Story

“Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion.”

For the longest time stories were the way to past down information from generation to generation. These stories were meant to describe the working of the world and the follies and successes of men. However with the even increasing rise in literacy stories, and storytelling, have gradually begun to fall by the wayside and have been pushed farther down from view in both to relay information and entertain. However, with the ability to rapidly gather information stories are becoming more and more prevalent in our world and are becoming more openly embraced than before.

Its funny to remember Pink’s interview with Oprah and to see one of the most basic ways we tell a story, “how was your day?” Pink is right when he says we don’t whip out a chart and start showing the percentages of what we do in a pie chart, but rather we explain what we did in a chronological and story like fashion.

To think back on any memory I have each one is in clear detail. Why? Cause I have a story with it that has a beginning, middle, and end even if they get a bit to long winded at times. These stories envelope all of my senses(Which oddly enough fun fact: the sense of smell is one of the best for memory), relay the emotions I was feeling, and envelope the listener into my view.

Here is a shot at my point.

I’m walking up a 45 degree plus angle and every few feet or so I have to stop due to exhaustion. I take full breaths but each stop the breaks are getting longer and longer while the oxygen in air is getting thinner and thinner. The rocks under my feet appear much more uniform in size and look sharper and less weathered than the ones hundreds of feet below. Finally I reach the top gasping for air and just sit down to relax my tired lungs. Though its over 90 degrees at the base of the mountain on the top its easily 20 degrees cooler and windy. There isn’t anything higher around us for several hundred miles and a feeling of being on top of the world starts to take over. Though the air below smells fresh this air feels even cleaner. As the beads of sweat start to stop rolling down my forehead I begin to realize this is the highest my feet have ever taken me. As we break for lunch the crew and I tell jokes and stories and laugh while we our modest lunch that was adequate at best. After a couple of hours that only feels like maybe 30 minutes we begin our decent downwards. A sense of sadness creeps in as I realize that I may never see this vantage point again in my life. As a cloud rushes over us we begin the long way down to continue the rest of our journey.

This was from the 1^st time of climbing Baldy Mountain (10441 ft above sea level) in New Mexico (2^nd highest peak in the state). Reading back I don’t feel like reading it fully gives the experience I felt that day. However I still reached out to, and hopefully, made a connection which is the importance of story. 

Design! A bit of Pink, but mostly relating to my own life experiences

Design!

It’s everywhere! From the little Victoria’s Secret package to how a hospital is laid out it is literally everywhere.

For the longest time I thought of myself more in the realm of designer than artist. Yes, you might wonder, I was still a photographer but the nature of work I was doing was completely Design oriented. My job for a time was being a photographer’s assistant for a company called Gibson Photography out of Northwest Arkansas. My task was to set up flashes, light filters, move furniture, and carry gear. However since I was the assistant and being the lowest on all totem poles I also helped the stylist we would have with moving furniture or ironing/steaming clothes and setting up sets. As proof I did managed to find one shot that I could use from when I was there, It’s funny to note that I am taking the picture so they can all look like they are working mostly since it was going on a social networking site.

When it comes to working for clients it doesn’t get much bigger than working for one of Wal-Mart’s departments and to see how everything works together to get a final image created and all the financing behind it. It was also great experience to work for such large and great client to also understand just how it is to work for one. My boss told me that this job would entail a lot of “hurry up and wait”. Puzzled he elaborated that even though an art director would be there to oversee everything and help give imput he would send it on to someone higher up (generally one of the billions of VP’s Walmart has) and they would have to approve it or make suggestions. At times it could take as much as 3 hours to hear back if it was approved or not. Generally we would try to set up in another location in the studio (or house that was being rented for the time of the shoot) and work on another set up while we waited. If three photographs were taken in a day it was a good day, four was the most I ever had ever been apart of. For the longest time this apparent lack of getting back and approving it quickly was baffling. Then it hit be this is a corporation that is spending more than 5k A DAY (yea its nuts) to get exactly what it wanted right so these images on displays in stores would sell millions of dollars of merchandise.  This is a corporation that is having photos taken in June and July to be shown in store in October and December.

How else did I realize that design is a MAJOR role player in literally everything we see?

The first time I walked into Wal-Mart’s layout center.

The layout center isn’t really that crazy of a building. The largest Supercenters come in around 261,000 square feet and average around 197,000. The layout center is literally just a plan and boring design warehouse at 240,000 square feet. What makes it different is that inside every single type of floor setup could be seen in there if you looked. At the time what caught my eye was the Christmas tree display, followed by a proposed back to school section and everything else you could imagine, in the middle of June. At the time young old me thought it was baffling that so much time and money would be spent on such a simple setup of even back to school stuff. Throughout my time things made more sense. It was about how to engage and draw in a customer to a product and to see if they could find ways to get them to buy other things as well. Throughout my time I learned so much in terms of design and even though I don’t call myself a designer (most days) it’s still very much a part of me. I have several other stories about what I learned about corporate Wal-Mart, design, and signage and if curious I will gladly share more.

