JulieDean’s Blog

We spent quite a few days talking about art styles, such as dada; we also discussed the use of readymades.

There is an artist, Andy Goldsworth, whom I learned about this semester thanks to my Design Perspectives class. I absolutely love his work – he uses readymades in his art, but they are all found in nature.

Here are some images of his work:

Not only does he use natures readymades - sticks, snow, rain, sheep fur, flower petals - the forms he creates also tend to emulate nature, curving, imperfect and destrctable.

Morgan was my chalk drawing partner.
This was one of our chalk lines. Not my favorite of the ones we did, but the only one I have a picture of.

Chalk

Wall of NewBridge Bank Park in downtown Greensboro

Elsewhere Artist Collaborative on South Elm Street

I went back to the fence where I posted my flyer, and it was gone. All the other posters and flyers were still there, but not the one I posted.

      <– upside down smilie face

ACTUAL SIZE!

I only bought one Now and Later. I went four times – the first two times the man was there so I didn’t buy anything. The third time the woman was there and I bought a red one. The last time they were both there, but the man was the person at the counter and I bought a laffy taffy.

When I bought it she didn’t really seem to care. I set the candy down on the counter, she responded with ‘ten cents’ and I gave her a dime. It didn’t even sound like she put it into the drawer. She seemed like a nice lady, but she didn’t really care or notice people were buying them.

I didn’t eat it, does anyone want it? It’s Tropical Punch.

So I live in Burlington and there seems to always be homeless people around the exits and Wal-Mart. It seems like I see at least 3 homeless people every day when I drive home from school.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that they all have signs saying things like ‘Homeless, Hungry’ or ‘No Money, Homeless’ or ‘God Bless You All’ but today I saw a man holding a sign that said:

‘It’s okay to SMILE’ and then there was a large smilie face drawn on it.

I know it’s a bit rude to think about it, but it made me wonder if he got more money than the other homeless people around here because he wasn’t asking for any, and he was just trying to be optimistic. It was kind of ironic too. I mean he was asking for money in a round about way, if he wasn’t he wouldn’t have been standing there in the first place. I felt bad for not giving him any money…

Oh, and if you can’t tell from these last two posts, I like making lists. Even if they are ‘arbitrary.’

For our final project, as you all know, we set up an audio track to be listened to at the Green Bean. I worked in a group – our audio is on interconnectedproject.wordpress.com – and had a good time. I feel that we had good ideas and I liked our completed product. However (and this is just on my section specifically), I liked the draft I wrote at the Green Bean (when we went on our second ‘field trip’) mich better. Again, this is just my audio, not that of my whole group. I feel that the draft I wrote involved the listener more and was more entertaining. I chose to make the final audio different because I wanted them to be completely seperate.

This project was fun for me to do and it makes me want to do more of these. If I did though, they would all most likely take place in Altamonte Springs, Florida where I grew up. I know more about that area, so I would be able to add my history, or events that I knew occured, as well instead of just a few observations.

We printed one of our flyers already – only one because by the time we were ready to print, the printer was out of ink. I took the one we printed with me and had intended to bring it home. Instead, when I was leaving my last class that day I decided to post it on a fence. Behind the McIver building is a wooden fence which always has flyers and postes pinned up on it and I hadn’t planned on posting ours, but I felt it would be a good place. I’ll take a picture and post it here later.

The whole process of this project can be described in two ways (in my opinion): extremely fun, and terribly frustrating.

1) When Lee gave us that Wednesday off as outside time to work on our project, Suzi Jonathan and I decided to meet to discuss our projects and help eachother out/give feed back. We went into this with three seperate ideas and just wanted to help one another out. We had tons of fun that morning and decided then and there to make it a collaboration. We discussed how different our projects were and what it would take to keep them that way, but still make them connected. We also made poster plans, and ate breakfast together. In the times we spent recording, we enjoyed each others company and became friends.

2) I say this project was frustrating because we had many set-backs. It seems that ‘third times the charm’ was our motto. The first time we recorded there was a terribly loud noise in the background and we had to re-record. The second time we recorded (and we liked it much more this time) the whole thing was recorded over. Once we recorded the third time, we were ready to upload and it was our best recording yet. This then lead to our uploading problems and needless to say, third time was the charm. It uploaded to youtube within five minutes and we got it on our blog just a quickly.

In the end, I did like this project a lot, though I had some problems with it. If I were to do this again I might decide not to collaborate with others. This isn’t becasue we had any problems with one another or because I didn’t like the final product, it’s only because I would be interested to see with what I can do on my own. In fact, I must say that I think we were great together as a group – we never fought, we worked off of each others ideas, and there wasn’t one person who made all of the decisions. Everything we did was talked about before we completed it, and I think we played equal parts.

So if you’ve read this far, theres not much left to this post I promise (and what is left isn’t about the project, it’s about noise).

This project, when it was first assigned to us, also got me thinking about sounds. There are some sounds I hate, which I think majority of other people dislike too (ex. a drill, nails on a chalk board, people chewing food), and there are also sound I love (but I’m not sure how many other people enjoy these sounds).

1) I like the sound that winshield wipers make when they wipe rain off the winshield. But – and here’s where it get annoyingly specific – only when it’s either not raining any longer or just very lightly. This is because you can hear the sound better. It’s similar to a rain stick, but not quite.

2) The sound of a rock being kicked across cement or other rocks. There’s not much to say about this sound really. The other day I was outside Wal-Mart and there was a rock that I kicked all the way from my car to the door, and I liked the sound so much I picked up the rock and took it with me.

3) Crinkly Paper

4) One of my favorite bands (I think that counts…) Ludo. I like a variety of music, but this is one of my favorites.

5) Trains

I thought of more sounds earlier, I actually had a list, but have since forgotten (and lost the list). If I remember them, I’ll post more. Also, these sounds are probably noises I won’t always like – I’m sure crinkly paper would get annoying after a while – but I like them now.

This Friday I went down to the Subway on Tate Street and observed what went on around me for 30 minutes. I wrote down two pages of observations and, after those 30 minutes were over Iwanted to continue (but I didn’t). It was somewhat eye-opening, I noticed patterns – some which were slightly humorous – but I didn’t see very many things that were out of the ordinary.

On a slightly unrelated note, it reminded me of when I was a kid and was obsessed with the Harriet the Spymovie. I loved that movie so much, and I used to carry around paper and a pencil with me everywhere to make note of my observations. I still have some of those old notes. Doing this project made me feel like a ‘pretend spy’ again.

This was what I brought in too class.

The other side:

And as its soulmate I chose the art by Pae White Untitled (Hillcrest 2)

It is a “spiderweb on perfect paper.” The perfect paper is a deep, dark blue that gradiates into a white with a shimmering spiderweb in the top right hand corner. Like the art, the stone goes from a deep blue to light blue, and the stone even goes further, turning clear near the edges. It is rimmed by silvery sparkles that resemble the spiderweb. Also, both the spiderweb and the stone are found in nature.

we had to record something using value and this is what I came up with:

The shapes represent when I was breathing out, I timed how long I could do it and the longer I was able too the darker the mark. I started to get much better at the end, until I became sick on the last 3 days.