESS

Background

Nana is a well-behaved little girl. Her parents are busy with work, so she lives in the alley with her grandmother most of the time. In winter, she is poor, and to help her family, she sells matches and groceries along the street.

One snowy morning, Nana walks on the snow to the main city. The streets are quiet, with only a few carriages passing slowly. She passed by a window, where the ballet models were graceful. Although she knew that the gorgeousness was out of reach, she couldn't help but stop to imitate and paint on the window.

The ballet teacher in the window noticed her a long time ago. At first, she thought it was a naughty child, but today she saw a unique aura in her every move, as if she saw a future ballet superstar. The teacher was surprised and affirmed, stopped Nana who was immersed in dance, and decided to take her back for training to open the door to the world of ballet for her.

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Design Process

1. Inspiration tracing: the relationship between ballet spirit and time dimension
Inspired by the documentary "Ballet, Sweat and Tears", the project focuses on the accumulation of time and effort in ballet training. The dancers' boring practice day after day has become the core metaphor of "visualization of time" in the project, trying to present the relationship between body and time and space in the dynamic process through design.

2. Spatial motion modeling: Rhino point analysis and curve reconstruction
Based on the Rhino model, the spatial relationship between legs and hands during ballet rotation is studied to determine the key motion points. The design core is to connect the points with smooth curves and generate concave and convex surfaces with special angles, transform the body dynamics into quantifiable geometric trajectories, and build the structural foundation of the project.

3. 3D modeling and printing: three-dimensional presentation of dynamic trajectories
The rotation displacement is simulated by the model with clothing, and the hand trajectory circle is formed at a fixed rotation angle of 15 degrees as the time period unit. The large outline is split and printed using transparent resin (headdress integrated, body split), and the jewelry and shoes are modeled and printed simultaneously to provide a three-dimensional framework for subsequent fabric attachment.

4. Inspiration for time visualization: cross-dimensional inspiration from Duchamp's works
Drawing on the concept of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase", the temporality of three-dimensional movement is transformed into a continuous trajectory on a two-dimensional plane. By adding a vertical axis to mark the moment of movement, a single image presents a sense of time and space superposition, providing methodological support for the visual expression of "time scale" in design.

5. Fabric experiment: the echo of pleat density and time texture
Taking the fluffy texture of the ballet skirt as a reference, the pleat density is used to metaphorically represent the time scale - the number of pleats in the same length is associated with the passage of time. Five fabrics (elastic base fabric, loose fabric) were selected for paper model folding experiments to explore the adaptability of pleat morphology and dynamic trajectory model, and to achieve the conceptual unity of fabric and structure.

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