Semester Take Away

There are many things that stood out to me this semester that have really helped to improve my skills for creativity, along with social skills, and my goals for life after college regarding what I may want to do. I feel that my mind was very opened to the idea that I can really create anything I want when I put effort into it. Before I would always just wait for someone to tell me to create something, or expect to get an assignment to give me inspiration. Now I create for myself, and create in certain ways that I never would have before. I have learned that I have a lot more creative passion that I ever realized before. I have also become much more open to having new experiences and meeting new people just through all that I have done in this class. It has helped me realize a lot about trying new things and not being afraid to take chances and get the most I can out of any situation. This includes being willing to just talk to others and experience all that I can through my own creativity and others' life experiences that they can share. I have also certainly made a change in my life involving what I want to do after college. I was able to explore my creativity a lot more in this class, and have been able to better define the type of work I want to someday pursue in my future careers. This has been a very influential semester for me. I don't think I could get any kind of experience like the one I had through any other course, and it has really helped to develop more of my college education and abilities.

Class Take Away 16

In this final class I was able to experience seeing all of the great ways people were able to transform their books, along with discussing a lot of different things about seeing sideways and what has happened throughout the semester. I really appreciate all the opportunities I've had to discuss these things with my altared book, and how I was able to express myself freely through the assignment. I was really impressed with the ways some people completely deconstructed their books and were able to create something completely new out of them. For my project, I really enjoyed the work I put into it, and all that I was able to communicate to others with it.

Altared book of the self

I believe that combining technology and the human body in the way she did in the video was not a bad thing at all. She was exploring new ways to alter the appearance and functions of the body to give a new point of view or even a new presence overall for the person being altered. This way of thinking and creating is certainly a unique field of work, but definitely pushes many boundaries of what is accepted by society, and even what is typically expected of normal human bodies. I believe combining a media arts and science project with my own body would definitely push my limits in many different methods and give me some kind of new perspective on how I approach new media. I started with a textbook that I have had for many years and have always dreaded, my “Scholastic Children’s Dictionary”. This book had always been the most cumbersome issue for me to worry about for many of my grade school years. For some reason in many of my classes during this time I had frequent assignments that involved looking up definitions in my dictionary for certain vocabulary words of each week. I was always hesitant to do these assignments because I hated having to flip back and forth pointlessly for hours just to find little words to write down for homework. I always wanted to just use the internet to look up definitions, as that would have taken a lot less time, but back then I still had dial-up internet, and my parents would not let me use it just for homework that had other ways of being completed. Ever since that time of my life I have always seen this book and just remembered the exasperating times that it always brought about.

This course has taught me many great things about being a digital artist and a creative thinker. I feel that through all I have done to the book I have represented myself well. I cut out pictures and word groups relating to the assignments we had in class over this past semester. I took one picture, of a bear catching a fish, and put it on the cover of the book. This picture represents the media round robin project, in which I created my own design and sweatshirt. This project stood out to me, as it related much to what I might actually want to do as a career someday, and therefore I felt that I needed to put it on the cover of the book to stand out. On the back cover I placed the rest of the images that I found to be relating to the other assignments in the class. I also cut out a hole in many of the pages of the book In order to plant a small leafy plant in the square-shaped area. This was a very important aspect of the project to me, as it allowed me to show the new life and creative ambitions I have gained ever since I started focusing on my future career goals. This plant growing out of what once was my least favorite object is a symbol to me that something good can always come out of anything bad that happens in life, and that I need to make it through certain struggles in order to reach the outcome that I am hoping for someday.

Identity of self in the digital world is what we want everyone to see from us. Based on the media and celebrities being shown as everything needing to be perfect, we always tend to overthink our image online that everyone sees in order for us to be content with ourselves. I feel that people need to step away from this mentality and approach life with a much more meaningful thought process. Much of what we do today will affect the rest of our lives every day after that. You never know what will happen next or what could be good or bad in the future that we’ll have to deal with.

This book has changed me in the sense that I now have a better understanding of who I am and what I want to be. I am very grateful to have taken part in this activity, and am very certain I have shown what I feel and am willing to create in order to represent much of my life thus far.

