Presentation Summary

After giving our class a presentation about the topic of "Hybridizing Symbols",  both my partner Melinda DiGiovanna and I felt that overall our presentation was solid.  We created a powerpoint exploring different symbols that our society sees in every day culture and used artists Ryan McGinness and Mambo (Flavian Demarigny) as examples of how symbols can be used in to convey a message in a simple visual fashion.  We felt that both of these artists were strong examples because of their use of symbols in their artwork and the way that they display their artwork.

We began our presentation by asking the audience (our classmates) what different symbols were and why they knew what they stood for.  Working in a simple to more complex fashion seemed to really draw more interest in our topic.
We first used Ryan McGinness's piece "Duality" as an example, and asked audience to look for symbols, then link those symbols to what the meaning of the piece is.

The audience pointed out a number of different symbols represented in this work such as people, handcuffs, holding hands, and intertwining snakes that all represented a connection or a bringing together.

The other artist that we explored was a graffiti artist named Flavian Demarigny, who goes by the alias of Mambo.  We used a piece from an installation assembled in Lyon, France.  Mambo collaborated to create artwork that combined symbols in the form of street signs.  

The audience pointed out a flower, a hazard symbol, as well as the surroundings of where the sign was placed.  All of these details contributed to what the sign might stand for as well as why the artist chose to bring attention to this area.

As an installation, the audience determined that viewing many signs as opposed to just one allowed the viewer to stop and pay attention to their surroundings, or to just play with the idea of signs and how society is so trained to view signs by shape and color, that we often do not even really pay attention to what is depicted.  By creating a play on the normality of street signs, the viewer is tricked to pay more attention to what the signs are saying.

After our presentation, the class evaluated Melinda and I.  We had high ratings for our teacher presence and the engaging quality of our presentation.  Many students wrote that we had great starting questions and really caught the audience's attention with the selection of our artists.  

Most students felt that we did a good job at researching our artists and theme as well.  However, many felt the need for a deeper exploration of the artist's background.  Melinda and I did our best to incorporate enough information while still budgeting our time to explore the theme.  It is amazing how fast 10 minutes goes by!!!

Lastly, was the synthesis of the artists and themes.  Although many loved our choice of artists, many were lost about the theme of hybridizing symbols.  Some students pointed out that our theme would work if we simply switched out hybridizing symbols with recontextualizing symbols to make it more clear.  

Overall, it was a very successful presentation of our artists and a great teaching/learning experience!

Thank you everyone!

PEW Internet Article

This article was very straightforward through its information.  I found myself drawn to the charts that were posted throughout because so much of the information could be compared and analyzed at the same time.  It was interesting to see how each generation associated themselves with the technologies around them.

The older generations tend to use e-mail more than younger generations, I find to be very true.  I feel that personally I communicate more through instant forms of technology such as text messaging or through instant chats.  I noticed a change when I got a phone that I can receive e-mails on, which always allows me to be connected.  I e-mail more often now that I can always have access to it.

The research showed that the younger generations were more involved in technologies by a landslide.  However, in schools, I find that teaching these technologies fall short in the classrooms.  If the majority of students are involved with technology in some way, I think that the curriculum needs to form more toward their interests.  I think that once we can associate education with things that are of interest to the students, students would be more eager to learn.

Update from New Paltz Middle School Fieldwork

The past two weeks at New Paltz Middle School have been quite exciting.  Ms. Sturgis has allowed Melinda and I to really become active in her classroom.  She allows us to work with her students and help out where we can.

Last week, we were there for our first "A" day.  The 6th grade students are working on a self portrait exploration through collage and text.  Students were in the process of cutting out images from magazines, and they were encouraged to lay out their pieces to see how many more images and words were needed to complete the project.
Ms. Sturgis introduced the directions to her first class and asked if Melinda and I would like to introduce the same project to the following two classes.  Melinda and I took the challenge and the students responded really well to our teacher presence.  After working hard for the class periods, the students found it fun to have a little friendly competition during the clean up.
We pointed out what table was doing a great job at cleaning up, and that they were going to get first place.  The other tables around quickly followed the table in the lead and the classroom was clean in no time.  The first table that was seated quietly a their cleaned up table was awarded first place.  The allotted time for cleanup was 5 minutes, and the students scurried to clean up in just 3 minutes.  This was great because Melinda and I wrapped up the day by telling them the next step of the project as well as asking what some students were using in their collages!

Sound Project II: Interview Popplet

For our 2nd sound project assignment, we were to conduct an interview to discuss the topics of different dilemmas that we face in technology and relate it to the art classroom.  I chose to interview a fellow art education student to see what he had to say about the topic.

I have included a Popplet, which is basically a web program designed to create mind maps, or webs to show my thought process of the questions that I wanted to ask.  I was able to visualize the questions that I wanted to ask as well as add images to the popplets.

Here is the Popplet that I created for my interview!

Sound Project III

For my 3rd sound project the assignment was to create an autobiographical narrative which reflects upon a media literacy that we have learned.

For the literacy that I explored, I talked about my love for Where's Waldo books when I was a child and how it helped me later on dissect different pieces of art to find hidden clues that would bring me to the meaning.  Through constantly viewing the pages of Where's Waldo, I find myself creating very busy and intricately detailed artwork as well.

I created a narrative using the program Garageband, and utilized different editing techniques such as volume control, cutting footage, re-arranging footage, and inlaying different footage to different places.

Day 1 of Fieldwork at New Paltz Middle School

When I was at the middle school level, it did not seem much different than other years.  I went to a Kindergarten through 8th grade school, where all grades were in the same building.  I feel that each year I grew a little more, but I never really realized many of the changes that we as students underwent.

