Monthly Archives: February 2016

Failure Achievement Post #3

Reflection on Creative Display #2

In my original conceptualizing of my creative display, four tree-silhouettes were supposed to be free standing. I wanted them to be approximately four feet tall, because I felt that at that height they started to really make a visual impact. Anything less than that height is really too far below eye level to be applicable to a human viewer. The problem with this, and one that didn’t emerge until I was attempting to put the whole assemble together, was that the pieces would bend so much that they were in serious danger of falling over. I had anticipated this and had tested the rigidity of each piece as I produced it, but I believe the simple fact that they have been glued together for a number of days now is to blame for their tendency to fall over now. The weight of the uppermost parts of the silhouettes is becoming too much for the lower parts over time and creases are forming. Some of the support pieces holding the larger sheets together had also began to come off, due to inadequate glue. This second problem was easy to fix, and helped some, but the second way did not have an easy solution.

Initially, I had a few ideas about what to do to compensate for these leanings:

Glue cardboard rectangles to the other side to try to counterbalance the sway

Cut more slits in the base in order to insert more perpendicular supports

Tie the pieces to the walls and chairs around them

I ruled out the second idea once I looked more closely at what was happening at the base of the display. The sides of the slits were being forced askew, and this was compromising the rigidity of the whole piece. I decided that it was best not to mess around with that part of the display then. I ruled out the first idea because due to a similar thought process. I had no idea if I would be able to counterbalance the shapes, plus I thought they would be distracting on both sides. I enjoyed be able to tell from one side that the large shapes would made up from a number of smaller rectangles. I thought keeping that smooth side was important.

That left the third option. At first, I didn’t think I would like the look, but after taping one of the forms to the wall I liked the effect. It makes the display sight-specific. When I set it up in the classroom I will need to use a different set of props than in the basement of my dorm building. It also one move more slowly around the display when reading the words that wrap around it. One is careful not to trip on the ribbon assisting its standing. In turn, this will hopefully cause the viewer to reflect more on the meaning of the sentence wrapped around the display.

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The connection to the article Viewpoint: How Creativity is Helped by Failure is as follows: The article recounts the creative process of writers for Pixar. After an initial draft, each component of the plot is carefully considered, analyzed, and placed in the wider context of the film. In the same way, this failure forced me to reevaluate the whole project and its message. This failure has pushed the display into a more active work, commenting on the role the environment has on impacting what becomes of recycled materials. This is told through the symbol of the ribbon attaching the recycled cardboard to whatever objects are around it. The goals of recycling, what the materials are recycled into, is contingent on the value placements of the surrounding nation-state, county, or community.

Journal #17 -Theatre Achievement Post

Reflection on tour of Oregon Contemporary Theatre and Silent Sky 

My first impression after touring the building the Oregon Contemporary Theatre now occupies was how large it was, despite its diminutive appearance from the outside. The theatre manager mentioned this was a common experience and expressed gratitude for the space they now inhabit. The theatre’s previous home was described as a small space bound by “a hallway” that made up the dressing room and prop storage concurrently.

Talking with the carpenter for the company was interesting. I hadn’t thought about the challenges that a set designer is confronted with previously. She mentioned the challenges she faced in designing the spiral form that served as the centre piece for Silent Sky. She is usually able to make considerable use of stock pieces, but cubes and rectangles don’t translate into curves very easily. I’ve seen a few shows at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before, and one in particular struck me as having a particularly evocative stage design. Much Ado About Nothing‘s set consisted of a large number of hanging strands of flowers that were illuminated depending on the the mood and demands of the scene.

