mew nedia

I was very inspired by Eric García's intentional use of materials in his art. That's something I always try to think about in my work, and it brings me back to Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. Perhaps it's my disposition towards intensely detailed work that makes me love the research that goes into those choices. I just think it can add so many layers to a work, and it can also deepen the artist's experience of their own work as well. I was particularly drawn to García's prickly pear ink illustrations; the color and the backstory were both lovely to me. I appreciated his humor in acknowledging that indigenous Mexicans didn't use prickly pears for ink for a very specific reason: the bug that lives on the plant gives a much richer and more colorfast ink. Source. Another part of his talk that I found engaging and encouraging was the way he talked about the successive phases of his process. (See what I did there?) I liked learning that so many of his wor

I'm very interested in Baudrillard's choice to begin Simulations with the story of a map. What's in a map? A route to somewhere, a border to cross, a claim to discovery and of being "first?" All right, but how does a map have "the discrete charm of second-order simulacra" and why are the simulacra of today no longer comparable to maps? (Baudrillard 1, 2) I'm reflecting on this partially because I'm drawn to maps and I find their use as a metaphor in this text engaging. However, I'm also trying to think of my artistic process as if it were a map, and wondering how deep that gets me down the list of successive phases of the image. The idea generation stage of making something usually references something in real life, unless it's a concept I've made up or synthesized from multiple sources, in which case it seems to me to be masking the absence of a basic reality. On the other hand, doesn't the fact that it exists make it a real thin

I have only the vaguest idea of what my final project is going to look like right now, but I'm fairly certain it's going to be a video. I first started making video projects in Intro New Media (which are on this blog if you care to view them), and I had so much fun I kept making them for other classes. Video is not a medium I'm very familiar with, obviously, but through this class I'd like to explore the capabilities of the medium more, and Adobe Premiere specifically. Previous videos have included collaborations with friends,  a focus on audio, and a focus on (re)interpretation of memory. I think the lens of simulacra and altered/reinterpreted reality could very easily be applied to these projects, and I want to take what I learned from them and push it further. I don't really know what I want this project to look like yet, but I'm imagining a lot of experimentation in the various stages of the editing process. I anticipate that being the most time-consuming p

This video project, as almost all of my projects have, started out as a very different beast than the one I ended up with. I always intended to do a video project about the influence of social media on people's emotions, but as I was musing and brainstorming I started thinking about a very recent time in my life when my emotions became largely dictated by digital communications from a particular person. This seemed to fit well within McLuhan's idea about a "simultaneous happening," and that "we have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction." (McLuhan 63) I don't think this was a good shift in my case. I felt nauseous waiting for the next excruciatingly emotional texts, or I was learning about Instagram posts second- or third-hand when they contained important information that one really should not be posting on social media. I felt constantly blindsided. I could never see the next big event coming, I could only wait for the floor to d

  John Cage, circa 1986. I have never considered silence as much as before I started researching this man. More than even his connections to McLuhan, I found myself wanting to write about silence in John Cage's works and how deeply important it is to his art. I am often told when performing solo music to "take more time" or allow myself time to breathe and time for the music to breathe. In orchestra rehearsals, sometimes we are told to make the silences as exciting as the sounds, if it fits the character of the piece. However, I have never taken it to the level of Cage. It inspires me to seek silence out in music, and play around with it too. I don't think I could be as brave about it as him, but I think I would learn a lot from the attempt alone. I did also find joy in reading about Cage's life and work and thinking about his connections to McLuhan. His artistic sensibilities are somewhat unfathomable to me, for the reasons mentioned above, but he seems like some

Beats to work and stress to  is a representation of some of the frustrated sounds that occur when I'm making art. I will often exclaim, apologize, swear, or otherwise vocalize in the practice room when I get frustrated with a passage I'm laboriously repeating. I will also scribble angrily when a drawing is not going the way I want it to. Thus, this sound project is made from scribbly sounds and scratchy viola sounds. It's groovy like the music I like to listen to when I study, but it's also vaguely anxiety-inducing, because for me it serves as a reminder of the times I get stuck and the times I will get stuck again.