Art21 and my appetite

Once, while at the MCA, my friend described art viewing as appetite. Although a lover of art-viewing, he said his appetite for art-viewing is small. It is very easy to get full all at once. Sometimes it is nicer to eat in smaller, tastier meals.

I am interested in how short the Art21 film segments are- just enough information to provide an idea of the artists' work, but short enough that it is not intimidating to my schedule.

I am trying to find just the right kind of snack/meal during long days at school. Something that, when I am a little hungry, I can savor and enjoy. I would like for it to be nutritional. I would like it to be satisfying, but not ruin my appetite.

These are the kind of in-between a meal and a snack that I am talking about and would like to have someone gift me while I am at school all day:

-A small slice of pie (apple is the best, but I like almost all pies)
-A piece of toast with peanut butter, banana, and honey
-Pizza tortilla (yes, I like to think I made this up even though I know pizza is basically a flavor. See pizza chips, pizza hot pockets, pizza toast, pizza bagel)
-Salad rolls
-A cup of cubed watermelon
-Chicken strips
-A yogurt parfait
-1.5-2 tacos
- A tea sandwich (I am interested in egg salad, but it doesn't always look good to me. Also, I carry things in my bag without refrigeration for too-long periods of time)
-Meat/Cheese/Crackers   (specifically, salami/gouda/fancy looking ritz)
-One scoop of frozen yogurt with a topping such as chocolate or berries.

Artist Statements from Threewalls:

Artist Statements can look very different from one another. I am still trying to figure out my own one-paragraph statement...


Aay PrestonMyint is an artist, printmaker, and educator based in Chicago, IL, and has exhibited nationally in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Memphis, and New York. He loves pie, but is less partial to cake, and similarly enjoys the beach, but not the ocean. He spends most of the day thinking about things like Futurity, Slime, Pageantry, Exploring the Possibility of Radicalizing Contemporary Queer Night Life, Body Hair, Doubt, the Problematics of Aestheticizing Community, Labor vs. Value vs. Reward, and "Projects" vs. "Objects". In addition to his own work in interdisciplinary media, he does collaborative programming with No Coast and Chances Dances, and edits an online and print journal called Monsters and Dust. He might send you a mixtape sometime if you ask nice.


A native of Southern California, Marissa Lee Benedict is a sculptor, researcher, writer, explorer, teacher, student and avid amateur of many fields and disciplines (coming from the French “lover of”). Motivated by a sense of critical wonder, Benedict’s practice is an ongoing investigation the complex – and ever evolving – relationship between humans and the material world. Whether communicating via sculpture, installation, performance, video or the written word – or a hybridization thereof – she seek to articulate Jane Bennett’s philosophy of “vibrant matter”, fore-fronting the “force of materiality” to create both a physical and intellectual understanding of networked interconnectivity. Benedict is interested in participating in processes which reinvest material with agency; processes which allow equal space for planned human action and uncontrollable biological, chemical and physical reaction.

Cauleen Smith (born 1967) is a filmmaker whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the black imagination. Smith’s films have been featured in group exhibitions at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; and the New Museum, New York. Beginning in 1994, she wrote, directed, and produced her first narrative feature film, Drylongso (1998), which was selected for the American Spectrum of Sundance Film Festival, and won best feature film at both the Urbanworld Film Festival and the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival Smith earned an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Flags: Walker Art Center Blog

Whaat?! This is the front page of the blog for the Walker Art Center's blog list.

While I was thrown-off at first by the many flags that look like they are secretly for testing things having to do with psychiatry or intelligence, I think I like this page. It is different than all the other museum pages we have perused this season.

I may or may not be interested in creating my own flag-symbols for things in my life and language.
It might look like:

Breakfast: Would be a grey flag with a light blue stripe and a small gold crown in the center.
Tea: Would have a frilly light-orange circle on a cream flag.
Animosity: Would have a large, blue downward pointing triangle touching tips with a smaller bright orange, upward pointing triangle on a navy background.

Exploring silent film plots: I had no idea

No dialogue= can still be a heavy plot! Whoa!

