Story Revision

I have to decided to keep the story as is. The only revision I made was changing the passage with all capital letters to lower-case letters.

Modular Madness Crit

Overall I'm not sure how "good" this project is. I certainly heard a couple of people say they really liked it, but it seemed not to be as big of a hit as I imagined it would.

My criticism for the project was that it needed to be more ambitious and more chaotic. It was said that I needed to put more ketchup packets at the bottom and that the ketchup packets should have been arranged more chaotically. I certainly think that the sculpture would have been more interesting with more ketchup packets at the bottom, but time constraints were the issue. I had already spent an inordinate amount of time working on it already and finished by 5:30 that morning still. I guess technically I could have just not slept that night, or more time could have been assigned if this wasn't good enough. For the chaos of the piece, I was I knew how to make it more chaotic. It probably would have appeared more chaotic if I devolved it faster up the tower.

Modular Madness Final

MATERIALS:
1. I believe it does. They form rings that slowly lose the form towards the bottom.
2. It would have to be something really similar. Only the way condiment packets make the shape I was looking for possible. Wide and flat and long.
3. They had to cover a large surface area and were really tiny. The cube wanted to keep revealing the cardboard underside.
4. I have enjoyed the 3D side of this class much more than the 2D side so far.

PROCESS/AMBITIOUSNESS:
1. I would say it does. It is as tall as me. It has a pretty complex understructure that is keeping the whole weird shape of the tower from crumpling upon itself. It has almost 2000 ketchup packets that are arraigned meticulously to convey my idea.
2. I initially imagined it straight up and down with the tower being symmetrical all the way around. After messing with the chicken wire it seemed more interesting for the slanted look that I have in the final
3. Definitely the final product. The bottom of the tower is much more ambitious than I had originally planned it to be.

CRAFTSMANSHIP:
1. I would say it complements it. The piece seems to flow appropriately well.

FORM:
1. Shape. My piece is changes of different shapes. Color. The difference of color between the cube and the tower so a definite contrast between the two.
2. Use of repetition and rhythm. Each couple of rows subtly changes the what a ketchup packet can do, adding complexity. Continuance. Your eyes are naturally directed from up to down. Contrast. The difference between order and chaos in the piece should be striking.

CONCEPT:
1. Ketchup is a liquid. The piece is supposed to evoke the feelings of a liquid falling.
2. I'm not sure if it specifically does.

PRESENTATION:
1. It was open and surrounded by a lot of objects that were red and white.
2. There is just enough room to walk all the way around. It is not too open.
3. It is definitely the tallest piece in that surrounding area. It draws attention to itself.
4. Some of the pieces are either primarily white or primarily red, so it does respond in that way.

A Horrible Person

This story I’m about to tell you happened a long, long time ago during senior year of high school. It is about tragedy and how I am a complete, unforgivable asshole. A local girl who was set to go to college the next semester had died that week, and a lot of the people at our school were very deeply affected by it. I personally never knew the girl, but everyone else that I knew did. She was texting while driving from her road that connected to the highway, didn’t stop at the stop sign, and pulled out right in front of an eighteen-wheeler. This made me realize just how fragile human life is. She just made one mistake and it was all over. Also at that time me and my friends were going through a really difficult section of Calculus, and we would get frequently get together for “Calculus parties”. These get-togethers would include most of the class, excluding the people that we didn’t like. We would actually do work about 50% of the time and goof off the other 50% percent. The weekend after the wreck we all had a Calculus party at my friend Jon’s house, who happened to live on the same road as the girl who died. During the early part of the Calculus party we were laughing and generally having a good time. From the level of comfort I felt around these people my social filter was completely off. A group of girls from class hadn’t showed up yet and had just called Jon asking for directions to his house. That’s when it happened. Out of my mouth came the words, “Just tell them to turn where the skid marks are.” As I was saying it my brain realized just how horrible of a joke I was telling. Time seemed to move in slow motion. My brain screamed, “STOP TALKING NOW! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?”. But I didn’t stop. No, I told the joke in its entirety. What was supposed to just stay a horrible thought in my head had come out and revealed itself to everyone. Dead silence. Every eye glaring at me. I break out into a cold sweat and am deeply ashamed of myself. Then, pandemonium breaks loose. “What the hell is wrong with you!” “ You are such a horrible person!” “Why would you say something like that!” A cacophony of justified insults fills the room. I wanted to slink away and crawl into a corner. I was dirt. The epitome of all assholeness was me. I still look back at that moment with great shame, and it helps confirm the feeling that at my core I might just be a horrible person.