Class Take Away 14

For this final class addressing the fear assignment, I was very touched by the presentations I saw that remained. All had a lot of thought put into them and definitely addressed the issue very personally. I felt like I was able to get a lot out of the project simply through watching the presentations as well as experiencing the fear on my own. I also enjoyed how we looked into the way cliches are addressed and what we can do as creative people to overcome them and be original. Much of what we do as artists is an expression of ourselves that we need to get out. I feel like I definitely learned more about who I am and what I have to offer though this class.

Class take away 13

For this class I was surprised at how many fears I had in common with many of my fellow classmates that shared their fears with me on this day. I thought it was interesting how some incorporated different elements of their lives that I could relate to into their fears, and how they had never shared some of these aspects about themselves with me before. I had an interesting time discussing my topic, however I don't think I was able to stress enough what I wanted to about why I chose the fear that I did. I expected most people to choose a more emotional or life-related fear, whereas I chose my fear of heights, because it has affected me very much in the past, but in ways that I have never really been able to share with others. I understand why I got the reaction that I did, but was just surprised at how much what I could say about it affected what people really thought of my fear.

Fear Factor

A fear I would like to examine is my fear of heights. I don’t know exactly I have developed this fear, but it always springs into my mind and is uncontrollable once I am in a situation when I am in a high place and think about all that could go wrong. I consider this more of a worry than a fear according to the articles listed. I get more thoughts about what may actually happen than what is more likely to happen. I have noticed this fear in my life whenever I have been in a situation where I am up high or more specifically in a place where I feel something could go wrong while I am up high. Even though I have this fear, it doesn’t keep me from doing too many things at the moment. I still am able to face it in some situations, and it mainly only bothers me when I’m on some kind of machinery or pedestal that is prone to some kind of unlikely error. Fear is used in life to keep oneself from potential harm. In most cases, something has affected someone in the past in order to make their fears stand out and give them a reason to avoid certain things or respond differently through fears. Some of my other fears, such as fearing rejection or other social fears can cause my creativity to go on a different path, but usually I am able to control this and do things my own unique way. My fear takes the form of different thoughts in my mind that make me unable to be happy and comfortable in certain situations. The thoughts are only brief in most cases though, and can be uncomfortable usually only for a few moments. Making a creative project helped to represent this fear and help me understand it better. I engraved a metal tin with an image of a person standing on a mountain ledge looking over. When you open the tin you can see another image on the bottom of it with the same ledge and scenery, but the person is missing. This can represent my fear tangibly through many ways. I chose the metal container as opposed to simply painting the piece, because the metal is colder to touch, and has rough bumps on the surface. The whole object itself is able to represent this fear better than a simple picture could. When you open the tin and see the person is missing, it represents the worry that is present inside my mind. The first image doesn’t show any kind of real danger, but when you open the tin you can see what could either be the reality, or what my mind makes me worry it may experience.

Bliss Assignment

5 Obstacles:

Finding which fear I am willing to openly talk about, thinking about times in which this fear has really affected me, finding a way to incorporate this fear into something tangible, being able to successfully establish an understanding of what my fears are, and being able to determine what type of fear it is.

3 What ifs

What if I go out and try to experience my fears firsthand to see what would be my greatest fears?

What if I make a list of all things that scare me and determine which is a fear I want to talk about?

What if I talk about a fear that I am comfortable with sharing?

The bliss exercise was very useful for me to be able to start understanding my fear assignment. I found that in my case, I cannot simply go and do something and get bliss out of it. Simply shopping just for the sake of it or going out and getting food, or even making a video where I do something fun is not enough for me to have a fully blissful time. Although it is an enjoyable period of time, I find much more comfort in bliss once I have accomplished something previously in the day. For the period of time that I considered my “Bliss assignment” I had just beforehand worked out and found out that I had been invited to join the honors college. This put my mind at ease and made it much more enjoyable to enjoy myself doing nothing of productivity for three hours. I found the overall experience to be enriching and comforting. I had no worries for that amount of time and was able to focus more on things I was interested in rather than what the world wanted me to do. I appreciated the experience I had with this very much, and found out many important qualities about myself that I have lost over the past few months.