Happy Medium

I very much enjoyed Lawton's visit! A lot of his work resonated with me, for a variety of reasons. His introduction in particular was extremely relevant to what I've been thinking about recently, being: how the hell am I going to live after college? All we're required to do is make enough money to eat, supply the government, and consume. Where in this formula is the real action of living? I feel like for so many people, their job is not a part of their experience of 'life' - their real life starts after they leave their workplace. I do not in any way, shape or form want to live only outside of work. I'm hoping to eventually make money by creating film, something that I find both a worthwhile use of my time, and something that I genuinely adore to both create and consume. ANYWAY, with this in mind, my favorite piece of Hall’s was his work with Carl – I connect with the medium and understand the use of sound on an academic level. The thing that I found most su...

I wanted to use my phone for this project, and to try to embody the feeling of a vine, but I needed it to be a little longer for my purposes. In the Eddie Izzard clip that I show, he is talking about British Imperialism, and how just the presence of a flag and a gun makes a space into a place, and beyond that a place that is OWNED. I don't know how a person really owns a place, but it happens! It happens on the large scale and on a much smaller scale. This happens all the time, every day--if you want to grab a table for lunch, you put a marker there, and that space suddenly becomes yours, if only for a short amount of time. And then, if people continuously own that space, it is thought to be their's, like a lunch table that is generally thought of as the 'nerd table'. I wanted to try to mimic this kind of behavior, while also making something kind of funny featuring my favorite comedian. Featuring my friend Jacob, who very kindly was my antagonist.

This project has a lot to do with our technological environment. I was struck one afternoon how silent and foreign our classroom was, so I decided to try to place myself within this space. As I created the video, I found myself focusing on time as a keeper of rhythm, but what does it really have to do with the pace of life? We use this tool to measure our lives, but (at least for me in that moment) I couldn’t find any value in it. The one shot that could potentially look like a POV shot is of the clock, hopefully communicating my exasperation with the time. In the end I wanted to create a feeling of tension. The audience, when watching the video, instinctually wants to breathe with the track, but it’s too drawn out and sporadic to be comfortable. That coupled with the displacement of myself, only anchored to the video by my possessions and blue computer screen, which again speaks to the tension I felt within this very regulated and concrete world. Also, kind of unintentional...

For my first project, I'd like to do a social experiment. This could also almost function as a psychology project, because what I'm most interested in is how everyone will react to my and another's behavior. My idea is to sit down and play a card game, and that's it! Except that I want to do this in the middle of Woodman's. I'm not quite sure how to yet document this phenomenon, potentially with both photography and a short video. I want to both capture how shoppers react to it (my assumption is that they will be very curious but not actually do anything or say anything) and how my partner feels after the experiment is done. I assume that I will feel very uncomfortable and out of place, but maybe it will also be freeing in a certain way. I'm also interested in seeing whether or not Woodman's reacts to our being there. I'm hoping to camp out for either a half an hour or a full hour. We'll just have to see!

Kyle Labak's Ach Mein Gott So I made a music video! Yay!  I wanted to use the platform of the music video because it's already a space in which experimental film is widely consumed, so in theory if Kyle became a famous singer, the messages that I'm trying to convey here would become part of the dialogue of this 'global village' that McLuhan expresses.  Betty Boop as the main subject just kind of happened - Kyle was adamant that she had to be a part of the project and I found that the material went very well rhythmically with the song. From there, everything kind of snowballed into iconic moments featuring women. I wanted to question whether or not those icons should be immortalized for the reasons that they are. For example, Disney's Cinderella represents the perfect form of femininity, the shower scene from Hitchcock's Psycho is known to be one of the most horrifying deaths in cinema history (with phallic imagery), and Superman, our hero ...

The Beatles were a very influential and iconic band from the 70's (as you probably know). What you might not have known is that they changed everything about the music industry during their time. Before the Beatles, studio recordings were only important in that they could replicate the live performance, but the live performance was the most important part of being a musician. The Beatles started as a band like this, but slowly they began to mess with the technology available. In studio, they were able to layer tracks and perform multiple parts within one song. During live performances, they were limited by technology, so by 1966, they almost completely stopped giving concerts. The Beatles were important to McLuhan's idea of a global village too, because so many people knew about them. Many different times, their music transcended time and space through technology, like for example their first appearance on American television; 23 million people tuned in live, therefore cre...

The convocation brought up a lot of issues for me about interventionism, and both the positives and negatives surrounding the topic. Overall, I felt like he tried to fit too many concepts into 70 minutes and just mentioning problems without really guiding us to a logical solution. There is merit to addressing specific issues, but there were just so many problems brought to our attention, and I felt like he was only halfway finished at the end of 70 minutes. ANYWAY, as I was listening to his speech, I was struck by the excessive use of 'honor' without really defining what it is, and I think the same problem extends to the honor code here at Lawrence. What exactly does "The Honor Code" entail? We have this basic sense of conditions drilled into our head: don't cheat, don't lie, don't steal material from the internet, return lost items around campus. The general idea is follow the moral code of a virtuous person. Appiah's idea of honor is similar, excep...