Modern Times portrays Chaplin as a factory worker employed on an assembly line. After being subjected to such indignities as being force-fed by a "modern" feeding machine and an accelerating assembly line where he screws nuts at an ever-increasing rate onto pieces of machinery, he suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, throwing the factory into chaos. He is sent to a hospital. Following his recovery, the now unemployed factory worker is mistakenly arrested as an instigator in aCommunist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, mistaking it for salt. In his subsequent delirium, he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks out the convicts. He is hailed a hero and is released.

Outside the jail, he discovers life is harsh, and tries to get arrested after failing to get a decent job. He runs into an orphaned gamine girl (Paulette Goddard), who is fleeing the police after stealing a loaf of bread. To save the girl, he tells police that he is the thief and ought to be arrested. A witness reveals his deception and he is freed. To get arrested again, he eats an enormous amount of food at a cafeteria without paying. He meets up with the gamine in the paddy wagon, which crashes, and the girl convinces the reluctant factory worker to escape with her. Dreaming of a better life, he gets a job as a night watchman at a department store, sneaks the gamine into the store, and even lets burglars have some food. Waking up the next morning in a pile of clothes, he is arrested once more.

Ten days later, the gamine takes him to a new home – a run-down shack that she admits "isn't Buckingham Palace" but will do. The next morning, the factory worker reads about a new factory and lands a job there. He gets his boss trapped in machinery, but manages to extricate him. The other workers decide to go on strike. Accidentally paddling a brick into a policeman, he is arrested again. Two weeks later, he is released and learns that the gamine is a café dancer. She tries to get him a job as a singer. By night, he becomes an efficient waiter though he finds it difficult to tell the difference between the "in" and "out" doors to the kitchen, or to successfully deliver a roast duck to table through a busy dance floor. During his floor show, he loses a cuff that bears the lyrics of his song, but he rescues his act by improvising the story using an amalgam of word play, words in (or made up of word parts from) multiple languages and mock sentence structure while pantomiming. His act proves a hit. When police arrive to arrest the gamine for her earlier escape, they escape again. Finally, we see them walking down a road at dawn, towards an uncertain but hopeful future.

From IMA's website...

Whoa! IMA has a silent film series. I wonder what kinds of sounds play during the film series... or if there is a piano player of some sort?

But really, all I could think about was...

How is it possible that this silent film has such an intense plot? 

Art Quotes?

Art quotes are kind of weird sometimes...

(from the ArtsEdge website)

This

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/students/features/understanding-art/rebellious-streak.aspx#fuller

PBS Site

Maybe I'm biased, but it seems that arts-related websites have better design than non-arts specific websites. The PBS website was incredibly frustrating. From missing links, inability to read posts, to confusion and chaos, I found this website very tiring to navigate and gave up.

typographic self-portrait assignment

Street Level Youth Media

is really relevant to my thesis project.

Go! Youth Media, Go!

Chapman School's First Grade

"I do it for the money," said no teacher ever.

I read a blog post on the Teaching Channel website stating that according to a MetLife Survey, teacher job satisfaction is at a low (see official and beautifully-colored diagram below):

How sad and disheartening! While there are many possible reasons for this, the blog post and survey suggest it is because of: 1) Heightened expectations for teachers 2) Budget reductions 3) Reductions in opportunities for PD and collaboration - (there is a nice-looking chart that corresponds, see below):

While I question if these are really the full reasons or biggest reasons for declining job satisfaction for teachers, I think that this post does highlight a need for possibilities of teacher collaboration. Where are the spaces in which teachers have the opportunity to collaborate, discuss, and brainstorm together? I think that the internet has great potential in this area. The Teaching Channel Website in many ways addresses this in that it is an active place of documenting, sharing, and discussing. Maybe if dentists had something similar...

In response to CAPE

While I feel that arts integration learning is a realistic way of incorporating arts into schools in the time of changing (declining) budgets, I think it is important to ask What is the difference/is there a difference in teaching through the arts vs. about the arts? Do arts have their own meaningful goals that are necessary to education or is art a tool that is used to research and discover?