Image from Eugene Art Talk 

 

I saw some of that same idea repeated on the stage of Silent Sky. The boards behind the stage receiving the projectors image served to signal location and scene change. The painted spiral galaxy served to underscore the main point of the second act. Our heroine undergoes an existential crisis during this act. What does her work mean? Why does it matter? In contrast, the other characters have found purpose in their lives in the second act. Her sister takes care of the Wisconsin farm, Peter takes a teaching job, and her colleagues at Harvard have rallies in support of the suffrage movement. It is not until the end of the play that Henrietta finds purpose: measuring the stars. The stage design allowed her to stand at a level above the spiral galaxy. She has transcended her earlier struggle for meaning and now stand above the Milky Way, which she has proven does not define the entire universe. She looks back on her accomplishments from her place among the starts and in the words of her sister, has “answered the question God put before her.”

Abstraction that straddles the border between attempt at naturalistic representation and emotive fluid form has always interested me. After talking with the shows’s staff on Tuesday it was apparent to me that the sort of stage craft displayed in Silent Sky is an excellent application of these principles. The set was able to function as a Wisconsin farmhouse, Harvard office, ocean liner, and various outdoor environments, all while implanting the cosmic significance and striving of Henrietta Leavitt’s quest to measure the starts by way of abstracted spiral galaxy on the floor. If this floor painting would’ve been done in a way that made its star-nature more obvious, the play would’ve suffered. What sense does it make that the stars are under a home in Wisconsin? It would’ve been distracting. Instead, their degree of abstraction allowed you to notice them when the plot demanded, and allowed them to fade out of memory in other scenes. Overall, the design forced me to think more about the ability of forms and colours to function as multiple symbols simultaneously. This is something I have struggled with in my own project, which contains many nested symbols. It was encouraging to realize that this sort of dense symbol arrangement could be effectively pulled-off, albeit by professionals. People will interact with my cardboard sculpture like actors interact with a stage. In that respect the play cemented in me the importance of having clear meaning behind symbols that are employed for two purposes simultaneously.

I was not at all familiar with the work of Henry Leavitt before the play, which I know now is because of the way science was conducted during that period at Harvard, at least in the astronomy department. The fact that the actual Dr. who conducted the work was never in the play resonated powerfully. The whole set-up reminded me of a parallel in the fine arts world, where master artist depend on a team of artist to bring their ideas to fruition, and then claim the credit for the entirety of the process.

Event Specialist Achievement Post

Buzz Saw Sharks- Leif Tapanila and the art of Roy Troll 

Last Friday I attended this talk put on by the UO Museum on Natural and Cultural History. I had seen the exhibit previously so I had some outside knowledge, primarily of the decades of debate that had gone on concerning how exactly a giant whorl of teeth was supposed to fit onto the body of a shark. This talk was primarily focused on looking at the actual fossils upon which our knowledge of  these creatures is based. I was interested to learn that the length of the sharks- though they were technically ratfish, as I learned- was all based on ratios of the measurements of the animal’s teeth. Some things I gleaned from this talk that either weren’t in the exhibit or I didn’t remember were:

1) The teeth of the Helicoprion grew successively bigger teeth as it aged. These teeth were then covered in cartilaginous fibre to prevent them from cutting into the sharks mouth as they began to wrap around to form the whorl. 

2) All of this animal’s teeth were connected to one root.

3) They could reach sizes of upwards of 25 feet.

I enjoyed learning about how the fossils were measured and analyzed in order to deduce the physical characteristics of the shark. Paleontology has always seemed mysterious to me, so it was very enlightening to hear somehow explain so clearly how one goes about learning from a fossil. Their method involved looking at bumps and other structures on the bones and then comparing those to the physical characteristics of other known creatures and extrapolated how flesh and other tissue would have attached to the jaw bones that were discovered. Also of interest to me, thanks to this class, was the role which the work of the artistRay Troll played in this presentation, and in the wider exhibit. Compared to the standard scientific images one sees, his drawings imparted a refreshingly feeling of life through their thick strokes and subtly blended colors. I also thought about what role they had as signifier and signified. Obviously, the drawings themselves were the signifier, but what was signified was more than just a basic representation of an ancient sea dweller. They imparted more of a narrative structure, which made the history of discovery in this discipline seem more engaging. I attribute this to the idea that we perceive something that has been artfully drawn to contain more of a story than the computer generated graphic image one typically sees in science textbooks. Both are imparting a message, but one expects to get more out of something that has been framed as “art”; one suspects a deeper meaning.

