mew nedia

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.

"Its Honor is Hereby Pledged: Broken Treaty Quilts." 2018 installation at Dartmouth College.                  I was unfortunately unable to attend the reception because of a schedule conflict with LSO rehearsal. My reflection will thus focus only on the talk. See her website here. I was impressed and moved by Gina Adams's work. I'm not sure if it's the bias in me towards seeing handcrafts as "not real art" or "women's work" or something, but when I heard she did work with quilts I was not especially excited. I should know better than that. Upon attending her talk, I realized I had severely underestimated my interest in her art and I listened with rapt attention. I was intrigued to hear of her disregard for the origins of her antique quilts, and I wondered (but did not ask) why she might ignore that aspect of her found objects, when such a large part of her art is focused on correcting the misrepresentations of history. At the same time, ...

  "These are difficult times because we are witnessing a clash of cataclysmic proportions between two great technologies." -McLuhan, pp. 94 This project was originally going to involve photographing people, but when I actually went outside to do so I found myself drawn to plants, as I am in most outdoor situations. I notice very small details that many people do not, and I can be entertained by a square inch of soil in the woods for upwards of an hour. I decided to follow my impulse and photograph the textures and small, complex shapes I saw around me on the walks I took. As I was walking, however, I began to notice how many man-made structures and textures looked similar to the natural world I was observing. From there, I decided to try and critique how people have been substituting outdoor environments for indoor ones, and how they are very reluctant to notice that this is often detrimental and unhealthy. It terrifies me that the world is changing in this way. I wish I didn...

Valaria Tatera documents cultural, ancestral, and personal trauma in her work Kill the Indian Save the Man: Legacy of Residential Schools  (2021) .  She explores the impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples in textile, specifically the "cultural genocide" (timestamp 1:06 of the interview) of boarding schools. She wants to represent statistics of the lives ended and otherwise affected by the schools in an impactful and personal way. In her work, the commodity of ribbon stands in for commodified native bodies, and those people that white Americans' history has tried to forget. A documentary on Tatera's subject, particularly for the purposes of representing statistics as real people, could be a very effective way to communicate her meaning. But she is referencing the history of trade between indigenous communities and white settlers via her use of textiles, which is an economic and cultural impact of colonialism.  Perhaps she doesn't want to digitize her work beca...

Opus One was a learning experience, to say the least. I was stuck on this one for a long time. Figures I would try to go as traditional-art as possible on this, my first ever artistic venture in a video medium, but I did try to come up with a legitimate concept that was at least tangentially related to the prompt.  The line from our textbook that informed my process the most was "our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old." (McLuhan 94) This idea of "misusing" the tools we've invented is the basics of what I tried to convey. In my brainstorming stage, I also came across a quote from a reading in one of my other classes (Queer and Feminist Pop Music) which I immediately knew I wanted to use, because to me it echoes McLuhan's point exquisitely. But then I got stuck for quite some time, until I turned to the idea of speedpaints - videos of art in the process of being made. I like to watch them because they help me learn an...