We had a lecture called “Epic Fail”, which was essentially about teaching us the value of “failure” in art and design practice as a method for making so that we can “fail better”, and direct that to a general idea of experimentation and risk taking.
As an exercise in the end of the lecture, we had to take a previous project of ours and make it fail. It was a bit hard for me because I had left my computer (where I have all my projects) at home for the day, and all I had in the RCA were a few prints from a project that had already failed. I set out to try to make it fail even harder, the prints I had were at least kinda cool looking so I tried collaging them into the ugliest piece I could. I went on to do this only a few minutes before we were supposed to present our failure so I had to rush. I cut my pieces semi randomly and used some ugly brown tape to stick them together. Not looking as sloppy as I wanted it to be I folded it into a paper plane. That’s around when the time was over:
Unfortunately, I think it ended up looking quite cool, and I didn’t have the foresight to make sure it at least wasn’t a flyable plane, so I guess I failed the task.
One thing I noticed is that even when I was trying to make something look ugly, I was still overly clinical about it and couldn’t manage to not accidentally cling to some ideals of harmony while making it. Next time I should either let go and go for complete randomness or be very strict about not placing elements in the place I first think of. Failing is a lot harder when you actually try to, I should try to fail more.
Caio's Graduate Diploma 