Citizenville

Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government

http://pdfdownload.me/citizenville-how-to-take-the-town-square-digital-and-reinvent-government

Using the internet to connect to government: Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick is using live chat sessions to discuss city concerns

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/03/live_chat_with_portland_city_c.html

Museum 2.0

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com

This is the most interesting blog I have visited in a while. I found every post to be very relevant and exciting! This may be evident in the amount of exclamation marks found on this page.
While blog post topics were diverse, the posts held some good-feeling, meaty info on Museum Ed. Because I am very interested in museums as places of discussion, education and conversation instigators in the community, this website was very helpful to me. There was so much great feeling as the blog emphasizes, considers, and talks about how to support things that I see as strengths of museums (interactivity, participation, diversity, alternative/imaginative formats, collaboration, education)- and also emphasizes critical thought and restructuring of things that I think are weaknesses of museums (the opposite of the last list). The website even encourages participation and interactivity with questions at the end of posts.

I was particularly drawn to this group that was sited on the website:

C3- The Creative Community Committee
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2012_03_01_archive.html

C3 is a group that meets bi-monthly/quarterly for specific brainstorming sessions that aims at a "community first" approach to program development. This is really neat and makes so much sense :)

Three goals that they shoot for with this structure are to:
1. internally, clearly articulate our programmatic goals and assess our plans against those goals.
2. externally, invite people with diverse backgrounds and connections throughout the County to help us understand their needs and brainstorm creative approaches to fulfilling them
3. sensibly balance the responsibilities and time commitment of staff and community members to the development process




How else to aim for relevant and needed programming than to aim to listen and include as many voices as possible in the programming process? LOVE!

StockyardInstitute

http://www.stockyardinstitute.org/
 
"Stockyard Institute is a Chicago-based artistic and pedagogical collective whose practices center on a variety of issues concerning youth, Chicago, visual art, community, and social knowledge."

Overall I really enjoyed reading about the many many amazing and wonderful art and ed projects going on in the Chicago area- I am floored. While clicking through the website I became (actually) a little overwhelmed by the amount of other organizations who do similarly great things- I would be interested in a site that might act as a forum for the many fantastic organizations around town to communicate with each other and find ways to work/help each other's causes.

Seeing websites such as this one make me excited about the many places and activities I would like to get involved in but don't have time to because I am busy with school.  I can't help but feel like since being in school I've been really disconnected from being involved in the neighborhood I live in and from organizations that interest me. These are things I appreciated about projects on the Stockyard Institute site.

RWM MACBA

http://rwm.macba.cat/en/variations_tag/

An excellent podcast on appropriation, sound, music, collage, history, libraries, and more!

VARIATIONS #6

The Library

Conjunction Junction What's Your Function?

http://artjunction.org/blog/

I found Art Junction to be a delightful sight about art, education, and broadly- culture. I enjoyed the layout of the site- the simplicity, clean design, appropriate uses of color- the side bar is not too congested and feels very useful.

As a blog, I felt that Art Junction made me feel curious about points of access. How much information or what type of information is just right to grab people's attention and invite him/her to read more? Or, similarly, how much information is just enough to know that the article may not be of interest to the viewer. Art Junction uses large and attractive photographs, a title, and a quick blurb about each entry. I found this to be just the right amount of information to draw me into articles without congesting the format of the page.

I have been playing with trying to post photos on my blog as points of access but I am finding that having a more clear format and maybe some sort of blurb may be helpful...

I stole this from the Art Junction website in hopes that someone might like it enough to look at this page.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The MCA's website is clean. Though there is nothing flashy about the website I think it looks contemporary and design-y, maybe it is because of the black/white/grey scheme, the sans serif fonts, the  minimal blocks of text and information... I'm a little unsure of where my perception of graphic design-y stems from or why I feel that graphic design-y conveys a contemporary feeling.
What interests me is the feeling of this website in comparison with the website of the Art Institute of Chicago. These websites portray two very different identities. While the AIC's site has contemporary qualities to it, I feel that the cleanliness of the MCA's site portrays a freshness that is in-line with the idea of what a contemporary art museum should be, rife with fresh ideas.

