Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Modalities of Action, Project Idea

Going along with De Certeau’s idea of “ways of operating,” I plan to make a video documenting some of the various things that my hands do throughout a normal day. I often find that my hands are doing things that I did not consciously decide to do; cracking my knuckles, tapping things, swaying while I walk. Then there are the things that I consciously decide to do; brushing my teeth, making food, playing guitar. Everyday things that I could not do without my hands.

Some hands, doing what hands do

When we think about it, it is obvious that our hands play a huge part in our lives and it would be incredibly difficult to function without them. But we do not think about it that often. It is easy to forget how many different things our hands do throughout the day.

Monday, March 16, 2015

I have no Yik and I must Yak

Having been influenced by the rediscovery of Wayne White, I knew that I wanted to work somehow with text on images. I thought of the various places that I could take text from: my journals, tumblr posts, quotes… And then I landed on Yik Yak, the app in which you post text anonymously and then vote on each other’s thoughts.

The premise of Yik Yak

A handful of Yik Yak posts are actually funny or relatable, but most of what is posted is mean/pointless/trolling/etc. Posting on Yik Yak is much like (to take a McLuhan quote completely out of context): “complaining to a hot dog vendor at a ballpark about how badly your favorite team is playing” (142). What is the point?

Yik Yak is meant for college campuses, so I thought it might be a fun idea to continue taking random candid photographs on campus, and pair the photos with random posts from Yik Yak. I toyed with the idea of making the pairings completely random, as people post many different things on Yik Yak in all types of situations, but I ended up deciding it would be funnier and make more sense for the viewer if I paired them to make at least a little bit of sense. I screenshotted the "Yaks" I liked and overlaid them with the photos in PhotoShop.

You can view the series on my flickr.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Nietzsche and McLuhan

Friedrich Nietzsche
I found this presentation to be much harder to make than all of the previous similar presentations I have done for Photography classes. Since it was not about an artist, I could not use art to illustrate my points. I had to draw my thesis and arguments from somewhat dense philosophical ideas, which I often have a hard time with. I am not entirely sure why I chose to do my presentation on Nietzsche. I guess I have always found him interesting, though I have never looked too closely at any of his work. If nothing else, this presentation was a good excuse to do just that. (And I found that I still like Nietzsche and his ideas.)
I did not know that Nietzsche had such strong opinions about art and that he even saw art as a substitute for “the God who made a clock-like universe, wound it, and withdrew,” who is now dead (146).
I think that if Nietzsche were around today, he would be mostly pleased with how far we have advanced our society and that we continue to seek out new ways to advance it.