Reflection

VISU 1100: Blog Post #12

Kim Garza was the graphic designer who showed us how her app “Eventurist” evolved from its beginning to its end, as a result of user stories and research that she and her team did to figure out what clients would be looking for in a travel app. She was also working on a personal project called “Till the Clouds Roll By”, and I thought it was really interesting because she decided to make a whole bunch of new footage, and music to go along with this scene in a musical. I’m not sure if the song itself had any emotional value for her, but the whole idea was really cool.

Tammie Rubin(?) worked with the idea of the chimera, a “thing that is hoped or wished for but is, in fact, illusionary”. She began taking all of these objects and turning them into these mystical pieces of ceramic artwork that keeps the viewer wondering about what the object is, since it is made up of recognizable objects, but is not recognizable as a whole. I really liked this idea of putting objects together to give each of the pieces more power than was their previous function, and it kind of makes me want to pursue ceramics, just to see what I could do with it.

Shuren(? I’m not sure what his name was) took a whole bunch of images that all focused on the idea of coincidental accidents. He doesn’t take his time to frame a shot or to put everything up just right; he looks for the random happenstances of everyday life because those single moments are what demonstrate how people choose to live, what they put up with, and how they deal with life. All in all it channels the subconscious humanity in the viewer. I really liked his comparison of his photography to ‘spandrels’ in architecture: something that is always there, but is overlooked because of the ornate arches and domes that the spandrels support as a background figure.

I really liked this course! It gave me a lot of opportunities to look at my own work, get advice from previous graduates in the same field, look at what my teachers are doing, and think about what it is that I want to go into after I graduate. I also really appreciated all of the chances that the alumni gave for students to contact them if they were interested in an internship.

 

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment

VISU 1311: Blog Post #11

The sheer amount of ways that David Blaine tried and researched in order to hold his breath for 17 minutes was insane.  Obviously, at the beginning, he tried to get away with not doing it at all, but eventually the solution just became clear to him; he just needed to do it, not find ways around it.

I think that from there, his research on the subject of holding one’s breath did the most for him, not the fancy gigs that he wound up with along the way. He found out how to purge himself, and did so every morning; he found out that movement cut down big time on his oxygen supply; and he found out the different ways that made his goal of holding his breath significantly more difficult. Finding the first steps of slowing the heart rate and calming the whole body down really allowed him to move into the part of holding the breath that took willpower.

His sheer will to reach his goal, I think, also had a LOT to do with his success. The trials that he mentions beforehand – standing on top of a 100 foot pillar for 36 hours, freezing himself in a block of ice, being buried alive for a week – all had to do with his taking medical impossibilities as a personal challenge, and rising up to meet the obstacles. Obviously, this didn’t always work, according to his first failure to stay underwater, but he tried again, and pushed himself more and more not to fail. When he was being filmed on Oprah, he realized that there was “100% chance” that he would not be able to make it to 17  minutes, and that was at the 8 minute mark. But he stuck it out for another 9 and a half minutes, and he made it! If that’s not sheer willpower I don’t know what is.

Overall, I just really have to respect his ability to try and try and try, reforming his process and keeping with the basics, just to reach his goal. That kind of temerity is something that I’ll have to try for myself.

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment

VISU 1311: Blog Post #9

Memento’s sequencing was really interesting, and incredibly interesting. You only see the convergence of the past and the present into a single moment at the very end. I’m not sure if the directors wanted the entire movie to make sense at the beginning, or at the end. They string the audience along with barely enough information to get by on the sequence of the time, because they’re learning over and over again, just like Leonard. However, by seeing the past, and going backwards from the future, gives the audience this confusing idea of how it all started without the benefit of knowing that they’re all connected. Maybe that disconnection was something that they wanted to emphasize, until the big reveal at the end, when we find out that, oh, it was all because of this one thing at the very beginning. There was no single part of the story that wasn’t important to how it ended, but by showing the end of the whole thing first, there was no way for the audience to be anything but controlled by the memory fragments.

