I’m gonna be taking “What’s on [My] Mind?” to Book Machine Houston tomorrow — Sunday, September 7, 2014. I’ve got 3.5 hours with a graphic designer to make an artist’s book. Drinking fake wine and getting my shit together!
Trying to represent the breadth of what it was. We’ll see how I do.
http://www.blafferartmuseum.org/book-machine-houston-texas-contemporary/
Hello. Just met up with the Mixed Berry Shake team for our June hangout, and Hugh and I (he showed up late Ciara!) promised to post here on .Re/act what we’re up to in a the six-week summer MOOC we’re undertaking: Understanding Research Methods via Coursera.
Here is a link to the question Hugh is developing and some discussion around it: How do Arabian women artists view the status of women within the Middle East?
(More …)
Molly and I did a Google Hangout today! We talked about each other’s cool PBR projects, realized that Avatars and Puppets have something in common, and solved all the issues in MOOCs which will be much better after today. Not bad for an hour’s work.
The Stanford/NovoEd course Practice Based Research in the Arts entered week five and launched a new function —Studio West described in the syllabus as “our bespoke online artist studio space.” I’ve spent the weekend moving into my online studio space and I am trying to understand this new platform/format/function/site. What exactly is Studio West? (More …)
Yes Molly! I think you raise many insightful and important questions about the studio we’ve all been wondering about and waiting for, for the past month. I agree with all your points. The only real answer I can give is that Studio West seems very beta.
I can’t imagine this is the final version since the functionality is so limited. If it is still in development, it may not have the better functionalities you describe before the end of the course. But if it does achieve that, it could still be a nice tool going forward.
Limited as SW is, it’s still nice to see images of our classmates work. That such a crippled Studio West can still be better than NovoED is perhaps an observation that MOOC platforms too are very beta. I imagine platforms like NovoED were launched on tech topics like the famous Stanford Robotics course, and they haven’t really built out to embrace visual culture yet.
For me, meeting new colleagues is even more valuable than lecture content, so I’m eager to see platforms like NovoED, Coursera and iversity have better visual offerings, indexes of students, links to student’s own websites, the option for turned in projects to “reveal creator’s identity” and the option to “reveal peer reviewer’s identity.” The option for privacy here is fine, but I’m not doing all this work to be invisible, I want to meet the classmates whose work I find compelling.
Studio West has gone to Reverse Chron order! Now let’s really move in and take this site for a spin. I agree that the compelling part of this course, Studio West and this site is the ability to connect with colleagues and engage in critical dialogue.
huh… I’m confused… it seems like Reverse-Chron when I’m not logged in, but then when I log in it seems to go back to Chron only…
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Ciara, 
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Ciara 00:06 on 07/09/2014 Permalink |
Christa, this sounds fantastic! Good luck and have fun working with the designer:-)
Vanessa Blaylock 05:52 on 07/09/2014 Permalink |
Oooh, this does sound fantastic! You’ll be staying for the discussion after?
The Book will be a glorious tactile experience. I’m also interested in this new “World Wide Web” thing I’ve been hearing about. I wonder if they’d give you files so you could put some or all of your book online?
I’ve been wondering a lot (without much progress) about how to create more immersive experiences in cyberspace: Books, Narrative Storytelling, yes, Cornel Boxes, etc.
Cyberspace has more serendipity than just about anything in human history. Its unboundedness lets you create your own adventures, but it makes it hard to craft anything for others to experience. When you have a Book be it a book with words or images, on paper or eReader, it seems to be an agreement between artist and reader to spend some chunk of time, large or small, focused on a specific story or experience, narrative or game.
See what a nice job I did of making your project about meeee! haha. Anyway, have a great time, I’m sure we’re all excited to see what results! 😀
Vanessa Blaylock 06:26 on 07/09/2014 Permalink |
Christa Forster 08:01 on 07/09/2014 Permalink |
LOL. So true, Ikea!! Funny.
Van, you say “Cyberspace has more serendipity than just about anything in human history. Its unboundedness lets you create your own adventures, but it makes it hard to craft anything for others to experience.”
William Blake, also speaking of boundaries, says “The want of a determinate and bounding form evidences the want of idea in the artist’s mind.” I wonder how Blake’s idea speaks to the artists crafting in cyberspace?
What intrigues me about performance is that while it does have a “determinate and bounding form,” that form is temporal, by nature diffused in the audience’s and the creator’s imaginations.
Blake championed what he called Eternal Truth, which was visible through these determinate and bounding forms. Most of his contemporaries’ work appealed to the senses rather than the intellect, resulting in mere “blurs and blots,” as he said.
I think your active searching to figure out how to “bound” something in the “unboundedness” of cyberspace, Van, is awesome, an odyssey toward what Blake would have called an Eternal Truth. The irony is that the serendipity that you mention is transitory, but it’s within this bizarre space where supposedly nothing every disappears (the www). How does this condition affect the imagination? individual and cultural?
IDK!!
Ciara 22:17 on 08/09/2014 Permalink |