Blog #5 Pondering of the Mind

A Mix of Quotes and thoughts from the various readings.

I thought it was quite funny to read about how Freedman explains/enlightens on curriculum. It made me think a lot about my own past and current views on the subject alone. It’s almost purely amazing to think about how much has actually changed within a year. Now granted in that regard I didn’t have a lot to work with in reality since most of my background was either arts and principles or mostly what I learned in college. Regardless the shift has been extremely monumental and its only been one year! It is crazy to wonder what might happen in another year after student teaching, after first year of teaching, and so on. The thoughts of it constantly changing is both good and a bit mind boggling to think at this time. Baby steps it is!

Listening to the Pink’s Interview with Oprah

The first thing that stood out to me was Oprah herself saying that she had initially just thought of design as basically fashion. Though I am no expert on the life of Oprah I was fairly shocked that she had this view. I was fairly certain due to her career and all the other individuals she had met that she would have viewed it more like ourselves. I thought it was good that she did point out that after reading the book that she started to notice the design of everything she owned from the plates, to the cabinets,  to the knobs, and to even the counter tops. I think this short inverter view showed how powerful design is and that even people in higher places are influenced by it and don’t realize it.

Second, I thought that it was interesting for Oprah to acknowledge how powerful story was and that without it she basically would not be successful. It says a lot about how much we rely on story to connect with others and a lack(?) of other ways that we can easily connect with an audience. Side note, when someone asks me how my day was I kinda wanna make a pie chart and show how my day was. I’m curious how they would respond. Confusion? Missing the final details? Or just call me a Smart-aleck and go on.

I thought it was very interesting about how Pink said, or implied, he wasn’t much of a right brained person at all. What stood out most however is when he said he took a five day drawing course and learned how to see. It gave me flash backs of my old drawing professor in my undergrad and how he said he was wanting us to draw what we saw and not what our mind knew or thought was there. It also was something my art history professor would say and during his tests he would put up one slide or two side by side and tell us to literally write down 10 things we saw. It could be something as simple as one was made of wood and the other metal but his point was literally just for us to actually look at and see an image. It was amazing that even such a simple exercise he said that at time it was a struggle for some people to write down 10 comparing or contrasting things they saw.  

Blog #4 A moment to Nerd out after the readings

After reading A new Culture of Learning I felt I really needed to write out the two different sides that were processing all of this. The Art Educator and the Gamer were both chiming in and it quite interesting. I did play World of Warcarft, or WoW as it’s normally called, primarily through the expansions Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm

Fun Reference Chart how players called the game:

World of Warcraft (the original release)= Vanilla

The Burning Crusade= TBC

Wrath of the Lich King= WoTLK

Cataclysm= Cata

Mist of Pandera= MoP

Its might also be a fun place to note that gamer writing lingo can easily be seen from game to game with just unique game words only appearing in certain games.

Anyways the gamer that lurkers with feels the need to give some very brief history on raids and to show that the game has not always been the way the author depicts, on the contrary the level of it required to actually compete some of these raids was even harder.

When WoW started there were 25 man raids, but they weren’t the top end game raids. These belonged to raids that took 40 players… yes 40. However it was impossible to actually beat these 40 man raids even if what the author says about breaking through was (and kinda is) true. You had to beat the 25 man tier 1 raids multiple times before you could access the tier 2 raids and repeat the process all the way to tier 3. Where the book talks about raids is around the start of TBC and it got considerably easier. The reason was more people wanted to be able to access the end game content. The problem had mostly a few real issues

1.       Most guilds were only able to actually take on some of the final raids before TBC and only 2-5 guilds in the entire world were able to beat the final few raids.

2.       Getting enough people to complete some of the lower raids could be hard enough because limited amounts of random gear would drop and there was not enough for even a majority or participates.

3.       Getting people who could always preform at maximum tanking/healing/damage per second (dps) was never easy

4.       The mechanics of the game were just kinda dumb If a warrior had 1 point to few in spirit (at the time did health regen and was/shouldn’t have been important to warriors) there was a possibility that the 1 extra health every so many minutes might cause the raid to fail.

5.       The bosses were just insanely hard. On at least two occasions bosses were actually found to be impossible to beat by humans and had to be patched so they could.

