Daily Archives: February 17, 2016

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.

FullSizeRender-3

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.