Candy Depew

In my authoritative opinion, this was the best speaker to date for our weekly presentation. Candy - although being a little too ego-centric for my taste - was highly inspirational for her ingenuity and well-rounded, highly accomplished artistic experiences. She spoke of apprenticeship as being a wonderful opportunity to learn new artistic techniques and to master new mediums, and instead of paying tuition for this priceless knowledge, one simply helps the instructor with their own work or installations. Through these means, Candy has become a master silkscreen artist who is also highly accomplished in the areas of sculpture and ceramic molds, prints, etc. - truly multi-media.

Labor in exchange for art skills? Sounds like a fair trade to me, if not advantageous for the apprentice! And although I was aware that practices of this nature existed, I had no idea how accesible - widespread even - they were to art students! I would have to be clinically insane not to take advantage of this opportunity at some point in my life, especially considering my own financial impairment.

Text Drawings

For last week's assignment in computer class, we were instructed to create 3 text drawings using Adobe Illustrator: 1 was to be an abstract piece; the 2nd a realistic representation of an object; the 3rd was the pictorial representation of an action or state of being. This week we were to redo one of our drawings.

Might I just say that in summary of this experience, I find Adobe Illustrator...to be...the...most...infuriating...thing...ever...mostly because it can't read my mind, which is always an annoying quality for software because then it doesn't understand that I JUST want to move this one object up to join with this other one, or I JUST want to select these three figures WITHOUT selecting everything behind them, or I JUST want to move this one object but you won't let me click on it...!!! ...but I digress.

Anyways, I suppose I should explain my thought processes to some degree: I began with the abstract piece because I had zero experience with Illustrator prior to the assigment, and I figured that playing around with the tools, fonts and mechanisms would leave me with a pretty abstract piece regardless. Two birds with one stone! And although after creating whatever...that image was...I am no Illustrator master, but at least I had a better feel for the program's general capabilities (for this piece, I really focused on moving letters/icons around, arranging them, etc). Following this, I tackled the "representation of an object" piece and decided to make a bunny head using the "little bunny foo foo" lyric text repeatedly to fill the spaces and create the outlines. I wasn't thrilled with the result because it looked rather messy and wasn't the most proficient exploration of shading with letters/text, however it provided me with additional experience to carry into the next piece! For my final creation, I chose the word "pointy" and, after much deliberation (i.e. searching for the pointiest symbol on the keyboard), decided to formulate the word and background with "^". Sharp, eh?

After viewing everyone else's work, I decided I would recreate the bunny using only letters (in Arial font because all Illustrator versions have that and I was tired of losing text moving from computer to computer...) because it seemed fun and most true to the assignment.

WELL...there it is! (haha, Amadeus quote. Anybody get it?)

Artist's studio (and death to powerpoint) - lecture response

Of all the lectures we've sat through, this one was by far the least engaging. I found this ironic considering one of the artist's underlying messages was "powerpoint is boring, so I will use this alternative presentation program to capture your interest".
My attention was far from captured. And I found the presentation - or my interpretation of the presentation at least - to be lacking in relevance or value to our artistic journey. "The artist's studio"...? Does this truly need to be explored? The studio - again, in my own opinion - should be an expression of the artist; a comfortable environment that expresses their interests and offers some degree of inspiration. If your studio does this, you're golden. But I'm not entirely sure why one would create art in a place that isn't condusive to the practice. Wherever we are making art, it's some extension of our studio.

BAUHAUS

I find myself to be largely supportive of the bauhaus approach to art education - an introduction to all foundation branches of art, and then working towards a specialization after considering all options. For not only is it a wonderful opportunity to be able to experiment with everything to be absolutely certain your specialization is the one you enjoy doing the most, each medium or category of art has its own approaches that the student will learn when taking those courses, and therefore be able to incorporate different angles of art into their work. By extension, I am also largely satisfied with the foundation program offered at Tyler: although foundation courses are tedious and highly demanding, it's wonderful to be offered a wide array of approaches and aspects of art before selecting and specializing. However, I am highly upset by the weak array of general education courses offered to satisfy our general education requirements at Tyler. I am a strong advocate of well-rounded education, and an equally strong advocate for not wasting my time and money. Having suffered through a rigorous academic program throughout my middle- and high-school years (IB program), I have already received a VERY well-rounded and meticulous education and feel as though the gen-ed classes offer me little to nothing (speaking in terms of attaining knowledge). For instance, I recently switched out of an "evolution and extinctions" class because the professor started talking about items like photosynthesis and general animal skeletal systems as an overview for things we would learn that semester. I have already passed through college-level classes in all of the core subject areas: math, science/biology, english, history...and now they're making me pay for knowledge I already have in order to obtain my degree?? There is something fundamentally wrong when your academic advisor tells you there is no way out of the gen-ed requirements, and that "at least it will be an easy 'A'".

