Defining beauty

I came across an article about how the store H&M photoshops heads of women onto fake ideal bodies that they create digitally. I thought this would be interesting to fit in with a big idea of defining beauty, and it also goes with what I made my video documentary about. You can read the article  here.

Sensory Drawing Lesson

 Last friday, Christine and I did our lesson on sensory drawings. We met up with each-other previously to plan our the entire lesson. We wrote down how many minutes we should take for the opening, explanation, work time, clean up time, and critique. We also wrote down what each of us were going to say. We felt so good about the beginning of our lesson that we kind of ignored the close of the lesson, which was a major mistake. We knew that we wanted the class to sit in a circle formation, (which is how the tables are already set up) and have a discussion where they would share their finished work, but we did not bother to think further than that. When the lesson was actually happening, we realized that we should have made the students bring their chairs on the inside of the table to make the circle smaller. It was very ineffective to have the students just sit in their seats because everyone was so far away from each other. When we asked if anyone wanted to share their poem, the room froze and nobody wanted to. We realized that we should have worded that better and not ask people to share their poem but just share their memory and drawing. Also, we should have had the students talk about each other's art instead of just having the artist talk about their own work. We also forgot to mention the clean up instructions. Overall, I think our lesson went good except for those things. I now know how important it is to plan every last bit of the lesson.

Video Game Article Responses

In our Technology in the Art Room class, we are going to be creating a project using the Scratch Software. Many people use Scratch to create their own videogames. The readings for this week all focused on videogames and learning.

In Paul Gee’s article, Video Games and Embodiment, he talks about different ways the player thinks while playing a video game. In many video games the player inhabits the goals of a virtual character, the player is acting as if the character’s goals are his goals. An example of this would be Zelda, you are playing as Link but you are taking on his persona and goals.

Simkins’ article, Critical Ethical Reasoning and Role-Play, discusses role playing video games and how they develop our critical and ethical reasoning skills. This article talked about the usual argument of video games’ effects on children, such as dehumanization and desensitizing violence. Many role playing games allow players freedom to act socially or antisocially. The example given was Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where the player can become a hired assassin and either murder innocent  people and steal from their corpses, or they could become a servant of the law and defender of the weak. The game doesn’t require the player to take one route over the other but it does provide a set of plotlines and rewards for each path. The article goes on to discuss how video games are learning environments. Roll playing video games allow the player to learn to take on the role of character in either a realistic or fictional society. This reminds me of when  I worked at a camp once a little boy was talking about how he plays grand theft auto and kills prostitutes, but he said “Its ok I just kill the bad women.”

The Gill article, entitled Usefulness of Video Game Experience for Students Learning and Creating Digital 3-D, reported findings from research which investigated learning outcomes in a high school digital art class which used animation softwear to create short animations. The study was with two classes, an advanced class and a beginner class, where groups of students had the entire semester to complete a short narrative using the program Maya. The teacher provided only minimal lecture and demonstration, and allowed the students to explore Maya on their own. The students were motivated to learn because of their love of visual culture, video games, movies, and TV. Many students used their video game experiences while creating their animations. The classes benefited from teaching themselves the program. I don’t know if I necessarily agree with this. When we were introduced to Scratch, we were just given the entire period to explore it and learn it on our own. I found it very frustrating and hard. I’m not familiar with the Maya program, but maybe it is more straightforward than Scratch. Although I agree that it would probably be beneficial to give minimal instruction and let the students explore and do what they want, I feel that an initial introduction lesson on how to use the program is necessary. When we learned photoshop, garageband, and iMovie, we were given a small introduction to the program. With Scratch, we were just left on our own, and I found it very annoying and counterproductive. 

Video Projects

For the video remix project, I wanted to show how the media sometimes uses tricks to alter the meaning and context of what a person is saying in order to frame them in a certain way. I did this by altering footage from a Justin Biber interview to change what he was saying. I did this by using the split clip tool in iMovie. I deleted segments of his speech and also re arranged the order of some of his words. I also added in text to make my own interview questions for him.

For the documentary project, I focused on the effects of photoshop on women's body images. I was originally going to do this for my video remix project, so I already had researched multiple videos pertaining to anorexia and the medias affects on women. I decided to use the video sources that I found and talk over them to create my own documentary. I also added my own footage where I interview two of my friends to find out how the media has affected them through their lives.

