2016/9/15
Coming from a strict Christian school, I was surprised by Parson’s discussion-filled classes and studios. Everything seems really open-minded. Both of my studio and seminar classes are fun because I really enjoyed those discussion sessions and hands on hands project making process. Recently, our discussion included topics about memories. We talked about how significant they are and how they defined when we are for our growth. The following is what I learn from both studio and seminar.
From the studio class, we already made some major progresses on our projects. From the class, I’m really pleased to see many of my peers’ brilliant works and glad to shares ideas and perspectives with each others. For this mouth’s topics, we are visualizing our memories, and bring them to the class. My theme for my memory project is significant. The reason why the memories were able to “survive” from time to time, is because they are bring crucial impact and emotions to our lives. I had my five significant memories:
My mom’s black leather jacket,
My bullied experience
My first time going to America
My first time drawing nude models
My walking in Kyoto neighborhood.
I had fun recreating them both as an acting piece and drawing piece and received so many great helpful feedbacks.
From our seminar classes, we read several readings about memories and identities. From Didion’s Why I Write, I found that the more we remember, the more we can put them on the paper. Sometimes those memories became part of us, they even became our identity. As people who retells our stories, we suddenly became a narrator of our stories and identities. In the reading :Before Sunrise, the reason why we remember those memories is because we put More emotion into that moment. The impacts of events also influenced by our emotion at that moment. From every reading we are gradually decoding the enigmatic veil of memory.
————————————————–
2016/10/6
After several days , we had a fun studio field trip back in the Central Part. We video tape our experience with the peer to peer trust change. I had a great time with my teammate, together, we made a video out of the recording and video.
It’s interesting to see the professors put such exercise into our schedules. To me, this is an exercise that not only testing peer as a person but also represent different points of view.
One you were blindfolded you have to trust your guide for protection but on the flip side, your guide can trick you too. This is a testing for how accountable the guide is and how dubious the blind-fooled person is.
I think, peer to peer challenge is a representation of three perspectives: 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person. Rotating roles in this game allowed you to put yourself into someone else’s shoes. In other ways, gaining more trust from each other, because they all understand each other after the experiences.
This leads to the Proust Questionnaire that we did for Seminar class. The process of interviewing really made us thinks that we all had trust issues. Sometimes, when the interviewer asked really personal questions, the interviewee would had to think about their answers carefully, because, sometimes they cares about their image in front of others, or just simply don’t feel confutable trusting people.
This “trust” theme would gradually lead us to a more macroscopic view— the city street. On the city street, what is our relationships towards strangers and surroundings? Are we safe? Who are we? Why do we care?
We still have to find out.
2016/12/16
After going through themes related to “trusts”, “cities” and “memories”, we gradually made our ways into public places, as know as “site specific project”.
In this project we are trying to design something that’s related to the site we chose and the design is going to reflect the history and significant of the sites. I automatically chose Keith Haring Once Upon a Time mural in LGBT community center. I had several other options.
For Keith Haring Once Upon a Time mural On the walls, there are paintings of male homosexual sex scene which symbolized Haring’s hard time during his life of dealing with his sexuality. This mural seems to be his wish to achieve equality as a gay man to obtain love and pleasure.
But this bathroom lack of females present and I would like to add lesbian sexual scene into this room to correspond with the gay sex scene. As a meeting room, I would like to add murals in this room that represent LGBT community. Roomful of mural that represent many genders.
After the site specific project, we had a fun week working on our last project—–a play.
Following teammate, Jo, Kit, and Renee, we made a sci-fi action fueled comical story. It’s a story of an arrogant girl from the future and traveled back and force to experience different cultures which opened her eyes to the world.
In this play, we are trying to summaries what we learnt from both seminar and studio: we need to be a designer/ artists that has a wide ranges of perspectives. We need to be a person who is welling to trust, and accept new ideas. Sure there are great memories from past, but we also need to step into the wilderness of unknown (like into the wild)and drift to the future . We need to become a sponge so that ideas are constantly absorbing into our minds, so we have ideas to appreciate and design for others, like this site specific project.
At the end of the day, I learnt from both class that we need to accept, trust, absorb, and change. Maybe this is the way to become a great artist/designer.