Image from National Geographic

This picture is an excellent example of an illustration that is much more interesting to look at than a similar image which could have been fashioned with a computer. Note the curtains which give the work another layer of meaning, as if all these ideas were performing through the decades across the collective stage of human scientific thought.  

These insights further underscored my project’s idea that the attention of the public can sometimes best be captured not with sleek materials and presentations, but with works of art which display the remnants of the work of the artist’s hands. The human-introduced element of roughness is valued in a world of right angles and straight lines. Works that display a sense of playfulness will prove to be the most enduring through time, because they will always remain accessible, being freed from association with a contemporary arts movement.

 

Journal #16

Response to Dr. Haack’s Presentation and Activity 

A) Dr. Haack’s presentation forced me to see data visualization in a new way. Before I had not put much thought into the merits of data visualization. With the sudden explosion of infographics everywhere my response is usually just to ignore them, figuring if I’ve seen one I’ve probably seen them all. Haack’s introduction to the Nike Making app also introduced me to the potential value of data visualizations and user friendly databases. I also believe my interest was piqued in this subject, despite my previous feelings toward it, due to Dr. Haack’s warm personality and excitement. I thoroughly enjoyed our short challenge activity in the class and have since started to think a lot more about how data is presented in the form of advertisements lately.

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This is the quick draft my partner and I sketched out in class. The idea is that consumers could consult this chart, which graphically compares the water usage in the formation of various materials arranged according to what what season one would wear that material in.  

B) Between the exposure in class to methods and purposes of data visualization and some of my own research into the links that were provided on the class blog site after the class, I am trying hard to think of some way to add a data visualization component to my project. It may not be possible since my project does not deal directly with hard data and most of my planning has been set in place at this point, but I am definitely racking my brain for anyway to apply what we learned in class to my project. I suspect I will have a chance to explore these ideas more in future classes.

C) I believe that now, more so than ever before, creative thinking is an essential skill for a college graduate to have when entering a competitive job market. Besides the fact that the creation of visualized data can be enjoyable, I think that it is on of those aforementioned creative skills that will become useful in the future. Motivated by that thinking, I downloaded a data visualization program called Tableau Public last night that is immensely powerful and appears fairly straightforward to use. I suspect it will be of use to me in the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ-cy67GJck

Video from Tableau Smith 

Journal #15

Data Visualization in my Project 

Image from the USDA Forest Service 

Due to the nature of the topics I am studying: nurse logs and artist who draws on scientific concepts rather than hard and fast numbers and graphs, data visualization will not play a large role in my project. On the other hand, visualization of concepts and key data points certainly will. The physicality of my creative display, a cardboard sculpture with a sentence fragment which will wrap around it, also ensures interaction with my project will be provoked in some way.

Inspired by Shel Marcuvitz’s thesis, nurse logs in a coastal oregon forest, my sculpture will display the edges of four trees that decay into nurse logs in the Pacific Northwest region. Their outlines will subtly emerging from cardboard sheets. Another piece of data represented through my sculpture is the presence of four used rolls of wrapping paper. The number, four, is also the number of the decay class in which some, Marcuvitz among them, theorize rotting snags are able to best support tree seedlings successfully taking root.    

Though not through the medium of a sophisticated digital image, my project is still cognizant of the creative potentials that lie inherent in the mounds of data that are ceaselessly churned out by scientists and researchers.  

Public Art- Subtle Influence

How can we make cities more visually interesting and evocative of the wider world that surrounds us?

I have seen a fair bit of public art. Large, usually abstract works that purport to signifying some intellectual concept dot the modern city-scape. Not only are these meanings usually not immediately grasped, there is often little reason to stick around the artwork to take the the necessary time to discover its meaning.