Observation at Cardinal Hayes

Today I observed at the Cardinal Hayes School for Special Children to supplement my independent study on special education and art. This school was a bit different than the Anderson Center, where I had my internship. At the Anderson Center the focus is more on a product rather than the process, but the opposite is true for Cardinal Hayes. The teacher at Cardinal Hayes focuses more on having the children explore and do what they want to do. The teacher at the Anderson Center taught classes with 5 to 8 kids in each class. At Cardinal Hayes, the teacher gets to work 1:1 with students to figure out their interests, which I think is very beneficial. Another reason why it is beneficial that he gets to work 1:1 with the students is because this way the students are doing the art, not the aids.  He only has one or two full classes a day. He explained to me that since it is a charter school, he has more freedom in the schedule and also in creating the entire curriculum.

Today he had one class period and five 1:1 periods. The first period was 1:1 with a student with autism and was a collaboration with the speech teacher. The student was asked what materials he wanted and what colors he wanted. He had to pick the colors and materials from his picture chart and say the words. The art teacher had a picture board with different shapes; a line, a circle, a triangle, and a square. The student had to point to which one he wanted to try to draw. This student was very excited about art. He struggled to draw a triangle and square, but once he did draw them he was so excited that he became overwhelmed.

The second period was also 1:1 with an autistic student and was a collaboration with the speech teacher. The student sat at shut himself off from the outside world. The art teacher kept asking, does he want to work small or big? The student did not respond until the speech  teacher said that maybe the art teacher would help him draw a Christmas tree. At this, the student's eyes lit up as he exclaimed, "Christmas," and got out of his chair to walk over to the large piece of paper which was tacked onto the wall. (The teacher explained to me that this student is very big on holidays) The student had to say which color he wanted. Then he began to draw a giant stack of presents. The art teacher talked to him through out his drawing and commented about what he saw. He also asked the student to reflect on his feelings during Christmas by saying things such as "You must feel really excited when you see all of your presents on Christmas." At the end of the period, the speech teacher asked the student how many presents he was going to get on Christmas, and the student counted all of the presents that he drew and answered.

The third period was 1:1 with a student with severe mental retardation. The materials were construction paper crayons and construction paper. The teacher asked the student which color she wanted, but the student did not respond. He kept asking her and finally she started drawing on one of the papers. The student took the crayons and moved her arm back and forth, creating scribble lines. The teacher also tried to teach her to make a circle but it was not successful.

In each of the 1:1 periods, the teacher tried to pick a material that would interest the students, and gave as much choice as possible. I liked the personal environment of teaching in a 1:1 situation.

Tim Lefens Lecture

Tim Lefens presented three of his theories during his lecture. The first theory he talked about was the deathbed theory, which was basically asking if you were about to die and the only thing in the room with you was white walls, what painting would you want to see on the wall? Tim's next theory, the double funnel theory, is that a person must drop their ego into a large funnel which is then dropped into a smaller funnel. Once a person is completely  devoid of their ego and of the material world, they will enter a more spiritual conscious. I agree with this because when your mind is free of thinking about trivial material things, you are left to ponder earth and the greater universe. Tim's third theory was that the art world is like a pyramid,  there is only a few great artists which are at the tip of the pyramid, and many mediocre artists at the base. and artists such as Warhol sliced off the tip of the pyramid so that now there are much more mediocre artist on the top of the pyramid. Honestly, I kind of agree with where Tim is going with this. I feel like Warhol is famous because he is the inventor of his movement, and at the time it was new, but now theres a million artists running around and copying him, and in my opinion, the product isn't really anything special. However, I don't agree with how Tim Lefens was contradicting himself when he first said that nobody can define what great art is, and then proceeded to name a list of artists who he thought were horrible. I thought it was interesting that his views totally contradicted the art education department's views of what art should be. Tim favored abstract art and said that art should not have any political connections. The art education department says that art should focus around big ideas. This is something that I struggled with last year in my intermediate painting class. I always wanted my paintings to have some sort of theme or idea behind them, and my teacher kept pushing me to just let go and do whatever came to me. At first I was scared and didn't understand what she was talking about. However, after I just painted without thinking about anything and being in a sort of trance state where I felt like something else was guiding me, or that I was just following my intuition, I made the best paintings ever. I think that Tim also contradicted himself because he talked about doing abstract art like I just described, but I feel that the disabled students who created the art did have a social message behind their art. Even though Tim contradicted himself many times, I really liked his lecture because of the personal stories that he shared. My favorite one was about the bones and how he left them in his room and forgot to close the door to the house, resulting in a swarm of raccoons. He was really funny and I enjoyed listening to him.

Storyboard for Documentary