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Final Project

I couldn’t be happier with the end result of my project. I feel as though it has helped me gain some physical skills I didn’t have before as well as deal with my whole emotions surrounding it. I feel like I have a better understanding now about what it takes to push yourself into discomfort in order to grow, and how to accept that you can’t always change things.

I am happy that I don’t feel sad. I am happy that I feel accomplished.

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I’m Stressed

I’m stressed. 

I’m stressed out about presenting, stressed out about the semester being half over, stressed out about getting assignments done, stressed out about papers, stressed out about life.

Many times stress comes like a tsunami. We know its coming, like how the ocean recedes and the wind picks up. We know that the wave is coming yet for some reason instead of moving away from its impact, I often find myself walking out towards the receding water only to be hit by the sheer force of the wave of stressors in my life.

And often, after the stressors are past, after the wave hits, I’m left feeling disoriented and drained, not knowing what to do now that the stress is gone. There are an endless amount of techniques out there for dealing with stress, and for each person it is different. 

I wonder if great minds such as Aristotle suffered from constant stress, or worry, or anxiety. I keep grasping at why I am so stressed when in the end, although it is relative, time will continue to pass no matter what I do. No matter what, seconds will be seconds, minutes will be minutes, and the stressful wave will come and go, whether I want it to or not.

Eckhart Tolle had said that "stress is caused by being 'here' but wanting to be 'there.'" I feel like this speaks to me because whenever I am stressed out, it is because I am worrying for an event in the future. I don t know how something will go, what will happen, and I just want it to be over.

I am stressed, but I am trying to learn how to cope with it. I don’t have a solution, or an answer, if I did I wouldn’t be stressed. I think I will simply try to live in the moment, and not dwell on things that have yet to happen

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Changing Views

Last semester I was in Environmental Design and Social Cultural Context, and our final project was to analyze 2 buildings and compare them, ultimately deciding which space was more successful.

Back then, I didn’t see anything wrong with this. My group had 2 libraries and we researched them before saying “hey, the North Regional library is better than East Lake library”. But as the X-lab has progressed, the library visits have made me think more and more about how untrue and unfair it is to say one library is better than another based off its floor plan, size, and other structural aspects. I revisited both the libraries (since they weren’t far away from each other it wasn’t hard) and gained a different, better idea of the spaces.

As I walked around North Regional, I found myself more attracted to the seemingly menial things, like the stair well. Then I began to see this thing unfold where I would look for the shadows and light, looking at the suns reach into the building as a James Turrell or Vito Acconci piece.

I found myself in the stairwell for 15 minutes just looking at its form and how it reacted with the light, a bit angry that I hadn’t noticed it before or had the eyes to appreciate it. I love the shot of the stairs I took because it is a bit disorienting, making it hard to tell which way is up, and what is in the front vs what is in the back.

I really saw the light in East Lake library, the lights on the ceiling created long strips of alternating light and dark, reminding me of the Slant/Light/Volume piece. I remember focusing much more on the floor plan for my past project, and taking absolutely no time to appreciate the space for what it was.

I feel like the X-Lab has really made me stop and slow down. It’s given me insight and knowledge on things I would have never went out of my way to learn, but now will. I’m very glad that I feel like slowing down, because I’m noticing so many more things I would have glazed over before.

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

I had mentioned this earlier to Matt, but I thought I would write about it. My mother, a 49 year old lawyer at Wells Fargo, told me she doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up.

Doesn’t know? You’re already grown up. You’ve been a lawyer for over 25 years.

This made me think of my own job search, my own path. I’m 20 years old and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But when is grown up? What depictates being “grown up”?

Who can you think of is “grow up”? Most of the time, it’s someone “successful” yah? Someone who makes a lot of money and has a lot of stuff, someone who goes on great vacations to Europe and has a stable (stale) job.