Blizzard ended up hearing the majorities cry and made more and more players easily access end game content. Boss difficulty and access in (TBC), More access and the 10 man raid in WoTLK, and etc.

One the sense of breaking through on a boss battles it wasn’t always never spoken on what went right. Every play had and in game meter that could record DPS, Damage taken, and Amount Healed. Sometimes it was obvious if a certain character wasn’t doing enough damaged based on their DPS and what percentage each of their spells were contributing to that DPS. Others it was a matter of positioning and the getting a few lucky breaks from the random factor not hitting certain players (like a healer). Then it did get easier, because of gear, but also because it did feel do able and losing to that boss again did become frustrating.

It should also be interesting to note that almost every player knows how each class is played but they only master one or two. Even classes that are considered more noobish are respected when a player who could play their class extremely well and weren’t just played due to ease.

As I finish typing this up I realize that I am not really completely sure if I fully answered some of what the book talked about and what I wanted to mention because I got so into my brain that hadn’t been opened in a long while.

At the very least I think there could be something said that the Gamer in me wasn’t really surprised by anything that I read. However the art educator in me appreciated a certain amount of enlightenment to it all.

As I leave I wanted to give any readers a fun little list of some MMORPG boss battles. One of the three WoW ones on here are  famous outside of the game to nonWow players and neither are the ones that were unbeatable. However I think there is something to be said about the difficult of bosses number #3 and #1

http://news.mmosite.com/content/2010-02-08/top_10_greatest_mmorpg_bosses_of_all_time,1.shtml

Blog #3 Out with the kingdoms and in with the 21st Century

“Out with the currency of the Kingdom!” cries the authors “Denounce the ways of the old nobles and elite! Join by learning and using the true form of literacy, Transmediation!”

Okay so it really wasn’t that dramatic at any point throughout the reading in any way shape or form. However, the message is still pretty clear. Why do we still only teach what the nobles and clergy learned hundreds of years ago when many more types of texts have revealed themselves, or became more apparent, since then? There are good things and bad things I see about this article. I will start off with the bad first. This article was written in 2001 and not a whole lots has changed in some regards since this had been written. “How can there be possibly be good news?!” you might ask. Well, quite simply the wheels are starting actually turn more and more and the need is making itself apparently more obvious. In many ways the authors were right in and in many ways I doubted they even foresaw how saturated students would become in media. Personally I feel it has been fueled by the rapid advancement of the smartphone in terms of becoming cheaper, more available to nonbusiness users, and more reliable. This Google age has only increased our need to help students understand what they are being bombarded by, so they can learn that the image they are seeing might not exactly be nothing more than a means to lure you into something.

I found the Man of Steel article to be quite interesting to think about because of our talks today on what is actually art. It’s funny that the author states that almost 25 years prior it often wasn’t considered art, at least among the “art world”. I think, and people can disagree, it shows that viewers can lag behind an artist work as they have done many times throughout history. In some ways the sad old adage rings true “you won’t be famous until you’re dead”.

It was interesting to about how art history is taught, and it seemed to be mostly everything I have experienced when I have been taught. I always did love my art professor when he taught art history because he would tell what else might be going on as a whole. It was a wonderful reminder to be reminded that certain aspects of modern art started to appear because artist were just starting to look at Japanese wood block prints because Japan was now forced out of isolation.

“We want to decode the artist’s intentions, to understand what was in the artist’s mind” (pg. 68). This seemed like I should have read this sentence yesterday due to the nature of the topic. However, even though I fully understand as a viewer wanting to decode what the creators mind was thinking. It truly is still and should be ment for a viewer.

As a minor off topic thought process I feel the need to type up more of my thoughts on the Neighbors exhibit while I still remember.

I was pondering my own brain as a photographer and thought  “Some of that stuff is beautiful, but is it really legal or does it just cross my own ethical line perhaps?” This led to well the subject matter isn’t in a public place so not legal. Then I thought but it is taken from a private space so really probably has some legal ground. Then I jumped to well even though these images are from large window apartment buildings most of them are probably second level or higher so it wouldn’t actually be that easy to see from a public space so maybe not legal again.

After all this back and forth I decided to actually look up these photographers rights since someone has chimed them during my unit plan when they were suggesting some borderline legal or at least ethical ideas.

http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm

How true these are I’m not completely sure but it does add another idea in the mix.

Blog #2 Barrett and Seranno A Combo that Never Fails

As I was reading everything this evening, in my lovely, well loved, and old reclining lazy boy chair mind you, I couldn’t help but feel like this all had an air of familiarity to it. In reality I had just left quite a few of these topics in one form or another less than two weeks ago. However everything seemed to have a refreshing feel to it, like lemonade on a hot summers day.