This kind of goes along with the first impressions idea that I took away from the whole movie. People always make first impressions; it’s human nature, and it’s something that is significantly taken advantage of in this movie. For every single character, we get a first impression that, had the movie been sequenced in a way that we’re used to, would have been the very last impression that we ever got. Leonard in particular is a figure that we see changed through our first impressions. In the beginning, or the sequential end, he is only a victim of a crime that ruined his life. Natalie is a stranger who is helping him out of the goodness of her heart. Teddy is the guy who committed all of the crimes. But by the end, or the sequential beginning, Leonard becomes the, technically unwitting, killer/bad guy. Natalie becomes someone who is so anguished over the loss of her boyfriend that she uses Leonard for her own gain. Teddy becomes the person who happened to be the person that Leonard pointed his gun at because he needed someone to blame for his loss. I think if the entire story had been played out in the actual sequence of time that is typical, it wouldn’t have had nearly the same effect. In regular order, we would have simply seen a grief-stricken bunch of people committing multiple crimes together, ending the movie with a very mentally sick guy who is so focused on revenge that he doesn’t care who he kills. With this kind of sequencing, the audience is left completely in the dark, and only slowly begins to realize the real ugly truth that works behind everyone’s actions. At the very end, the audience gets to see that everything that happened, happened for a reason, and that it was all connected to this one point at the sequential beginning. The big idea was connection. And I think that point was so poignant because a guy with no short-term memory can’t make connections like that, but they all happened anyway. It almost seemed inevitable.

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment

VISU 1100: Blog Post #7

1. I think that I definitely related the most to Alex Roka, and not just because we share the same name. First of all, he was a graphic design student, like me, and he began to discover the different areas that he wanted to go into while he was in school: the illustration, and the graphic lettering. I definitely want to be able to narrow down my passions into that category that I am the most passionate about, and to pursue it in my career the way that he did. I really liked looking at the different designs that he made too.

2. The lady who came from Pump project…? She probably surprised me the most. She talked about doing all of these really cool things with all of these Austin artists, and she ended up where she was because of the hard work that she put into it. It wasn’t even paid at first, but she put so much time into it that at some point they began to pay her, and the obvious enthusiasm that she had for her work felt contagious. I guess she just surprised me with the idea that the longer you work at something, the more likely it is that you will be rewarded. No doubt she had a measure of talent to go with that, but the way she talked, she didn’t seem to rely on her talent too much, which also surprised me.

3. The most valuable piece of advice that I got from the alumni was probably that I should just try to learn as much as possible, because that’s what this time is for. I should try new projects by myself, even without a teacher telling me to do it in a project. I should also network while I can, and put my name into the world so that I’m not completely anonymous when I graduate.

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment

VISU 1311: Blog #8

I really enjoyed how Dan Philips started off with his project, by explaining his various houses, and what he’s done to make each one recycled and reused. I think that this was a brilliant segway into getting into his main idea: the sheer amount of waste in the building industry, that comes from this mindset in the global age of materialism where everything must be perfect. I loved hearing about the different things that he’s made, or what ideas he’s gotten, and by accessing his audience through this fascination that I personally felt, he is able to continue into the large problem area extremely easily. He makes it relatable for the audience.

He first explains that the housing market today is a commodity, because of the human perception of continuity. If one little thing in the house doesn’t align with that continuity, then it gets thrown out, and it’s no big deal; it doesn’t affect the buyer’s life at all. He also blames these two different mindsets for this waste: Dionysian and Apollonian. With the perfectionist Apollonian mindset, it creates “mountains of waste”, and this cycle of perfection where everyone wants these things that must look perfect or it’s garbage. Having a Dionysian mindset would create mountains less of waste, because it focuses more on the gut instinct that all of us have.

We also tend to create this wasteful cycle of perfection through our ideas of how we think other people expect us to live. This happens to everyone; we all in some way are bothered by how other people think of us, and so we try to live up to their imagined expectations. In reality, that’s impossible, but we still do it. I thought that this living up to expectations was a really interesting point in the cycle of waste. I’ve never thought of it as such before, but it makes perfect sense: if there’s something wrong with your house, you fix it so that your neighbors don’t talk about it. And that’s called waste. It’s a hard thing to move past, but if we want to fix our environment, we need to stop throwing away all of this material just because we can. The amount of consumerism that occurs globally only helps this cycle along, and so the only solution we really have at the moment is reusing all of that broken material. It’s there, what else are we going to use when it all runs out? We need to stop living up to each other’s expectations in order to preserve our global environment.