My mom is successful, and has had a great job at Wells Fargo. But she is faced with not only the stesssors of being a high level lawyer but also being a newly widowed mother who has to see 3 kids through college while taking on the entirety of control over the family which she didn’t have before. She is grown up, but is not grown up. She wants to indulge in her passions for the fashion industry, she wants to do something she wants to do, not something she feels she needs to do to support us.

You can be successful doing what you love, if you have the passion for it. And you never really grow up.

I hope to be the crusty old lady in an old person home at 99 years old saying, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up”

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I have a friend I’ve never met

I have a friend I’ve never met. I don’t know their name. I don’t know who they are. I have never even said anything to them. But I think they are a friend.

Every day I drive to campus. I sit in traffic, I avoid bad drivers and by the time I get to campus, I hope that the church street parking garage isn’t full so I’m not late to class. The morning attendant is there everyday, and we always exchange a smile and a nod as I go into the ramp. It had become something that calms me down when I’m angry from my commute, and something I just look forward to in general.

I posted the other day inquiring on how we can appreciate things we don’t notice. How little things can slip out of our perception and be gone forever if we move too fast to see them.

I appreciate the simple gesture the parking attendant and I go through 5 times a week. I appreciate the fact that if nothing else goes right, I will always have that small, positive interaction. I appreciate how this small gesture can make my day a little better.

It is something small that can make someone’s day. What can you do to make someone else’s day? It doesn’t have to be big, just purposeful, and with a smile. Pass it on, and it will come back.

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Last Weeks Library Trip

Last week I was able to visit the Walker Center Library. The quiet, intimate space the collection of books was in felt warm and inviting, and the staff was kind and helpful for the entirety of the trip.

Since my past weeks visits turned up no luck on finding information about James Turrell, I was determined to find some information at the Walker. With the help of the librarian, I was able to find a couple books on Turrell that showed his work in a similar fashion to Robert Irwin’s works. The slant light volume piece was a result of the two light and space movement artist manipulating the seemingly empty room and filling it with volume using no objects, only light. Light has been a powerful tool for both Robert Irwin and James Turrell, along with many other artists of their day.

James Turrell has done many pieces with light, painting in space as he calls it. “If you’re going to talk about seeing, you have to talk about light” is a quote by him, and you can see how this holds a lot of weight when you look at his pieces such as the ones below.

And as I was leaving, I captured a moment as I passed a hallway that had the light creating geometric forms on the long wall. I felt like I was appreciating the moment like James Turrell May have, and I had a dejavu moment much like my very first post about hearing someone whistling after watching the noise music video and having a subconscious appreciation for it.

How can we tune into these subconscious appreciations? How do we know when we are gaining them? And how can we learn to appreciate all things while we still have the chance too?

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I’ve never seen anything, ever

Having Boris come in and talk to us was a very thought provoking experience. Upon initially looking him up and seeing that he was a color scientist, I wanted to ask him what that meant and why color interested him so much. He ended up going into why color was interesting to him and talked about his red project. How do you know red? Boris was surely determined to find out.

When we think of a color, we may think that red is just that. Red is red, blue is blue, and so on and so forth. But as we discussed, there is so much more to colors than what we assume they are. Take a look at this video, it’s only a few minutes long. It is kids describing colors to a blind person.

https://youtu.be/MK94B9VcDyU

Initially it is so difficult for the children to comprehend that this guy haven’t seen anything ever in his life. But when he begins asking them what sound they associate with a certain color, or what they think of, the kids are all very quick to respond. At one point one of the kids says that yellow is like the one kid who’s a good kid, but just can’t sit still. In a separate video later, the same blind young man says that that comment really connected with him, and he felt like he had a better understanding of what yellow was.

We discussed how when we perceive colors, we all see them just a bit differently. That colors can be perceived as an experience and provoke different feelings. That’s why someone may say a test printed on red paper is more stressful than one printed on blue paper. Or why someone may say they wearing blue is professional and shows more confidence than wearing yellow. Colors are so much more than a swatch you find in the paint section at Lowes. They can give us real feelings, make us remember memories, and in all have an entire life of their own.