I think the MCA's website is well laid out and I appreciate the simplicity of the site given how much information is actually on the site. I think the double navigation bars at the top of the page are great for creating clear and clean organization. I also appreciate that events and items of information are conveyed primarily with an image (see for example, the exhibitions page in which each exhibition is categorized with a med size photo and a small caption at the bottom). This is a little bit of a contrast from AIC's website in which there are many arbitrary photos that are almost like a decoration to the word content of the page.

Smart Phones

Upon returning from this year's Consumer Electronics Show (an electronics expo so large there is a transportation service that runs through the various buildings), my friend said that Smart Phones are the future of technology.

My flip-phone died last month (RIP) and I have finally decided that I would like to get up to speed with the world and use a Smart Phone. I feel that the way things work in the world is adjusting more and more to Smart Phone lifestyle. For example, I went to a restaurant the other day where you cannot call for reservations (you must email). I have seen QR-Codes blown-up very large and central on posters, alluding to the idea that the real information is to be had via your Smart Phone. I went to a concert in which you were supposed to pre-download an app that allows users to interact in a specific way with a song that would be played later in the show.

I am enjoying my phone and all of the things that are now much easier to do. I am also wondering what kinds of things I am getting lazy about and taking for granted...

Things I can now do with ease using my new phone:
-Use websites made for Smart Phones
-Deposit checks via pic message
-Navigate
-Know which direction I am walking/facing at all times (I love a compass, but usually do not carry a physical one)
-Know/check the weather at all times
-Shazaam! I can hear a song in public and get the name/info
-Digital lists with reminders
-Look up addresses while I am on the way there (before, I would look them up at home and plan my route at the beginning of the day)
-Check product information
-Find online coupons
...

Don't Tell Me How to Look at Things: Pluses and Minuses of the Digital Interactive Displays at the AIC.

+Viewers can partake in further and in-depth research about an object
-Research is limited to what the museum would like to talk about
-Format provides answers, does not necessarily encourage question asking.
-Machines take away from experience of viewing the object (why don't I just research the museum items on my own?)
+Machines can provide other contexts for viewing the objects. For example, the music added to the photos of the monkeys with instruments ceramics. The displays could recontextualize the objects in a humorous setting, in a more casual setting, in a more formal setting.
+Machines provide historical context and backing for the objects.
-Machines don't always provide critical historical context.
+IPads make the Decorative Arts Gallery look contemporary!
-The actual content on the IPads seems archaic
+Format is easy to use and navigate
+Machines can highlight certain parts/details of the museum object
+Machines can draw connections between objects in a gallery
-Machines don't necessarily draw connections between gallery objects and the viewer's experience in the world

Kutiman

I really like YouTube Videos

and so does Kutiman!

Kutiman is a DJ of sorts who compiles and layers YouTube videos into one song. The internet is very amazing and Kutiman knows all about that.

Brainstorming for digital interactive museum project:

-Something that would allow gallery visitors the opportunity to place their own work, ideas, experiences, other medium inside the gallery- creating an opportunity for curating and encouraging viewers to draw connections from their own worlds or ideas.

-A place where viewers are encouraged to leave their responses to the gallery show, maybe in video, writing, or art form.

-A game that can be played such as a scavenger hunt in the gallery.

-I am very inspired by YouTube cover songs. Maybe viewers could create copies of the gallery works and have them stored on the ipad. For example, a photography exhibit could be reproduced in reenacted tableaus.

-?

AIC's website is boring

I once tried to make a website that mimicked the AIC's main website- squares and rectangles, minimal images, a neutral font that is not the hip-kind of neutral (not looking at you Neue Helvetica), and the kind of palette that you might find in a model home, a palette so inoffensive you can't stand next to it while wearing a bright shirt. I think the home page is neat. It has a large photograph of an exhibit in the background (a changing one, I am told that changing images on a front page is hip these days). The rest of the pages are heavily text driven and very minimal, it is slightly reminiscent of a template.

To the website maker's credit, I imagine it is difficult to create a simple seeming website that would serve, much as a white gallery wall does, as a neutral space to the individual stylings of an exhibition. Upon visiting other art museum websites, I found that most of them were also fairly neutral.

