21st century education
Sharing my “Box of Practice” with Katrina Schaag

Sharing my “Box of Practice” with Katrina Schaag

ScreenCap of Google Hangout with Katrina Schaag
Katrina Schaag

As part of Gretchen Schiller’s Box of Practice activities, Blueberry teammate Katrina Schaag and I had a Google Hangout to share and discuss our Boxes. We each found that Schiller had asked us to do things we were already doing! As much as an activity, Schiller’s prompt was a sort of validation that our intuitions were on to something. Or at least that someone else had felt these artistic impulses and walked a related path.

Photo of Vanessa Blaylock at virtual Stanford University Library in a Google Hangout with Katrina Schaag
Vanessa Blaylock

In addition to Box of Practice, Love Letter to Practice, and Circle of Influence, we spoke of art, life, and many topics. One idea we touched on briefly was the idea of focus and how platforms like Theaters, Museums, Books, Churches, and others offer a high degree of focus, but the bounty of knowledge and ideas that is the Open Web seems almost antithetical to it. We wondered if this represented a loss of depth of experience? Or a loss of ego for the author?

Katrina Schaag holding up a card with a small drawing and text. In a Google Hangout window.
Card from Katrina’s Box of Practice

Either or both, we each felt that focused presentation / focused experience is still something of value. I’ve started some very modest experiments in how presentation might offer a more focused experience for the interested viewer. Here are 2 full screen layouts that strive to do this, one for my own portfolio, and one a gallery of featured “single images” from WE, the authors of .Re/search.

Practice Based.Re/sonate
Portfolio.Vanessa Blaylock.com

Tumblr "Archive View" screenshot of Vanessa Blaylock's blog Virtual Public Art
My Box of Practice (Tumblr Archive view)

And here’s 2 activities for YOU!
1. Send me a large image of your work to feature in our single-image gallery.
2. Leave a comment below and let us know how you think the Open Web can offer a focused experience. Or is that a conceit? Should we embrace the unbounded nature of the web and appreciate surfing the myriad waves?

Katrina Schaag.wordpress.com
Vanessa Blaylock.com

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