Image from Art Parks International 

If no one is ever to understand its purpose, has an artwork failed to be an effective piece of public art? If something is seen everyday, what effects does it have on the viewer?

This video, though approaching this idea from a different angle, speaks to the second question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQXe1CokWqQ

Video from Youtube 

Buster Simpson presents an alternative vision, which is not surprising, considering his early art career saw both the founding of an innovative art glass studio: Pilchuck Glass Studios and avant-garde performances. One of these performances included throwing rocks withe word “purge” on them at the World Trade Center – from a great distance of course. Simpson’s work is able to make statements, but they are not often large mental blows and quite often involve some bit of humor. His alternative vision is of an “art in public” which, instead of merely inhabiting space, poses evocative, light-hearted, and creative “solutions” to difficult concepts. Environmental degradation and restoration, recycling, and gentrification are but a sampling of the topics this artist has made statements on in the past decades.

His accessible art suggests at once leaves the viewer appreciative, inquisitive (over the natural phenomena that that specific work is founded on), and open to the vastness of possibility that exists within a city that is not subject strict codes and regularity, but instead a grounds for functional playfulness, humor and wonder.

Failure Achievement Post #2

Reflection on Research 

While researching the studies that have been done on nurse logs, I came to a point where I realized I had lost sight of the scope of the this project. I diligently searched through the vast scientific databases available to UO students online, and at one point had upwards of twenty-two different articles saved. Through the process of narrowing down which of Buster Simpson’s projects I was going to focus on, I also narrowed that list of scientific articles considerably. Three of those articles, however, turned out to be Ph. D. theses and my better instincts kicked in. I chose not to use these sources in my project due to their overwhelming length and dense subject matter, much of which went over my head. Instead, I narrowed down my pool of articles yet again, and printed them out in order to take written notes on them.

Even here, my desire to delve deeper into the subject than time permitted got the best of me. One of the articles I had selected and printed turned out upon further review to be only distantly related to the science I was studying.

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Notice the title and the lack of relation to any mention of nurse logs. Part of the article included mentions of tree decay, a topic related to the broader study of nurse logs, but ultimately not a focus of my project. 

This process of failure taught me some important research skills that will undoubtably aid me in my college career. Namely: take time to consider the scope of what the research project requires, and to suppress my own insatiable desire to have complete knowledge about a subject before discussing it. In reality, this later desire is very often not feasible.

This realization ties in in an interesting way to the BBC article Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure . The article recounts the story of a ceramics teacher who divided his students into two groups – one that was to graded upon quantity of pots produced and the other upon quality. With this particular temptation, that is, to consider a topic more than is necessary, I found that my quandary was the same as the later group. By the end of the class, they had spent more time theorizing than producing.

Since this failure, I have spent some time doing quick free writes on how the different concepts I have been studying relate to one another. This practice eventually lead to the flow chart included in one of my previous journal posts.

Failure Achievement Post

Reflection on my Creative Response Component

In the initial model of my creative display, the half-outlines of trees were meant to be carved out of single sheets of cardboard. I wanted them to have some height, at least 3-4′, so that they made a human-sized statement when viewed.

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After some initial scavenging, it appears that there is currently a shortage of large, rectangular pieces of cardboard being recycled. In response to this, I plan to find as many large pieces as I can, piece them together into rectangles, and then add bracing rectangles to one or both sides to ensure that the whole mass stands upright on its supports.

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This realization connects to the BBC article – Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure – in the following way: Andrew Stanton advises “be wrong as fast as [you] can”. There is no possible way to be wrong before the beginning of the actual art-making, so in respect to this idea I have certainly “succeeded” in my failure. 

I believe that this setback has the potential to underscore my point – of forgetting about materials after we have used them – even more strongly than if the tree-outlines were composed of whole sheets of cardboard. These rag-tag pieces very obviously tell that they have been discarded. In this way, they simplify the story-telling of the sculpture.