Modular Madness!!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

My stuff:

So far I'm not sure how this playing around is going to factor into my final project. Every idea I've had so far has developed into something that could be considered representational. I'm really struggling on how to make something abstract, but still interesting. My hatred of abstract art is probably a factor in this.

Lecture Response #1

Picture 1:

Picture 2:
Totally did this, but forgot to take a picture before turning it in.

Cardboard Project

The project is one of the things that I have actually enjoyed doing so far. The dots are just dots and while they initially were interesting, the tedium that came made it unenjoyable to work on. The newspaper collage was also the definition of tedious. This however, was fun to make the concept art and see it come to fruition. It was frustrating and I never want to see cardboard again, but at least I can be sort of proud of the toils of my labor. 

Throughout the project there seemed to be a common thread. Everything I made had to be cut and re-cut because everything had to fit perfectly for it to work. I spent an entire 2 days of work just getting the base structure to fit on my body well. But after this period I could "mass-produce" whatever needed to work on the rest of the project.   

Works in progress shot

Certainly not to sound arrogant(because mine was far from the best out there), but I was really pleased with how this ended up turning out. It works well as both the magnolia seed and highly stylized armor. I really don't like the amount of empty space, though. I think it could have looked a little more cluttered, though I'm not sure how I would have done it. Also I think the main problem with this is the fact that I completely forgot that I had to have a side to the armor, and it is much less detailed than the rest of it.

For my critique I got a 4, 2.5, 2. My 2.5 for craft was because one of my side pieces became partially unstuck and the other one was hanging by a thread. The side pieces were holding up fine, but decided to completely screw everything up and break literally 5 seconds before I had to perform. I don't necessarily disagree with his score, but was incredibly disappointing after all that work to get such a low score just because some stupid little piece decided to break. To add to that, other people's work also failed spectacularly and weren't penalized at all. I got a 2 for performance which is whatever. I will never be a performer and am fine with that.

I have no idea how grading will work for this, but if it's just adding together the three scores then I feel a little gipped. I don't think performance should have that much weight since we're being grading on the cardboard project and not how much of world class actors we are.

Kurt Schwitters

A German painter who lived from 1887-1948. He worked in a variety of different styles, but was most famous for his collages. His worked throughout the years was influenced by cubism, expressionism, and modernism, among others. He is most famous for a collection of work called Merz Pictures made in 1921.

Samples:

Truthfully, I'm not really a fan of this style of art. The reason I chose Kurt Schwitters over the other 2 was because he seemed the most visually pleasing choice. Overall all 3 were too abstract for my tastes, but I liked Kurt's way of seeming painterly while doing collage.

Collage

Collage: the process of take separate 2d images and placing them together to form a new idea.

Collage came formally with modernism, and Pablo Picasso was the first to apply it with oil paintings.
I chose collage because I've done similar things to collage before, and random 2d things put together seem more cohesive to me than 3d objects put together usually.

Samples:

from Blog4Jen

Karete Roksvag

Dots Squared Crit

Dots:
I obviously didn't convey my concepts well because all of my dots were completely guessed to be wrong than what they actually were. I also colored out of the lines on two of them, which can't really be justified, but I every single time I tried I colored out of the lines on at least one dot. I finally just had to concede to the dots' will.
Squares:
All of the squares were guessed right immediately. My rough got marked because it was cut out too roughly. My relaxed was said to be cut out too uneven, though this was actually intentional to a degree. My  squares in relation to the background were said to be well placed.
Pictures:
I didn't have pictures, and Valerie was really disappointed.

Squares!!

My sketches:

My final work:

My process for this was complete efficiency. 8 sketches in, 8 final dots. Even with method I am pretty happy with how the end result came out. I think the 8 work cohesively together. My favorite are probably smooth and rough(top 2). My process involved cutting out pieces from black construction paper that were measured by ruler.

I learned that I'm really glad that the world isn't in black and white, and that it seemed easier for me to make the meaning recognizable here than with the dots. My group still confused my dots in the final one here, while the squares were unanimously agreed to be the right ones. Truthfully, I'm not sure why it was like this, but it does reveal something about my process.

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Dots Critique

My group kindly informed of my habits on the day I was supposed to put up this blog post.
Essentially, my main habits were that only used 2 different sizes of dots, and that the distance from my dots always were exactly the same somehow.
In every picture I also colored outside of the circle on at least one.
My group chose to put half of my dots in the wrong category, proving that I obviously did not explain my meaning well enough.
The most surprising part of the critique was the discovery that every time I chose to make two dots close together, the distance was exactly the same. Like exactly the same. I don't even know how I did it.