PECHA KUCHA
In this Pecha Kucha I want to present the way I see and think differently as a result of the experiences I’ve had in the class.
I now see and think differently in the following ways:
•By valuing an experience over the memory of that experience
•By taking time to see things more clearly
I have three years experience as the editor of my high school’s yearbook. In my time on the staff, my responsibilities included designing layouts, writing articles, and taking pictures wherever and whenever possible. I formulated a habit of documenting everything, taking excessive amounts of photos in all aspects of my life. It’s as if I became a memory hoarder, trying to capture every inch of my life and my experiences that I might someday forget.
I was taking thousands upon thousands of pictures to remember and to share with others. After coming to MIAD, I quickly started to understand that some pictures would never compare to the actual experiences. The real world wasn’t high school, and it wasn’t my job to make a yearbook of my life. My brain would do that work for me. I needed to accept that I would remember what I was going to remember, and forget what I was going to forget; but if I tried to document/remember it all, I was going to miss out on a lot.
So I ask, how does my memory of an experience differ from the experience itself? Is one more important than the other?
From the very week of school I was thrust into “experience” with the garbage collecting tour of Milwaukee. The installation my group created out of the objects we collected was focused around not only turning humble materials into something beautiful, but incorporating the idea that things change over time. With the light of the sun, our installation of shadows changed, moved, and sometimes disappeared altogether, much like experiences and the lessons we take out of them.
But record keeping and documentation isn’t all bad, I learned that it could be valuable to my growth as a student and an artist. Incorporating writing into my sketchbook assignments added a new dimension to memory making for me. With the sketchbook I could record what I saw, thought, and felt during each new experience with UV.
Sometimes I took notes during the experiences, other times I took pictures and formulated my thoughts later. Either way, the observations, prompts, and responses all helped me understand why what we were doing was valuable. And for those of us with spatial intelligence, putting together these pages actually enhanced my memory of each event.
The Vermeer reading also got me thinking about “the experience”. Much like me, Vermeer seemed obsessed with capturing these moments in life, no matter how insignificant they might seem. I’m still not necessarily sure which is more valuable, but I certainly learned that there is no memory without experience.
I have tons of low quality cell phone pictures from nearly every major event we had with UV1. Often these pictures were taken on the go, and looking back at them all I realized just how many were horrifyingly blurry. It didn’t take long for me to see the connection between these pictures and my ideas about experience. By rushing through the experiences, taking in as much information as I could, all the information I actually retained was low quality and not worth much (hence the connection to these pictures).
I began to wonder: what is the value in seeing things differently? Why should we strive to “unblur” our world?
This class, and MIAD as a whole, is about taking something you see out of the corner of your eye and learning to look at it straight on. These realizations from the cell phone pictures allowed the world to come into focus and made me take a closer look at the things that are intriguing, questioning, and important to me. I learned to take time to slow down, look, and appreciate the details of things.
My second set of questions was realized during moments of overstimulation. I came to find that trying to remember everything resulted in learning nothing. The parts of these experiences I remember most are when I put my phone away and really looked and listened. Only the experience itself can provide a clear picture.
So many of the quotes I took from James Elkins related to this idea. The world is out there, we just need the tools to see it more clearly. We can try to look at everything, but in the end we see nothing. This class taught me to take a closer look, to filter my stimulation and learn more efficiently/effectively from what I see.
Again, the sketchbooks were a way of taking all these observations and realizations and organizing them into thoughts I could use. To be able to focus on one question at a time gave me the opportunity to, in the end, see more clearly in school and in everyday life.
I see the learning, thinking, and experiences from this class applying to my work and my life as an artist/designer in the following ways:
• By allowing me to grow with each new experience I have in my creative work and in my life and utilizing both the experience itself and my memory/documentation of the experience
• By helping me see the value in slowing down, looking, and analyzing things with my own eyes and therefore learning more efficiently in this way.
I’ve heard a lot of my peers say we don’t learn much in this class, but I think the earning we did was much more subconscious than other classes and that’s why it’s easy to overlook. I’ve come away from UV1 with a whole new approach to each new experience, art related or not.
