VISU 1311: Creativity Blog #6

In Memento by Christopher Nolan, a man named Leonard, who cannot create new memories, is close to finding his wife’s killer. Though this narrative is not incredibly complex, Nolan, out of a desire to make the audience experience Leonard’s condition, splits the film into two parts and then shows one part in reverse chronological order and has the one part shown in between.The problem with narrative is that you have to tell the audience information, which builds and then eventually rises to reach a climax and resolution. Using this logic, you must think that trying to make the audience understand Leonard’s condition and story simultaneously would be almost impossible.

One can clearly see that Nolan thought through this action. When making a psychological crime thriller, usually there is some kind of an unknown factor, and this tension carries the film along until we hit our climax and get our reveal. With this film, even though there is a death at the end, all it does it fuel our curiosity of why this man was killed, especially when we see that him and our trusty narrator are friends. Speaking of the narrator…the film also utilizes him expertly as an unreliable narrator. We as the audience almost automatically relate to him as our protagonist and we continually hear about his organized system and his value of facts over opinions, therefore we as the audience concede that of course we can trust him. Though eventually that is one of the biggest reveals, that he isn’t the man we thought.

VISU 1311: Creativity Blog #5

Synergy. It’s a word that’s used a lot on team building power points in the corporate world. We need more synergy in our division, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used in the artistic sense before, but I don’t know why I haven’t. Keeping the idea of synergy in my head while watching the video was helpful to recognize it as it popped up in the conversation. I realized that synergy is actually talked about a lot in art, its just never given a name. Playing the guitar, there is a synergy between your two hands to create something greater and more complex than one hand could muster. A band playing together, there is synergy between the different members of the band.

Richards stressed being open to synergy as an important in the creative process, that with each member, the song is slowly formed and a new way of doing it is discovered. I think the way harmony fits into this is that, a band or a creative team of any kind must be in harmony to be open to synergy. Maybe not total harmony, as many great pieces of art have been created while there was tension in a creative collection, but some kind of unity of process is needed. I understand why we were meant to watch this now. I wasn’t mad about having to watch it (who doesn’t love Keith Richards and the Stones?), but I didn’t know what a video about technical guitar tricks had to do about our collage project. Now I understand why this meditation on synergy and harmony was given to us.

VISU 1311 Project #1

As an English Writing and Rhetoric major, I don’t have a lot of experience with photography. I did photography for yearbook as a senior in high school and therefore mostly present images from an objective way of documenting what I see, rather than taking what I see and coding it through a unique perspective. This project was incredibly difficult for me and really challenged my thinking and creative process. Each time I went out I had a plan and each time I finished, what I was shooting had changed. The collection I discovered in all my photographs is ,I believe, a solid representation of what gestalt is. I tried working a lot with shadows and nuanced contrasts with light. Some of the guidelines that I set for myself was that I would only use natural light and that I wouldn’t edit any of my photos, so each of these photos showcases interplay between sparing uses of natural light and darkness. Therefore all of my pictures are from outside on South Congress and heavily feature nature. The set also utilizes the principles of gestalt, such as grouping, containment, repetition, proximity, continuity, and closure, all in their own way.

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proximity, containment

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closure, containment

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repetition, containment

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continuity, proximity

 

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VISU1311: Creativity Blog #4

I really don’t what to sound uncultured, or like some kind of square. I love art and I like to think that I understand why many people make art that purposefully rejects the standard way things are done. Many art movements came about not as a development of another, but in opposition to other movements or styles. The French New Wave was incredibly vital to the development of cinema and it came about as a rejection of the Golden Age of Hollywood. I understand things, and I get things, I promise I do, but I don’t get this.

Its rambling, ranting, raving mad with nonsensical words, imagery, and sounds. I know that you must be thinking that this is good. Well, not good, but at least I’m reacting very passionately at it. Art should never create neutral emotions, but it should make people react very positively or very negatively but that’s the problem. It’s not like this thing makes me want to react either way. I don’t like it, but I couldn’t care less about it. I don’t want to try to understand it or read deeply into it. Its incoherent mess of media is just, there, being.

It’s not to say that I need my art to have a clear concise message or a gripping narrative. I can appreciate art for its aesthetic qualities or for things that have a certain structure for a designated purpose, which is what I think this is trying to do. I think that The Medium is the Massage is the way it is, is structured and created the way it is, precisely for its purpose of shattering people’s normal ways of thinking and preconceived notions of media, but its just, boring and kinda of beige. A weird beige, sure, but still, just beige.