Is it legal? - collaged music videos

The conclusory stance of the previous post: utilizing the image of somebody else in a slanderous way for monetary gain without their consent is highly inappropriate and deserving of monetary compensation. I find this especially true if the image was only slightly modified by the user: for instance, Alison's photo was minimally modified with a sexually-indicative and humiliating caption.
However, in the case of "anime music videos" and other meticulously-assembled videos combining pre-made music with snipits of pre-made networking, I find these to be perfectly legal and void of harm to the orignal video/music artists. These free-lance internet collage artists take original works and painstakingly cut and rebuild them into something truly their own without monetary gain (although internet popularity has some degree of unnamed value). These collaged music videos don't detract from the sales of the original artists. If anything, they boost their popularity by advertising the works all across the internet to millions of viewers! I myself have come across songs in personally-made music videos on YouTube that I didn't know before, found myself liking, and then proceeded to purchase them on iTunes.

If a person can take the images of other popular works of visual art, cut them up, reassemble them, and call the finished piece their own, why can't the same be done with videos and music recombined in a completely unique way?

Poor Alison...

Understandably, if a picture is posted on the web without a copyright, it becomes public property. However, I find it highly inappropriate for a company to utilize the personal photo of a minor with sexually-indicative captions for monetary gain. It is my firm belief that Virgin Moblie (Australia) is in the wrong for having taken the photo of the young teenager Alison without any sort of authorization or parental consent.
What if the same caption was applied to the image and it was posted somewhere popularly viewed on the internet by an anonymous body who didn’t gain any monetary surpluses? I wouldn’t have the same reservations…although internet popularity becomes another object of value. I find that the best-case scenario would be if someone were to use the photo for a reason largely void of gain (ex: a collage) without slandering or humiliating the subject in a public place.
Were I Alison, I too would be pressing for monetary compensation. Is this approach ethical; does it pose a true solution to the problem? With the value placed in money, I’d say so: if Virgin Mobile (Australia) were fined a sizeable amount for their ignorant use of internet images (the ignorance being a failure to seek out undoubted permission to use said image), it would raise a warning to all other companies (etc.) that there are still lines to be crossed when dealing with items posted in public domains on the internet.

Artifacts and sketches from Chinatown

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Adventure to Chinatown

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Exploring Philadelphia - chinatown edition

Well, I grew up and have always lived in the suburbs of Wilmington, DE. We have a section of I-95 running in close proximity to our neighborhood, and there's the city of Wilmington right closeby...that's it, the rest is very plain and inaccessible by foot. The nearest store is over a mile from my house, and there aren't any sidewalks so driving is the safest option. Buses hardly ever run through our neighborhoods; I've always been highly dependent on my parents for transportation to, well, anywhere.

SO, this whole independence thing and lack of cars/parents driving said cars is incredibly, INCREDIBLY new to me. I gathered a couple new friends - Marilyn, Kirana and Marilyn's boyfriend Carlos - and coerced them into accompanying me to chinatown. We took the broad street subway to the vine-race station (they had to explain to me how to use the day pass: at first, I tried swiping it without activating it first. It was soooo confusing) and then walked the three or four blocks down race street to the Chinatown area. Surprisingly, I was the navigator! Me! An out-of-state girl who's not only directionally challenged: I completely lack common sense and am a horrible leader. By some miraculous stroke of luck, I led our party there and back without incident. AMAZING!!!

While in Chinatown, we did some light shopping and stopped for lunch at a corner restaurant that served general Chinese and Vietnamese dishes. First, we jumped into a cool little cafe on race street that serves bubble tea in adorable Hello Kitty-print disposable cups! At a 99 cents store (I don't think the store owner understands the concept of "99 cents", because half the items in there were over $10 O_O), Marilyn and I picked up some delicious red bean mochi while Kirana selected a bag of dried fish sticks. They had some seriously awesome and exotic packaged food at astoundingly cheap prices: pickled ginger, ginger candy, dried pickled plums, those fruit-filled marshmallow things, dried sardines, etc. etc. Afterwards I insisted on stopping at a produce store in search of canned lychee nuts, because they're delicious and food stores NEVER have them. But I digress. Of course, being a group composed of mostly girls, we stopped at the "Sanrio" store right down the way from friendship gate, although we refrained from purchasing anything because the prices at this particular shop are nonsensically high. Finally, we made a stop at one of the many Chinese bakeries in the area where I picked up a couple bean buns and almond buns (I don't think anyone else followed suit), and then we made our way back to the subway, arms laden with bags.

Finding our way back into the subway system was another adventure entirely. We didn't realize the vine-race station was only an exit, and it took us about an hour of interrogating passers-by and wandering back towards the Ben Franklin building that the only accesspoint was in that direction. GRAH it was infuriating. And THEN, while we were waiting for the train, two people started fist-fighting several yards to our left! This attracted a sizeable crowd of onlookers, and even a Septa worker stopped to watch for a second before wandering off again, and just as the punches were gaining accuracy, the train made its noisy entrance and dispersed the crowd - even the fighters.

I refuse to ever ride the subway alone. EVER.