Approaching Project 3

Project 3 Approaches….

Finding a topic (getting into the mindset, before we approach the prompt):

• Looking for the AH-HA moment
• What made you choose your career?
• Taking a step back
• Even though the critics may not enjoy your favorite show or music, that does not mean it can not still be your favorite (it connects to us)- using your emblem, your guide
• Does this object strike a nerve or touch me in some way?

The Project:

• Taking one part of your popcycle (Career) and putting it into electracy
• Use our emblem to guide us
• Using our career disciplines (in literacy) and moving it closer to entertainment (electracy)
• Using critical and creative thinking
• Using metaphysics to move career to electracy- images, sounds, mash-ups trying to be syncretic
• We are not trying to persuade or advertise to anyone
• Not allowing there to be a gap between your personal life and your career example
• Organic
• Without lived experience- we only have to look to why we chose the career to move to electracy
• I’m going into sociology because… (this is the project)
• Putting into aesthetic practices (not argumentative) an expression
• Composing together the different “tracks” of our lives
• Updating something from our career for the modern “networking age”
• Understanding that our facebook pages can not be simply understood as a stagnant document- they all mean things to us

What’s the Recipe?

JUST ASK MRS. FEATHERBOTTOM:

The recipe has 8 different parts

• Community
• Entertainment
• Family
• Picture
• Epigram
• Mood
• Morality
• Metaphysics

Not an illustration or depiction, but an expression

Metaphor vs. Autonomy

We can not use a football metaphor when talking about coming to class- we are not football players- it’s just not me.

Default Mood and Attunement

Grounded in our lived institution

Creating our emblem should be something like making lasagna-

Where there exists a mixture, but they’re still coming together in one entity

We are not trying to suppress anything, but we are trying to composite something much bigger

Creating a widesite

• Creating a site around why you chose certain things in your emblem
• Having an anecdote or an image, that break down the emblem

Band Numero Dos

Hey Britt and Steve! Here’s the link for the new In Studio Session

It’s a blank canvas- feel free to write/post anything you want

For Exercise 4:

Part 1:

• The “third meaning” of a song
• The performance- how is it sung?
• Leave out your interpretations of the lyrics
• You’re initial insight into the song

Part 2:

• Non-narrative, insights into your own thought processes
• Using apparatuses: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/glue/diagrams/apparatus2.html

Alright, so I’m a little nostalgic…

After reading this chapter, I can help but think of the Bar in my life. So many people, perspectives, and stories that have come together to make me who I am. When I start to try to dissect and understand the supporting players of my story I get all nostalgic inside.

As I have said (probably one too many times) before, I am on my way out of college.  I start to think about those people who have come before and have shaped who I am today. These people flash before me and I start to wonder if they will ever know how they’ve affected me…

Probably not..

But I guess that makes it all the better, we interact and change each other on daily basis: A compliment here, a joke there, and sometimes even with saying anything we can change someone’s life. My Bar is ever spinning and ever growing- people coming in and coming out.

I went through high school as a theatre nerd, which in turn started me on my current career path (possibly still part-nerd), but anyone who knew anything about theatre in the early 2000s knows about “Wicked.” The song “For Good” sums up my feelings towards my Bar. Not everyone drastically changes our course of life, but they change us for good, somehow.

Ok. I’m done with the cheese. Just watch the clip.

Heartfelt Endings

I am a huge fan of Greg Garcia- the creator of “My Name is Earl” and the new show on Fox “Raising Hope.” He has a signature style that is a good representation of the conductive/convergent style we were highlighting today in class.

Greg’s style is to have characters that are raw, trashy, uncouth, and plots that could make a biker gang blush, but at the end of every show there is always a heart of pure gold. Garcia does  a great job ( I would argue the BEST job) of combining the audience repulsion and cringe of Jerry Springer with the values and morals of “The Brady Bunch.”

If you haven’t checked out “Raising Hope”  I would suggest it, and if you’ve never caught a rerun on “My Name is Earl,” get your tivo crackin- you’ll be glad you did!

 

Play vs. Game

On Friday we discussed that media has differing types of discourses, and I was having a little trouble. The problem that I was having was that we were using the terms “game” and “play” to mean the same thing. Recently I learned that for the sociologist George Herbert Mead these two words were very different things.

For more information follow this link:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/mead/#SH3c

And take a look under the subheading:

Symbolic Interaction and the Emergence of the Self

Mead was interested in how we composed and created our “selfs” and he believed we did this through a series of stages when we are growing up. First we imitate, then we play, and then we play games. Being able to play games comes from attaining a sense of self as well as a sense of the generalized other (the rules of the game and the rules of society as a whole- norms and values). 

I’ve decided that game is the better wording for what we are doing with our mystories. We are doing more than just playing a role, we are taking into account others and ourselves within a larger picture. Thus, we are not simply playing with media, we are using the media following the rules of the game.

But is game-logic the right kind of logic? Or should we simply be playing with media?

Good questions, hopefully soon to be answered.

Pop Quiz:

Which is play and which is game?

THERE’S A DIFFERENCE!!!

Interface Impressions

I.

Peter Klaven from “I Love You, Man”

II.

Mario Party

For Project 1

Part 1: Career Discourse

“Make a website documenting an important discovery, or a (founding) invention, in your career domain”

• Create a website documenting important discoveries or inventories in you career domain
• “We are not the inventors”
• Not a paper on “what is a computer” but what is behind the invention- the process, what it was for them, the circumstantial details
• compressing, not filtering
• NOT making an argument
• You think it’s cool- put it up on the website, no need to say why it is important
• Using the concrete and material objects of experience- not abstract
• you are the “curator” not simply an argumentative essayist

Part II: Home and Family

“Make a website documenting a scene that sticks in your memory
from the childhood years of your family life.”

• Use anecdotes in project (story telling)
• If we are the author? Why would we explain it to ourselves? We wouldn’t- just convey the expressive parts
• Chora logic: a way of  organizing information by using a place as the intersection of all our experiences
• should be composed in a hybrid discourse: multiple modes (i.e. Hide and Seek, mix with short narratives with true life interviews, and even greater mixing when some of the places that were fictional could have been true to life

Both:

• Image motif- something concrete that links the two parts together

When 2D Just Isn’t Enough..

Today we spoke on the importance of mapping out our popcycle in relationship to the places and locations that hold special meanings, memories, or anecdotes for us. It was stressed that this map in no way had to be the actual geographical map, but instead good be scaled using the prominence of each memory.

But I believe that a flat map with only one dimension will not due. There is overlap between the places that mean something to us. I cited the highschool as one of my memory points, but these highschool memories would often lead to my house or friends house.

For example: I graduated on my highschool’s track field, then I had dinner with my parents afterward, and then went to a graduation after party at the local community college. All of the hustle and bustle stems from the highschool- so it seems that these maps way be more like Venn Diagrams then maps, but even diagrams can not show the actual images or memories that stack up at each location. We need to look at a 3D map that allows us to pull apart and examine each place and the relationship this place has with others.

Let that statement and linger around in your mind, while you think about let me show you what I think this map would be like:

What do you think? Is it possible to follow all the threads of life as easily as Shawn White wields that power in this commercial? It’s something to strive for.