With the proper classroom management, I feel that an art classroom can be both a fun and learning environment.  The teacher who my partner, Melinda DiGiovanna, and I are placed with, Ms. Sturgis, handles her classroom with both patience and interest.  Many people warn aspiring teachers about the middle school level, for it is a time when students are undergoing many changes, physically, mentally, emotionally, and behaviorally.  Ms. Sturgis seemed to create lesson plans that addressed many topics and things students might face at this level such as identity, pop culture, and liberty.

Having a sense of identity is very important at this age, it will shape who you will be and grow from for the rest of your life.  At the 6th grade level, Ms. Sturgis as well as another teacher in the school. shaped her lesson plan around identity exploration.  In one class, the students had just finished a project about the "Elements of Art".  After learning about these, students experimented with line, shape, color, space, value, texture, and form.   The second class that we saw, students were creating a name poster for their locker.  A locker is a very personal place and this project allows students to create a name tag that personally expresses themselves.

In the 7th grade, the lesson was based around liberty.  Students learned about collage and were to create a "collage word locker project", where students depicted a word that described themselves or a close friend and incorporated collage in some way.  Ms. Sturgis encouraged the students to use the whole piece of paper for their artwork, and after they were finished, Ms. Sturgis scanned the work into the computer and printed out multiple copies for the students.  Each student picked two others besides their own to matte on a larger sheet of paper, that would be laminated and taped to their lockers.

The 8th grade was just being introduced to their new unit on Pop Art.  For this project students find a headshot of someone who they see in popular culture today.  In the computer program of paint, students will alter the image using bright colors similar to the Pop Art style.  To educate the students about Pop Art, Ms. Sturgis showed her classes a series of videos about certain artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Andy Warhol and Keith Harring.  All of the videos that she showed were taken off of youtube.com, which I thought was a good tool because students often use it.  After the students viewed the short video clips, Ms. Sturgis passed out a hand out with pictures of each artist and asked the students to write down three facts about each artist.

Andy Warhol on Pop Art:

Media Education for the 21st Century

In Henry Jenkins's article Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, Jenkins focused on what new media literacies teachers can bring into the classroom. These new media literacies are a set of cultural competencies and social skills that young people need in the new media landscape. This set of skills focus greatly on social involvement and working as a collaboration and network. These skills build upon the traditional skills which are literacy, research, technical, and critical analysis skills.

The new literacy skills allow the student to create as well as learn.

Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting
multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

The fact that all of these literacies now include more social development, gives more options for students who may not be interested in art to contribute their ideas and feel that their contributions make a difference. This all plays into our society's participatory culture.

The new literacy that I found most interesting was the idea of play. In my other class, Theory and Practice, we recently looked in depth into the idea of play. Not only does it engage the students in a different way, it is also a way for them to engage in a project in different ways, much like the way each individuals mind works.

At a young age, children are being bombarded with visual and media information that teach them about the world around them. As they grow older, the focus of education suddenly shifts and textbooks and literature are now the focus. For many students the switch from these ways of acquiring knowledge is a struggle. As teachers I feel it is necessary to cater to many different styles of learning.

The Microscopic Opera

Matthijs Munnik, Microscopic Opera (detail)

In the Netherlands lies the most prestigious Genomics Centers which are now being used by artists and designers to create new artworks ranging from topics of sustainability, food, health, bio-informatics, agriculture, and safety.  There is a competition for Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award (DA4GA) where they are able to collaborate with these Genomics Centers.  

Exhibited on January 8th at Naturalis, many different projects were on display.  The piece that I most enjoyed in reading about was called the Microscopic Opera developed by Matthijis Munnik with Richard de Boer.  The article explains that the lab worm's (commonly used worldwide in laboratories for research) movements are converted into sounds and images.  The artwork utilizes the lab worms in this piece to cohere to genomics because lab worms are the first multicellular organisms to have fully sequenced genomes.

Matthijs Munnik, Microscopic Opera 

Munnik and de Boer use software tracks to convert the movements to sounds into abstracted opera singing as well as a range of other sounds.  There are images shown of the lab worms on screens of the magnified organisms.  These organisms are kept in petri dishes and each dish holds up to 1,000 worms!

More projects from this exhibit can be viewed at http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/bioart/

This piece is a "New Media Literacy" in that the lab worms are a part of a performance.  Although not staged, they are the subjects that are being viewed and their movements converted to images and sounds.  Munnik and de Boer worked together for this piece and this literacy can be classified as "Collective Intelligence" as well.  More literacies can be learned about in my article about Media Education for the 21st Century post!

Talking About Art with Students

When I was younger, I found it easy to find things that interested me about artworks.  But what about the student who begins a lesson completely uninterested?  How can a teacher guide a student to ask and answer questions about an artwork?  Upon reading Terry Barrett's book Interpreting Art, he created a way for any person to seek answers to some questions to lead to the artworks meaning.

Barrett's formula consisted of combining subject matter (how one would describe the piece) , medium (what the piece is made out of), form (what its properties are), and context (purpose/history) to get the outcome of the meaning of the piece.

In class, we used a Bloom's Taxonomy chart to answer questions about an artwork.  I feel that this forced the viewer to ask questions about a piece of art.  It categorized different thought processes and allowed for an organized and better understanding of the piece.  This incorporates Barrett's formula in that all of the different categories of Barrett's formula can fall under Bloom's Taxonomy Chart.

These questions are a good starting point to talking about any artwork and always can generate a conversation about a work of art at any age.

Digital Project II: Digital Collage

Who we are and who we want to be are many different things.  In this piece there is a combination of different people.  Through Sweeney’s article, I researched the topic of identity in regards to the Internet and how much we really know who is looking at us or becoming us through the web.  Then I played with the idea of identity and how affected our own identities are through media.  In a sense, who we are and how we see ourselves rests in the palm of our hand.