Furthermore, museum websites do so many different things! Even just to list the vastly different things they do, I must get organized and use a list format...
They:
-Act as a bulletin board, advertising current and upcoming exhibitions and events.
-Archive old exhibitions and events
-Provide an educational resource online (like image searches)
-Show how you can use the museum in person as an educational resource
-Document the museum's contents
-Encourage you to give them $, via donation, membership, or shopping
-Provide the resources you may need to visit the museum
-Normal business stuff such as employment, news, about, etc.

These are really different areas of concern/use. I no longer am looking down too harshly on the simplicity of the sight. What is really curious to me is the identity of the museum as portrayed by the website. While these colors are in some ways reminiscent of the color of the floor in the modern wing, the pale light and shadows on the grey of the floors of the other wings- there is minimal identity as portrayed by the site. What font is that? What does it say? Do museums have portrayable identities?

40 minute project for Jorge Lucero lecture

I got lost on the way to the MCA. I had been there before, but couldn't seem to find my way back. So, for 40 mins I created a trail of breadcrumbs from the lecture room to everywhere I went in the MCA in hopes that I could find my way back to the room. The breadcrumbs were destroyed, but I did find my way back. At which point I got fattened-up on sweets.

(Original Print) from Jorge Lucero

Personal Ad Jargon Discovered

According to Wikipedia, Personal Ads in Britain are referred to as an ad in a Lonely Hearts Column.
Upon collecting many personal ads from Craigslist today, I decided to familiarize myself with the jargon and abbreviation used in the ads. Below is a short listing of my findings (most are from Wikipedia -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_advertisement):

There are often three letters. For example, SWF, we all know from that movie- but what does DWM mean? The first letter usually describes the relationship status or sometimes sexuality of the person.

• D: Divorced
• G: Gay
• M: Married
• S: Single
• T: Transgender
• W: Woman, Widow or Widower

The middle letter is usually referring to race. Isn't it strange that this is the next most important thing after relationship status? It even comes before gender.

[edit]

• A: Asian
• B: Black
• H: Hispanic
• J: Jewish or Japanese
• L: Latino or Latina
• W: White

The last letter usually describes the gender of the writer.

[edit]

• C: Couple
• F: Female
• M: Male (or Man)
• T: Transgender
• W: Woman

Sometimes there are codes that describe the writer, such as BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) or WE (Well Endowed), but sometimes the codes are just abbreviations/acronyms- such as LTR (Long Term Relationship).

• ALA: all letters answered
• ALAWP: all letters answered with a photo (probably means the advertiser will only reply to letters that attach a photo)
• GSOH: good sense of humor
• ISO: in search of
• LTR: long-term relationship
• MBA: mutual business arrangement
• NSc: non-scene
• OHAC: own house and car
• PnP: party and play
• WE: well endowed
• WLTM: would like to meet
• nnYO: nn years old; for example, 23yo = 23 years old

The most common codes/acronyms I found were as follows (in this order):

1) LTR

2) BBW

3) _D_

4) ISO

Who R U? Presentation

The internet may be one of the most generous forms available for expressing and presenting identity. The internet is blind and users can create their own appearance. The internet cannot hear and so users can create their own voice. On the internet, users can construct their identity. Even identifiers such as community or history subside for a bit and new communities, new histories are constructed.

My original idea for the Who R U? project was to construct a single personality and to present the personality and Prezi using g-chat in an effort to reiterate how an online identity can be so easily constructed. In exploring this idea a little further I begin to feel that the internet allows for construction of exaggerated or false identities as much as it does for revealing what an individual may feel is a truer identity. Blogs and Youtube comments often offer really unfiltered thoughts that aren't said in real life. An amount of ambiguity or lack of responsibility allows for many different kinds of expression. Similarly an amount of publicity can be a free and democratic space in which musicians can post their songs without a record label, artists can display their work without the help of a gallery.

I chose to focus this project on Craigslist Wanted Ads for Dating. I think they present a place in which profiles are constructed and revealing. They are beautiful in that they not only seek to articulate a true-ish identity of the writer, but also seek to articulate a true-ish version of what the writer hopes to find out in the world.

PenPal PenPal

I love penpal-ing. Thank you Rita, for introducing me to this website. http://www.swap-bot.com/