Autumnbegins’s Blog

new life

This project was a study of line at it’s most basic level.  We were instructed to create lines on paper using an alternative method based on a physical activity.  I chose to tape the pencils to my fingers and mark on the paper while skateboarding across my driveway.  Balance was definitely an issue since the board I used had broken trucks.  For this reason my lines were forced to be random.  They ended up serving as documentation of my destabilization.  

This is my readymade object I selected.

This is a vinyl record.  It’s match in the Weatherspoon art gallery is an installation piece consisting of bright plastic children’s chairs and clothes hangers that have been stacked and melted together in a state of suspended destruction.  I see this piece as documenting the fact that while the practical functionality of the readymade has been striped away by time and technological advancements, it’s beauty remains intact, and of this beauty it can never be stripped.  

As for my observations:

These are the observations I recorded at Tate Street Coffee just before they closed one night in March.  I decided to only use text since I’m much more comfortable scratching barely legible text than I am trying to make my fingers form something visually appealing.  It is mostly stream-of-consensus and any real meaning behind it is completely unintentional.

For this project we were instructed to pick 3 books to check out of the UNCG library without knowing what would do with them.  We were later told to create collages that incorporated some aspects of the books or complemented them in some way.  These works were to be inserted into the books and later returned to the library.

1. You Are a Mathematician

This book presented a special challenge in that I initially chose it because of a complete lack of interest in it’s subject matter.  I decided to check out a Math book since I happen to be the farthest thing from a mathematician.  

A couple semesters ago I took a poetry class to fill my literature requirement.  Several poems that we studied I still remember clearly, one of which is Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”  I felt that it has a certain significance in relation to a book of dense mathematical text.  

When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer

By Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and
measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much
applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Inspired by this writing, I chose to place one unedited image of a starry night sky on one page while placing the same image on the facing page below a sheet of trace-paper on which assorted astronomical charts and formulas were printed.  The second image becomes almost unrecognizable while the untouched image retains it’s natural beauty.   I decided to include a print of the poem on the back of the first image to reinforce the meaning of the piece. 

2. Cutting Library Costs

This book I chose at random because of it’s extremely narrow target audience.  Based on the card behind it’s cover, it had not been checked out in about 17 years.  For this project I happened to find an old bookmark I had received as part of a library elementary school reading initiative program.  The front is unassuming and left intact but the back is covered in random pictures of libraries being demolished and destroyed.  The meaning is mostly left up to the viewer but I see it as documenting the ultimate in library cost cutting.  Libraries driven to cut costs might eventually become libraries driven to extinction.

3. Virtual Reality: Through The New Looking Glass

I love dated digital technology, I feel that it represents the infancy of something we now find so normal and unspectacular.  Kind of like cave drawings are to rennesance painting or hieroglyphics to written language.   

The background image is a picture of a Second Life avitar, blown up to the point where the individual pixels lose their function and become blocks of color.  Pixels are the atoms of digital imagery and by putting them on display I tried to expose the skeleton of the digital illusion.

Listen to Stars of the Lid,

-Luke

Copy and paste this link into your browser to hear audio file:

http://www.supload.com/listen?s=csxhAP

How ironic, my final post before midterm review contains one of my first projects in this class.

I’m not sure how I feel about this piece.  Part of me feels that I underperformed and could have pushed my creative buttons a little harder, but I find myself drawn to the simplicity of the forms.  After thinking about it more, I can recognize some of the underlying motivations for the image.  For example, I has a maintains a certain sign-like quality.  It would feel right at home bolted above a modern pizza restaurant in a city such as the one in my current header image (Tokyo).

Speaking of Japan, this is my endurance project from class:

For an hour I wrote the Japanese Katakana phonetic characters included in groups A through M (including N) in descending order from right to left.  This is the traditional way of writing Japanese characters.  While taking Japanese and looking at ancient texts, I’ve been amazing at how much care and time was put into these massive manuscripts.  

As you can see, I’m not pro at writing vertically.  My rows get a little out of sync in places due to the doe to fatigue and absent mindedness.  I realized early on that I should have decreased the number of characters that I had to write.  Since memorization was an issue, I had to periodically look up the following character to be sure that I got it right.

My goal with this project was to create something visually pleasing that had no subtle meaning or reasoning.  After deciding that I wanted the darkest shading to be in the center, I acted on impulse to create the surrounding lighter shades.  I tried using different techniques, such as using excess graphite on my finger, to fill in the stencils and give variation within the piece.

     To me, our class’s group project is reminiscent of the glowing lines left by car headlights when photographed with a slow shutter speed.  This makes me think of how, in these photographs, each driver leaves behind a proof of movement.  This leads to the idea of memory and history, and how everything we do leaves some sort of trail.  There are always strings attached.  Do we live our lives with some sort of cord trailing behind, like a spider?  Is it an umbilical cord that ties us to our past, which we must sometimes cut?  Or is it like a tight rope, where balance is everything?  Or like that of a kite, broken away from it’s owner and twisting in the wind. 

Film Extra

(From Dr. Strangelove)

            I chose this extra from the film Dr. Strangelove because I felt that the extra communicated multiple messages to the viewer, both intentional and unintentional.  As far as intentional messages are concerned, the filmmakers’ choice to place a dead or wounded soldier under a “Peace is our Profession” billboard is obviously ironic. 

But in my mind, this motionless extra initiated thoughts that were probably unintended by the filmmakers.  It occurred to me that, since these extras seemed perfectly adept at firing guns and recreating military formations, they could be real-life military personnel.  If this were true, what might be running though his mind while he lays face down in the dust?  Is he jealous of his fellow players who get to run and fire rounds in front of the camera?  Or is he confronting a reality that has run through his mind countless times while on the field?  That is, the reality of death.  

for this project i focused more on the process than the final product. tried to document every step of the preparation and creation of the piece. i believe the outcome could have been better but i’m satisfied with the process.

p.s.

failed attempts and experiments:

p.s.s.

this is the value drawing i did in class.