How to use your inflight time to create art?

So you think you have no time to make art. It used to be my number one complaint, “No time, no art,” until I learned about Nina Katchadourian. Frustrated by time wasted by frequent flying Nina Katchadourian came up with an idea before a flight in 2010, that made all her subsequent flights her studio.

Determined to maximize her time on the plane and remain engaged during what is often a numbing experience, New York-based multidisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian developed a kind of game to create things throughout the entire flight that became known as project “Seat Assignment.”

As an artist, I’m always looking at what more there might be in our mundane, everyday surroundings if we pay it interest, give it a second look.

I hadn’t brought materials with me, so I began playing with whatever was at hand on my tray table, and documented the results with my camera phone.

In an interview with Astry

Seat Assignment has been displayed at art museums, and the collection continues to grow. The project was born from thinking on the feet, from optimism about the artistic potential that lurks within the mundane, and from curiosity about the productive tension between freedom and constraint.

What makes the project works is unexpectedness. Each time you wonder how did she do it. She intentionally uses a mobile phone. “Once you pull out a real camera,” she says, “it screams, I am making art!” In two hundred flights since 2010, only three people asked her what she was up to.

She was flying from New York to New Zealand when she thought, I have twenty hours ahead of me, why not do the whole exhibition based on this flight and she did. It’s worth reading her interview on Berlin Art Link.

Inspired I had a go in my kitchen:

While researching her I found another interesting project by her where she attempts to profile a person based on his/her book collection by selecting and arranging books in stacks based on titles. Have a look at this video:

It goes like this:

1. Choose a person you know or would like to know better

2. Take a look at/through their library

3. Make 3 stacks of books to develop a portrait of the person

And here are some examples:

This is a project for me for another day. Do write to me to let me know what you think of Nina’s projects.