 Much of my research in 8730 revolved around how to get dialogue about students own artwork in a critique or other setting. During that whole time I couldn’t help but feel like it could have a VTS feel about what everything I was reading about but nothing would ever flat out nail down the head completely. Then this wonderful statement appeared before my eyes!

“Interpretations are not so much absolutely right, but more or less reasonable, convincing, enlightening and informative.”

There it was not being tip toed around anymore it actually gave all the frame work of VTS. A reasonable statement that was could be conceivable, shine a light something someone else had missed, and provide information to others. Working with the Boys Writers all last year they exhibited these types of answers, most of the time, and even when they disagreed they were able to see why it was said and where in no ways disrespectful.

As a side note: I still can't find the answer to the question Livek asked me about "the perfect question" in discussions. In many ways I am finding this to be a quest that halfway through these articles I thought would surely be answered..

I couldn’t help but also be highly draw to literally the last section I read the work of Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ). It does not help that he is one of my favorite artist but the topic of how people think his work should be treated or has always been almost maddingly intriguing. The responses that were gained were ones I have typically heard, however what was a surprise was how respectful the discussions were with differing views. I think this says a lot about how to have meaningful dialog it has to be a respectful and safe environment with a great facilitator in charge of the conversation.

Other  bits that stuck out and felt like they should be mentioned:

Students learn from observation.

-I wrote something like this in my artist statement/bio for student teaching a few weeks ago as a quote that I believed in and felt was important to write.

Students learn less just because that’s the way it is.

-I feel like this is something that I haven’t truly seen in some ways yet because I feel like at times I have either been underestimating students or literally not knowing what to expect. The thought of them learning less might just be somewhat do to my own lack experience or because I literally don’t know what to expect. Either way it feels hard to see them as learning less. Maybe not something as quickly as we think, but not less. 

Possible Questions:

Does anyone really feel like the really learn less? I can understand maybe not as fast as expected but learning  less seems a bit odd in someways.

How can you deal with people where great offense is taken on an artwork. It seems like the best option is possibly to step away from everything and revist it under cooler times.

Scratching the Surface Blog 1

The thoughts from a tired mind on Eisner, Freedman, and Learning in the Visual age.

Our experience directly shapes another. What a powerful phrase to have to think about (even more so after dealing with a day like today) in the thoughts of life much less art education. How true is it in the purest sense? It feels fairly true when I think about my own life looking back on it. It’s hard to believe that if something slightly different would have happened I would still be exactly where I am today. I don’t mean a difference as drastic like butterfly theory (crush a butterfly in China and a twister happens in Oklahoma) but the principal remains the same, every experience I have had throughout my life has shaped me into who I am this moment. At the same time I am doing this to others at the also and we are all consentingly facing new experiences because of how we affect the world. The shear thought is almost mind blowing in its own right when/if you choose to think of the vastness of what everything means.

However what does this one phrase mean to me in a practical sense when it comes to education?

The first is the most obvious. My experiences directly affect my students and help or hurt their own growth in this visual culture. The flip side is that by interacting with students I will just be equally affected by them in learning what they already know of visual cultural, what remains relevant, and just growing by being around different unique individuals. Then year to year will change even more so! A new year will mean more knowledge has been gained but just as much will need to be learned all over again.

BOOM (or Ping feels more like a boom)

There went my mind being blow away again because I just made a connection. I couldn’t help but think after re-watching Ken Robinsons talk on individualized education plans. Everyone is given a unique plan for success in an alternative school. This is what my students will need because they are all coming from unique experiences that are still being shaped by myself. In a lot of ways its easiest to think of everything as kind of a work in progress that is never truly done. We won’t ever stop gaining new experiences and you won’t honestly meet the a student you had five years ago that is EXACTLY like the one you had now. Therefore my own curriculum must be able to change for my students, the times, and also myself.  Otherwise I am doing a disservice to all.

Questions:

How does one know if what they aren’t doing isn’t enough? At times its obvious but others not so much.

What does one do to improve themselves if they are possibly at the front of a movement? Its far easier to look back and see what someone else has done and follow then it is to blaze a new trail.

Imagination First:

 Rewrite History

How fittingly how this one stood out of the rest this evening after all the other previous readings.

To start it might be fun to recount a well know historical event ex: The American Civil War. Now force the students to think what would have happened if the Confederate States had won, but more than geographically and on a complete scale. What would people wear? Eat? How different would be artwork be? Would we have everything we have today? Would we have had more or something new?

It would be fun to have them explore any avenue in this new universe (or any other type of alternate universe if they wish) from designing clothes based on certain goods origin to how ones diets might change. I think every student would truly come up with something different and most likely each would also create a different universe from everyone elses.