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment

VISU 1311_Project 1 Reflection_Alex Clarke

There were a huge variety of different points that were made throughout everyone’s different pieces, and I thought that a lot of them were really good, and connected in some way to my own work, particularly since the presentation of it was nowhere near what I had hoped. Overall however, there were several that kept popping up in multiple presentations, and so I believe them to be the most pertinent to the reflection.

1) Editing the grouping of all of the photos. I admit it, I did not give myself enough time to fully edit all of my photos. I was not the only one who wasn’t so great at editing though. Looking at all of the images together is really important to make all of them cohesive. It can have a lot of different purposes, like all of the different versions that I saw in many presentations, such as emphasizing a certain group of photos. Two pictures may work together to make each other stronger, or maybe some of the photos cannot be viewed without being grouped together, because when alone they are just too visually boring. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure how some of the photos were able to work together, but I suppose that that would really depend a lot on the viewer’s own aesthetic, and how well the images speak to each other.

2) Explaining your purpose is important. It gives the photographer the benefit of the doubt, particularly if they are able to articulate the different functions of their photograph well. A lot of presenters had some difficulty in talking about their work, including myself. The idea was to explain how each of the photographers took the theories of Gestalt and applied them to their photographs, and it was hard to define just how and what principles were at play within each photograph, or what allowed one group of photos to work when compared to other pictures. If anything, we as a group really need to learn how to speak about a larger idea that all of our pictures are trying to convey.

3) Composition of the photographs is really important during editing. Some people simply were too close in their frame, and were unable to see the big picture of the assignment in every photograph. Because of this, many of their pictures were disconnected, or simply claustrophobic. In some cases, the composition just wasn’t clear enough in displaying one type of Gestalt principle, and would have needed many more examples to get the point across.

Overall, I think there were some pretty great photos from everybody. If I were to change my own post though…

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment

VISU 1311: Creativity Blog #7

To be completely honest, “The Medium is the Massage” was presented in a completely bizarre format that made it incredibly difficult to focus on and take seriously. The abstract pairing of pictures, words, and sound all together perhaps contributed the most to the confusion that McLuhan is trying to create, I suppose. He’s trying to distance himself from the idea of completing today’s jobs with the technology of ‘yesterday’. He wants to use the technology that he has – in a completely new way for us, but a completely normal way for him – to convey his ideas. It is certainly a step-back from the “linear, or sequential, thought” that the invention of text supposedly created.

In a way, the entire text serves as its own “massage”. The text itself is the environment that McLuhan believes we create ourselves, and he alters it in multiple ways the way that the media all the time. Much like the extension of our feet is cars, and clothes an extension of our skin, and electric circuitry an extension of the central nervous system, he extends his own ideas in multiple combined mediums that all affect our personal selves, through our extensions. The mix of images itself conveys a completely mixed message that overall become McLuhan’s major idea, but when put side by side with no context, make absolutely no sense. For example, the mixture of political cartoons, and surrealist photographs that are sprinkled commonly throughout the pages. And let’s not forget the repetitive patterns and backwards text. The only way these images can really be seen together in a cohesive structure is through the small packets of text that string these pictures along and make them somewhat coherent to the overall idea.

The idea of the environment-forming was definitely thought-provoking. The fact that electric communities have a far greater influence these days than our parents is definitely something that’s the case these days, and the school system is suffering for it. Not to mention actual familial relationships. All of this online interaction is creating what McLuhan calls “the global village”. Where literacy once separated us, technology brings us together, where nothing is private, and everything is a google search away. With this new environment, the idea of imposing old technology simply doesn’t communicate anymore. Humor itself is an example of the new methods of communication that we as a society prefer. The role that government and education also has some influence, where one instills certain values that citizens have to live up to, and the other is busy using outdated forms of communication for its students who are frustrated with the lack of reconciliation between old and new technologies, respectively. All of these factors combine to create an environment where many people struggle with this reconciliation, and the media is there to massage, or perhaps exacerbate, the effects.

Perhaps if we focused on using this new technology somehow to combine both old and new technologies to influence our personal environment so that we can “gain perspective” that was taught to us through the making of text. Since people no longer felt included in the conceptual discussion of the text, they were suddenly allowed to keep opinions to themselves, which felt itself in the divide that readers and writers still tend to have today. However, having a “global village” may certainly change that, and may challenge the users of technology today to gain perspective in other ways, or perhaps mingle into one single mindset, like a gigantic media-fed gelatinous mob.

Posted on by aclarke | Leave a comment