Thoughts On Carver

The Carver article started off kind of weird, with the fingering of the woman’s face by the old blind man. I agree with the author that it is hard to judge poetry and its quality. The repetition of “blind man” was an interesting choice, seeing how the same old man is spoken about, but the author finds the need to keep reminding the reader that he couldn’t see. Then her officer isn’t named – no one gets a name in this, only descriptors. These details left me confused. The author really seems fixated on the “blind” part of the man, and hating on his dead wife just because she sounded “colored”. The part of the author and blind man smoking marijuana was entertaining as well.

Though the story is interesting, the ending was quite strange. The ending actually started to bring the subject of ‘art’ into the story, but I was confused why the author kept his eyes shut. I guess it would be so that he could see what the blind man saw, namely nothing, but it seemed pointless for me. 

John & Ben Walking

Walkin' and Talkin'

Thoughts on Wallace

The Wallace article starts off interesting enough, with a topic of swimming fish, which I imagined went down Finding-Nemo style. The next story about the Atheist and religious guy was also entertaining. The whole, “mind must be a slave and not the master” thing is an interesting idea, But, I’m not sure that the connection between suicide and the idea brought up earlier is valid; they shoot themselves in the head to die the quickest. The droning of a daily life and job did a good job of bringing out how people feel, I felt stressed just reading about it. The “speech” becomes very hipster, and liberal to the max, almost to a point where I can’t stand it, even though it is hypothetical. The reading starts to drag on, still asking me to consider other people when I’ve already been convinced they are terrible by the narrator. I like how the message is to consider other people and their situation, but the way the writer went about it to make us think about them didn’t work for me. And I especially don’t understand what this has to do with art besides it being about a liberal arts school. 

Thoughts on Kaprow, Weschler, and Saunders

The Kaprow article placed an interesting emphasis on the daily boring routines that usually no one notices and pointed out how the actions we so easily do now were so hard to do and difficult to learn as children. I also like how he basically paid so much attention to what he was doing that he felt new things, like the tension in his elbow, which I relate to when a word is repeated over and over, usually out loud, when it loses meaning. I didn’t like this article because it just doesn’t seem like art to me, and more of just an observation, but observation is important in art so I understand where the narrator is coming from.

The Weschler article was interesting in how it described how the artist became enamored by the absence of anything in deserts, and more generally, nature, but never became obsessed with the actual science of nature and didn’t really like nature that much at all, never camping or leaving society for too long. What I didn’t like was the first picture was incredible creepy and how it seemed like he was trying to make a distinction that was not there, or at least not apparent to me.

The Sauders article was by far the most interesting, I find a strong narrative always is good to hook me and keep me attentively reading, and the airplane story was a good way to start. The near death experience rings true to me, with the one word “no” thought running through his head, because I got into a car accident and all I could think was “fuck” the whole time. I like how the main topic is death and how it affects your view on the world and art. The only negative is how expansive it was, the article was very long and almost a biography on the man, which I think could’ve been shortened.

Always On Me

iPhone 5

I choose my iPhone because I use my phone for everything, to check my schedule, to see the time, to stay in contact with people, and to stay entertained. Without it, I feel lost.

Guide

BuckID

You need your buckID everywhere and anywhere around Columbus. It gets you discounts and helps you pay for things. It IS you while you attend The Ohio State University. Where it goes, you go. Or maybe the other way around.

Identity

Retina MacBook Pro

A great performance laptop, what can I not do with it? It can do almost everything I need for my classes, helps me compete assignments, take notes, do homework, and anything and everything else.

Powerhouse

iPad

A nice complement to my iPhone and MacBook. When I need to read a textbook, nothing is more useful than whipping out my iPad and pulling up a digital book, or if I need to view a large webpage quickly, I can pull out the iPad.

Swift 

Backpack

It would be hard to carry around everything I do without a huge, strong backpack. It's never given enough attention and thrown around, unlike my other objects, but it is by far the most helpful.

Workhorse

SanDisk Cruzer Flash Drive

Small, simple, but in disposable. Carries my files to and from class, always ready to be inserted into a foreign computer and transfer data from it.

Hidden

TI-84 Calculator

Does all of my Math and Physics calculations. What else is there to say? Without it, I'd fail school.

Backbone

Pilot G-2 Black Pen

Does most of my physical note taking, prefer it to my pencil but both have their uses. The pen glides better and the darker ink looks good and is easy to read. Most of the time.

Clear Marker

BIC #2 Mechanical Pencil

A step child of sorts, less favorable than the pen, but still has it uses for erasing my many mistakes in math class. Has a place in my heart.

Mistake Fixer

Polo Glass

Helps me see clearly, if I can't see clearly how can I live life and experience it's contents?

Life Giver

Wexner Experience

Walking into the Wexner was an interesting experience, I had never stepped foot inside, and it was different than I thought it would be, and smaller than I thought it would be. The first thing I saw was the "Clock" exhibit. Again, much different than I imagined it. I thought it would be boring and just be close ups of the clocks, but it was fairly interesting and creative how the artist got all the clocks to line up with the time while showing different film scenes. So I walked away from that with a different frame of mind (I had originally intended to only be in the Wexner for ten minutes, and ended up staying for half an hour.) that caused me to go see the other exhibits. The "lights" exhibit wasn't something that stuck out to me as special or something that interested me so I wont talk about it. The "More American PIctures" on the other hand was. I enjoyed seeing some of the olden pictures of Americans and America in general, and some of the new pictures were... interesting, like the fat man holding a small cat or large rat or something. It was just different. Overall, it was better than I thought it would be. 

Campus Afterthoughts

I think the project came out more abstract than I initially thought it would, most likely because I didn't want it to be like any other map, I had seen people with just normal maps and picture inserts, but I didn't want to do that. I still took the map approach, but it is more blended in and less obvious unless you look close. It's almost like "Nipple Jesus" but less provocative. From afar it looks like a normal Google Map, but up close, it's about 20 pictures combined into my path to class, but they are partially erased around parts I deemed unimportant, and with the same map background as the foreground, with 50% opacity. The foreground was then erased over the pictures I had put in, so that they would be more clear. Overall, I think it turned out pretty well, but I'm excited to see how others take the same expectations and make something completely different.

Blending Campus

Blended Campus