Cool Video

This group, Playing For Change, started about 4 years ago to unite mankind through what they feel to be the universal language of music. For this video in particular, they started with the base track recorded in California and then traveled all over the world recording more parts and recording the whole experience on video. I think it’s a really cool product that can’t help but make you smile as you watch it. There’s a whole cd/dvd you can buy or download from itunes. Here’s the website if you want to find out more: http://www.playingforchange.com/

The River Market

This weekend I took a trip with my roommate down to the River Market in Little Rock to take some new photos. I just wanted to mess around with my new camera, he had to take pictures for a class assignment. We ended up spending a few hours just walking around being photographers. It was a lot of fun. We met some characters along the way, but that’s to be expected on a Friday night. I took a few hundred pictures, and threw away more than half when we got back. I think some of mine turned out pretty well, but I can tell there’s a long way for me to go before I can get consistently good photos (at least by my standards). I’m enjoying this learning process though. Here’s a link to see the whole album I posted online.

Susan Boyle

I don’t know if you’ve heard about a woman named Susan Boyle yet, but her story is a cool one to follow. Her performance on Britain’s Got Talent on Wednesday has been watched on youtube 12 million times already. She’s not an attractive woman, and you could hear the snickers as she walked on stage. Everyone was skeptical when she said she wanted to be a famous singer. At 47, she’d never performed for anyone besides her church in her small village. After the first line of “I dreamed a dream” from “Les Misérables” the entire audience was on their feet applauding her because she had blown them away. It’s unfortunate that she had been written off even before she opened her mouth, but her story serves as a great wake up call to our cultures to show how much importance we place on attractive appearance. Her performance was so good that Simon Cowell even had a moment of true joy on his face while she sang. Here’s the video if you haven’t caught it yet:

New Adventures

Well my birthday was last week and I got an awesome present. It didn’t come in the mail until yesterday, but I’m glad it’s here. I now am the proud owner of a Canon SLR camera. What better way to break it in than with a camp fire with some good friends. After getting the fire going, I managed to pull it out and get some pretty good shots. I have a good idea for how it works, but now it’s a matter of getting completely used to using it. It’s still a learning experience, but it’s a fun one. Once I get a good bag to protect it, I’m hoping to take it with me a lot and capture some great pictures. This is a new hobby of mine that’s a lot of fun. It should come in quite handy too as I’ll use it for a lot of my graphic design projects too. I really wish I was going back to the Dominican again this summer so I could get some even better shots than I ever have, but unfortunately that won’t be happening. I am sure that I’ll get great shots no matter where I am this summer. If I get enough shots that I like and want to share, I may even post them to a flickr account. Who knows. It’s going to be a long process as I try to become a better photographer.

Cultural Shift?

There have been several interesting discussions this semester in my missionary anthropology class, but one we had today has stuck with me. The question was “is our culture in a transition to becoming an oral culture?” I think it’s easy to make the argument both for both sides. That ease is what lends to my answer, it’s very possible we’re in a shift. I do think that it is a very gradual shift. With so many images bombarding us every day, or second depending on where we are, we don’t take time to read nearly as much as past generations. When we spend hours watching television, spend billions going to movies, and click through hundreds of webpages every day, what time do we leave to read literature? While I don’t think that literacy is completely fading away, it is certainly losing it’s hold on our culture’s attention span. We’re in the global minority, with 2/3 of the world being illiterate. Politics tells us that illiteracy is a bad thing, but that’s not always the case if your culture is an oral one. While much reading and knowledge of literature is fading, our daily life necessitates a level of literacy. In order for all the billboards, newspapers, magazines, and even tv commercials to be effective, the audience needs to have some level of literacy. In some sense, the way our culture is shaped, we could never move completely to an oral society. If text faded away, we’d still have logos and images constantly surrounding us. It’s all a very interesting thought. What would the U.S. look like as an oral society? I’m not about to outline it, but it’d be very different than I’m used to.

On a different note, I’ve finally posted some pictures from a spring break project. I was assigned the task of taking several specific photos of a town of my choice. I chose Southlake. Here’s a link to some of the best on flickr.

Rethinking Litho

After a few weeks of struggling with a new process and posting about my frustrations, I’ve finished my time with Lithography. At first it was a very detailed, painstaking process that I messed up a few times because of poor instructions in my textbook. Now, two prints later, I understand it much better. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of lithography now, but I’m not as against it as I used to be. I’d even consider returning to it down the road. I managed to print my second color of my print today almost twice as fast as the first time I printed  from a stone.