Journal #14

Response to The Beauty of Physics: Patterns, Principles, and Perspectives 

Image from Wikipedia

The key idea of the beginning of this article, that the mathematical models used in physics are simply projections or “maps” of physical phenomena draws together two ideas that I have had before. As such, I found the article particularly interesting to read.

In my seventh grade geography class I was introduced to the Mercator projection and its inherent distortions. I tucked that information into the back of my mind, but didn’t think on it very often. Now in college, I am taking entry level physics classes and have had a limited dealing with different physical models that describe the world accurately enough to perform calculations, but are of course simplifications of the real events taking place. This idea has always intrigued me: that one is able to glean useable results from the world by essentially assuming false information. If it were not for this article, I would have never seen the connection between these two realizations from my past. Granted, I was largely lost in the article’s further explication of this metaphor in regards to quantum mechanics, but it was still interesting to witness the incredibly complex mathematics that have been developed to explain the world given the inherent limitation of never actually being able to describe anything with complete certainty. In a way, this is a metaphor for the stories of reality that each human tells themselves in order to describe an experience that they have no way of fully understanding. They can never view it at the “full scale”, be that the full scale of time, the complete sensations of everything living on the planet (to say nothing of knowing the complete definition of life), or even just the complete set of events that each individual action will set into motion. This last idea is explored wonderfully in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, in which a form of math so advanced is produced that a man is able to accurately predict the tides of history based on the actions of the masses.     

Image from Collider

 Since I am intrigued by the illustrations and the general concepts of the latter half of this article, I decided to do some basic research into some of the mathematical terms with which I was unfamiliar. In reading about unitary evolution operators, qubits, and Bloch spheres, I came across a whole host of other terms with which I am unfamiliar. These, of course, also impede my understanding. I was able to see the connection between the metaphor of the “non-locality” of a three-dimensional ball projected onto a two-dimensional surface and the “non-locality” of quantum mechanics being “mapped” into systems that are less complex. One of the results of this, at least in my brief understanding, is quantum entanglement. This allows electrons to somehow communicate instantaneously across vast distances. If these systems, particularly the Bloch sphere “map” (at top of post), are also distorted in some way from reality, it begs the question: how much more complicated is the world beyond even what we can conceive of?  

Journal #13

Reflection on Dr. Dawson’s Presentation 

Image from weheartit.com

 

A) My experience in my high school anatomy class served me well today. I was able to connect the terms I had learned in that class with a physical heart. The opportunity to handle a real organ of human anatomy solidified the terms and science I had learned before. My main takeaway from her discussion today was not directly related to the tangible organ, however. What I found most interesting was when Dr. Dawson asked the class where their mental images of anatomically correct hearts came from. The answers were varied-some came from science textbooks, some from Youtube or social media, my own mental image was informed by a combination of scientific images and cartoons. These answers made me think more about how knowledge is disseminated through society. The large majority of people come upon scientific images second or third hand. That is, they do not have access to facilities such as cadaver labs or electron microscopes. It raises the question- Would the fields of science seem appear more accessible to the general public if this equipment was more readily available? instead of in the possession of the select few who are able to reach the upper echelons of academia? 

B) Since my project this term does not deal with a physiological component, there was no direct correlation between this guest speaker and this specific project. However, her active demonstration at the end of the session – in which the whole class was employed to symbolically carry out the role of the heart through movement – gave me a new perspective on how performance could be used to visualize data.

C) The aforementioned realization that information can come from an enormous variety of sources gives me a lot to think about as I move forward both in my college career and beyond. As someone with a burgeoning interest in contemporary art and visual culture, I decided to explore the ideas of the beauty of visualizing data, and came across an interesting article.

Is Data Visualization the Future of Art?   

(personal note on the above article: it is my personal opinion that painting will never lose its relevancy. Some of the earliest records of human art we have are cave paintings, and the traditions has only become more richly varied and provocative since then.)

Today’s presentation may have not made me decide to rush to the anatomy department and pursue a career in medical study, but it definitely planted some new ideas in my head. I would argue that that is just as impactful.

Image from Visual News