VISU 1311: Creativity Blog #3

Looking back at these three pieces, they all connect in a very interesting way. If you started the way I did, with the Amy Tan Ted Talk and Song Exploder episode with Spoon first, then maybe you would be thinking, as I did, that the thread through these three pieces might be how the creative process works. Then you watch the Stan Brakhage short film. It made me reflect back on all three pieces again. Maybe the common thread was not creativity, but how parts and pieces can come together to form a whole. Maybe, as Amy Tan put it, the common thread was “the value of nothing, out of nothing comes something”.

Honestly I still don’t know what that means. Is she telling us that the value of nothing is that something comes out from it, or is she questioning the value of nothing and making a statement on the absurdity of her statement. I think I’m leaning towards the latter, and its not just because its impossible for something to come out of nothing (at least science says so). At the end of her talk I got the impression that her creative process is catalyzed by the things she absorbs from the world around her. Whether it be what she experiences or reads, she questions things and lets the mysterious forces of the world have her come into contact with new things. She is open to discovery.

This is similar to how Spoon created the song Inside Out. They were open to discovery and the flow of new ideas. They not only let different genres influence them but they also let different and new people into their creative process. They lay out pieces and understand that maybe not all of them will work and maybe the puzzle won’t look like what they imagined, but they’re okay with that. As in the Stan Brakhage short film, they let these different parts connect, overlap, and collide, and they’re patient enough to discover what is it they’re actually making. They are willing to go on that abstract journey that Stellar takes us on. Without any familiar sights or sounds, we are pushed into a new world, and we come out on the other side of the journey changed. In the end, these pieces, to me at least, were about many things. I believe they were about the weird and difficult journey you must undergo as someone who does creative work, and about the discover you must be open to on the way there.

VISU 1311: Creativity Blog #2

Being someone who aspires to be a writer, I must say these two authors definitely have distinctive voices. Let’s start with Mr. Pink. There are the obvious things; the witty and casual tone, the convincing argument supported by data and real world examples, but what something else really struck me. Optimism, seemed to be ingrained in every aspect of the piece. A world where book smarts and numbers become secondary to people who can deliver more, that seems very optimistic to me. Though it all seems plausible. The film industry these days is in a place where every one is just trying to ride the biggest cash wave, with more unique films being swept to the side. This current state of affairs depresses the hell out most movie fans, but bring up Pixar and everyone gets excited. A major studio, yes, but somehow they manage to deliver that emotional gut punch many other studio films cant muster. A world that needs both the numbers and the arts, I know I certainly hope for that.

Mr. Hara, also possessing a unique voice, doesn’t go the same route, presenting a bright future. Instead he drags us along through a journey of history. He thinks that before we can figure out what design is, we must know where it came from, and how other have used and known of it. He wanders through questions, pausing here or there to explore the idea of design, and also lament a cultural event or two. A bit pessimistic, and (if I’m being honest) kinda boring, he suggests that design began as wisdom also blossomed. At the end of his summary of history, he doesn’t say what he thinks the future will hold. Instead, I suppose we must hope he reads Mr. Pink’s book.

 

VISU 1311: Creativity Blog #1

Vilem Flusser is trying too hard. That was my thought as I began to read his pretentious maximalist essay on photography. Capturing not objects, but the concept of objects? The way he went on forever discussing black and white photography. It sounded like a graduate student trying to impress people at a dinner party. I was confused, annoyed, and becoming increasingly angry. Its not that I ever thought photography was, “Oh, lets take a picture of that pretty tree!”, but this guy seemed to never get any where with his philosophical ramblings.

To me, the art of photography was to capture something, whether it be a political riot, people at a shopping mall, or nature, and through the cultural, aesthetic, and artistic weight carried by the images, communicate something to your audience. Whether it be a feeling, a message, or a question was up to the artist and his intention and his ability to properly convey what he wanted. Then I started to hate Vilem Flusser even more, because I realized, that’s what he’s saying. When he says that photographers capture the concept of images and encode that into their art, that likes saying you take this image and all the weight around it, its history and its meaning, and then intentionally insert it into your art for your audience. Flusser, I realized wasn’t trying too hard, it was I that had to try harder.