project 65/

A NEW TEAPOT

A. Sotnikova, Teacher, Moscow

Often it seems that life is going along quietly, smoothly. It would seem that everything is fine in your daily existence, you have all the necessities, everything is going along according to a well established order. And at the same time, you continually have the feeling inside that something is missing, something important is missing, the main thing. And this dissatisfaction, if we were to analyze its murky source, is evoked by this measured repetitiveness of the days spent amidst the same circumstances of the life surrounding you. It's as though once and for all everything all around you has stopped and you yourself become a stationary object around the stationary objects standing around you. And although one day follows another, a frightening feeling emerges of life ceasing inside of you and around you. How can this be shifted, how can a new impulse for life be "ignited" so everything would "start working," come to life around you, so that this pleasant but sonorous inertia would disappear? But to think up some sort of decisive, all-changing plan when the surroundings are "silent" is not all that simple, and given an overall good "everyday state of well-being," it seems to be entirely impossible. Yet nevertheless, such a project does exist, which inconspicuously, leisurely begins to change and give a new stimulus to existence.

In a well adjusted system all you have to do is to move one "detail." For example, when a family is having dinner and decides to replace the old teapot with a new one, a prettier and fancier one. As soon as the new one appears on the table, it will immediately seem that the old cups don't go with it and they also need to be replaced. From here, continually, step by step, you will change one detail after another in the life surrounding you, planning, estimating, thinking about the changes on greater and greater scales - and you have acquired everything required for active, creative "well-being": the feeling of future prospects, the feeling of inclusion in the creative process, the presence of a goal and the dynamics of emotion; there is consciousness of a light, almost reckless adventurism - after all, the realization of yet another idea will serve as the impulse for the emergence of another!

A NEW TEAPOT

1. Construct a six-sided case which rotates on a pedestal.

The sides or the case should be of non-glare glass, everything else is wood.

2. Draw sketches on the glass from the inside in black paint (the sketches inside were stolen and brought by S. N.) in the exact order of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ...

3. Place a 40-watt bulb inside.

* First paint the glass from the inside with two yellow colors; light yellow above the line, a darker color below the line.