When all is said and done, I’m read to return to screen printing. The great thing is that I’ll be back at it as soon as next week.

Theory

I’ve spent the past few hours in the library reading several articles about the aesthetics or artwork, definitions of graphic design, and trying to figure out what art really is. It’s a long, exhaustive process full of theories I agree with, disagree with, and am completely confused by. It’s a topic I never really thought too much about before this semester, but something worth thinking about. I’m not even close to coming up with my full theory on the matter, but it’s an interesting process. It really wasn’t until this last year that I started to think of myself as an artist. The change really happened when I developed a passion for printmaking, especially woodcut and screen printing. The more research I do, and the more time I spend thinking, the less I consider the graphic designing I do as artwork. I’m viewing all of that more as visual communication produced by an artist. I don’t know about that though. In some ways I want to think of it as art, but it’s hard to consider a letterhead a piece of artwork. If it is, it’s functional artwork, which in my opinion doesn’t hold as high value as a fine art piece does. Maybe I’ll share my full theory of art when I finish writing my paper on the topic in a few weeks, but until then, this is just some of my thoughts along the process to get there.

Fashion Show

I went to my very first fashion show tonight. It wasn’t something I would’ve done if it were a traditional fashion show. A group on campus called HUmanity put together a free show to highlight issues between companies that use sweatshops and those that are working to remove the oppression and poor conditions those workers face. It was a well planned production. They showed a few videos done by others on the topic and some they made themselves. The fashion itself highlighted 21 popular brands and 21 alternatives that are in most cases, just as fashionable. Unfortunately, the first brand the showed as a “bad” brand was one of my favorite – The North Face. I’m a big fan of the quality products they produce, especially for the camping and hiking I like to do. I didn’t know how much they rely on sweatshop labor. I was pleased to know that other companies I like (Patagonia, Merrell, Chaco, and TOMS) all get the “good” rating from these outside sources. While the fashion show won’t necessarily alter my buying habits, the main reason for that is because I don’t buy a whole lot of new clothes. I appreciated their support of second-hand stores like Goodwill more than any other advice they gave. As a college student, I do get stuff from Goodwill a lot and it’s nice to know that my money is going towards positive things.

On another note, I feel like I have a strong idea for my next printmaking project. The best part is the project is still over a week away from being started, so I have plenty of time to work on it, rather than rack my brain thinking up an ok idea. Here’s hoping I can come up with images that match the concept in my head.

Mount Nebo

I’ve been able to take a few camping trips recently and Mount Nebo is now one of my favorite parks around me. I made the trip the last weekend of my spring break to hang out with friends and get away before starting classes again. It ended up just being me on Friday because of the cold and rain. It was cold, but it didn’t bother me too much. I did manage to get a fire going with cold, damp wood in a little rain before heading to the tent. The next morning I hit the Rim trail and hiked the 3.5 miles taking lots of pictures and getting to know the mountain a little bit. There aren’t as many trails as at Petit Jean State Park, but the ones they have are great. It was good for me to spend the day by myself. I had plenty of time to rest, refocus, and read. The rest of my friends arrived just in time Saturday night as I was burning the last of my firewood. Unfortunately the logs they brought were a little wet, so they took a good amount of effort to get them to catch. We hung out for a while that night and slept in close quarters with 5 people in 2 2-man tents (someone forgot to bring another, but we made due). The next day we woke up to a beautiful Sunday, apart from the clouds and fog. We hit some trails that I hadn’t the day before and saw some history of the mountain. By the time we finally headed off the mountain, I was ready to get back, but it was a great way to end spring break.

I was able to borrow a friend’s camera for break to complete a project, but I also managed to use it on Mount Nebo for some great pics. Here’s a link to some of them.

Lithography

This is a rant against lithography. So far in my printmaking classes I’ve enjoyed every technique to some extent. I’ve also understood how to do it all. Now that we’re working with lithography, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve already resurfaced my stone twice and drew my image on the stone. Last night I started to etch the image onto the stone following the directions in my book. Somehow I messed it up and I now have to resurface and start all over again. The worst part is I have to do all that today because I need to print tomorrow. This is no fun. I can’t wait to get back to screen printing.