weekly update
posted 10/30
reading: Expressive Processing (Wardrip-Fruin), Understanding Media (McLuhan)
working on: a touching/talking training/exploring device, a series of comment card feedback exploration (more to come), a very unresolved idea about eye contact
thinking about: In the past three days the Happiness Hat has been featured on over 100 blogs, on TV, and the video has been viewed by more than 140,000 people. This was much more of a response than expected, and in thinking about that and also the question of how art functions in the age of electronic reproduction posed by Peter Lunenfeld, the question of audience comes up for me. I think that the creation of technologies that allow instantaneous mass communication forces the artist to consider much more who her target audience(s) is, why, and how best to reach them. The experience of an artwork is no longer limited to the art community, there is now the possibility to reach any community, and choices must be made about the piece based on this decision. The documentation of the work also becomes a part of the piece as well, changing the meaning in some ways, but also offering the potential to add new elements ors layers of depth. Anyway, we have to write 500 words on this topic so there will be more thinking about that to come.
On another note, I’ve been hearing a lot lately from various professors, speakers, peers, etc about what art can not be…design, education, objective, scientific, informative, to name a few… I guess I believe, naively maybe, that anything has the potential to be art, so I’m now on a mission to see if I can make everything in my life into art, or at least blur the boundary between it all as much as possible. Perhaps then I will be able to find out for myself what art can not be.
Finally, I’ve just been feeling overwhelmed (though maybe overwhelmed is the wrong word) by questions lately. How easy is it to change your mood or someone else’s? What is the potential for feedback to change what we act, think and feel? Could we somehow use technology to train us to be more human? What does this mean? When is trying to push or change oneself to fit better into some model a good thing vs a bad thing? How is it that you can appear to fit well with everyone, yet feel like in some ways you really don’t? Would using negative pain feedback to train this positive behavior cancel out the pleasure caused by smiling? Or could it somehow raise the threshold of the whole system, stimulating us to feel everything more intensely? Is it important to be happy or feel good rather than bad? Does feeling good all the time/refusing to let problems or less than ideal situations frustrate or upset you limit your desire to make a change? How often does the appearance we project misrepresent what we are really thinking and feeling? In what ways are expectations, patterns, and appearances positive and useful? In what ways are they negative or limiting? How do you choose your audience? What do you compromise in the choosing? How can you make a piece work on multiple levels? What qualities does a work need to have for it to grow and evolve for you in the production of it? What questions can you ask that provoke more questions?
main goal this week: really get moving on production on this touching thing, but also it still feels fuzzy and not quite right… also figure out the topic for the paper for Peter’s class