#module 4

Project #4: “University”

***Disclaimer: This handle of vodka was actually filled with water! No need for concern as I refused to deal with hangover this would’ve brought or trying to attend classes tomorrow smelling like a distillery***

As an intro, I’m not sure if I’ve discussed this before in this class but I actually began my post-secondary schooling as a pre-med major at the University of Iowa. Located in a small city in the middle of the otherwise predictable Iowa cornfields, the University of Iowa was notable for its celebrated Writer’s Workshop and, during my short two-year tenure, it’s ranking as the #1 party school in the nation.

Throughout my 7 years in college, I must say that MSU Denver and the general Auraria Campus are simply unique in their lack of overall collegiate drinking culture. Perhaps it is the lack of university football tailgates, the lack of dorm culture, or even my older-than-the-average-freshman age, but I truly feel that even with a brewery on campus, Metro is worlds away from the damaging college drinking culture that seems to seep throughout every other major college campus I have ever set foot on.

Despite this separation of drinking culture within my current college community, I still find this to be a massive and overarching issue throughout the nation. When I went to U of I, underage drinking was essentially required in order to maintain friends in the dorms. And while this party atmosphere begins as a “fun” way to blow off steam, it quickly becomes a stressful form of societal maintenance that drains you of any other ability to focus meaningfully on academics and learning.

Module 4: Depth of Field - Activity 1 (Part 2/2)

“For this activity you will need to fin a long, uninterrupted subject or scene such as a fence, ladder, ruler or path. Using this subject, you will need to shoot a series of images using your full available aperture range.”

One-Minute Performance Piece: It’s Such a Stubborn Reminder One Perfect Night’s Not Enough (To Destroy)

As I said in my exercise, once all the pieces started coming together, my idea to destroy reminders of my recently ended relationship through various means became my strongest idea. I gathered receipts and tickets and other papers I’d found from important days and bought brussels sprouts, an old computer monitor ($4 at Goodwill, no big deal — should’ve been a TV for maximum effect and authenticity, though), and a bottle of Jameson, (some of) which I poured over a PBR box and tried to set on fire. Everything I wore, including my underwear (I considered even doing the piece without pants on), hair, and makeup, was curated with reminders and memories considered.

I had everything very planned out, even with my phone balanced to film against a fire extinguisher I thought I might (was hoping to) need, but there was absolutely quite a bit of failure involved when it came down to it. I thought I’d set up my position far enough from the phone for it to capture everything down to the floor, but it cut off much higher up than expected and left out a lot of the things I was destroying. As the video shows, it took me four matches to try to get the fire going, but (probably for the best) it never got to be much more than the matches burning just themselves on top of everything else — all of which I tried to show at the end, but was very off due to still being on selfie mode. Everything came out to about 1:20 instead of just a minute after editing, with the raw footage coming in at almost a full minute, but I’m glad I didn’t have trouble filling up a minute. I could’ve spent a lot more time trying to execute everything fully and correctly and had it end up much longer. I really hate watching myself in all of this, and seeing everything while editing was one of the hardest parts.

While Roselee Goldberg’s essay “Performance: A Hidden History” is highly informative when discussing the audience-artist relationship of performance art and the general discourse surrounding its relevancy, I found the documentary to be more engaging and realistic in its portrayal of those who have found true ingenuity and even fame through this art form.

As a tumblr-obsessed teenager, I became extremely aware of Marina Abramovic and Ulay through their often reblogged images of intertwined hair and counterbalanced bow and arrow pieces. Going into this documentary, I knew that my somewhat immature view of Marina was about to change as her generally polarizing personality is well known in the art world, however instead of clarifying my opinions I honestly emerged from the documentary even more conflicted on both Marina as an artist and on my view of performance art than I have ever felt before. 

If one were to judge art purely through the value of being the first to do it, Marina is a true genius. Each of her pieces hold a unique place in the world of art as the first of their kind, often both horrifying and intriguing viewers in an otherwise saturated painted art world. But as a person, I find Marina to be pretentious and egotistical which causes an issue for me when viewing her artwork as I begin to view it through these lenses as well. Seeing her essentially force young artists through the world’s weirdest summer camp in order to bring them to a “proper” mindset to imitate her works was both uncomfortable and unnecessary. I understand her desire to help them gain a more patient view of the world in order to cope with the trauma that her works might create or induce, I felt that the entire process was thoroughly self-absorbed.

Basic data manipulation for converting ' ' to Nan:

Bar graph for categorical variables:

histogram for quantitative variable:

standard deviation and other descriptive statistics for quantitative variables:

Scatteerplot is created to show data desribed below:

I’ve been thinking again about the links between Play and academic Risk-Taking with the added elements of how a “sense of belonging” that explores the interplay of community and identity are so related to what we’ve been reading about play. Here is a snippet of what I’ve written about it

Play involves elements of risk and the ability to imagine possible outcomes (a key point in Dr. Mando’s talk and article). The biggest idea play can contribute to further the theory of academic risk-taking is that play tells us to try again. The scholarship of risk-taking recognizes that there isn’t always an opportunity in our education for students to try again so sometimes, they don’t try at all as the risk of a poor grade or worse is too heavy. So, building the link between failure in play that sees “success (and failure) is a collective interdependent achievement” and as an iterative learning process can help situate the bond between play and grad learning with the recognition that building a sense of belonging is not only a metric of individual success, but also of the community and culture of grad learning (Steinkuehler and Tsaasan 187).

CH7 and 20 both emphasize the importance of community (and collaboration) in shaping feedback systems and in turn, building expertise. I think this may be a component that has been missing in other discussions of failure/risk-taking (ie community empathy). CH 20 in particular has made me rethink some of my attitudes towards instruction/play that encourages vulnerability as something that isn’t handed down from the top but is built through mutual gameplay. This seems like a (necessary) complication to theories of failure that is harder to translate to a classroom setting – any thoughts/tips?