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What is your path?

I had the opportunity to learn about someone today who graduated from the UofM who went through a Black Mountain-esqe process of getting to where she is today. Her name is Tessa Louise, and she owns her own fashion label in Minneapolis. I’ve attached a link to her website below, I strongly recommend taking a look, she has some amazing pieces.

https://www.tessalouise.com

In her website bio, you can only learn just a snippet of who she is and what her path is. I am lucky enough to have met her father and learn a little more about her path to owning her own fashion label. I learned that Tessa had always been a creative mind, drawing and sculpting throughout her life. She didn’t know what she wanted to do when she entered college, and probably would not have guessed she would one day start a fashion company.

It was a passion she found while investigating the different areas which creative minds go into. She was even told she should do industrial design, but in the end found her place in the fashion industry.

But I don’t think that fashion and industrial design are all that different. Like all design fields are connected with invisible strands and strings, everything has the opportunity to be influenced by something else if you just allow it to be. A dress can be influenced by a chair just as much as it can be influenced by a Monet painting.

I also got to tell her father about Black Mountain College, which he had never heard of before. It is easy to tell when someone is truly interested in what you are saying, and he was, which made the sharing of knowledge very rewarding.

I am very happy to have gained some personal insight on what it is like to find your path. No 2 paths are going to be the same, so don’t try to go West like everyone else if you truly want to go East. We all have our own path laid out by our passions and heart, follow it and you will end up where you want to be.

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Storytelling

We’ve talked about storytelling in class and the many different forms it takes. From the literal story ina book to the story you tell through subtle body movements and expressions, storytelling seems to be at the heart of how we understand and explain the world.

Today, Matt looked over my portfolio before I attended my very first networking event. For the past 2 years I Shevardnadze gone through the process of signing up, prepping, and then chickening out of attending multiple networking and career events. To attend today was a big step for me on its own, so I was unsure of how to present my work.

Matt suggested that I explain my work as a form of storytelling, and this really resonated with me. It felt a lot easier and productive to explain the projects and assignments as a story, not a graded requirement issued in a class. I feel like this advice helped put me at ease a bit and it became easier to talk about my work and I felt more confident as a result.

I feel like this is one tool I can stash away to help my anxieties as I move forward into more and more professional settings and interactions. It can be intimidating sitting across from someone who is judging you in a matter of seconds. Knowing the right way to talk about yourself and your work without sounding like you’re reading off a script can really make a difference in how you’re viewed.

At the end of the day, what will they remember about you? What will they remember about what you said? Storytelling really feels like a way to make yourself memorable by sharing not just your work, but your process and experience.

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1 Positive, 1 Negative

This week, I was able to visit 2 libraries on campus. One visit was fun, productive, and positive, while the other was not so much. The first visit was to the Magrath Library on the St. Paul campus. I had never been in this library before and was excited to look around. I was surprised to find a large array of design books that could have kept me entertained for hours.

It was also a treat to see the architecture of the library, since it was so unique. The whole group of buildings clustered around Magrath were all unique and interesting, every staircase was different, the study areas were found in every nook and cranny. It was a bit disorienting walking around, and it took a while to find the library even though the entrance was right where I walked in. It was a fun experience, and I ended up getting a book on stores and graphic design.

If it weren’t for my class that night, I could have stayed much longer and would most likely have found many more books. The library worker was kind and helpful, able to answer any questions and give some insight on where to find certain books. She was very kind and for that I am grateful.

I left feeling happy and accomplished, since this isn’t an easy assignment for me to ask people for selfies at the risk of being rejected.

So I went on my way and found a few books that I needed for class, then explored on my own. It was very quiet and there were not a lot of people. It seemed almost off, but I enjoyed browsing the shelves a bit envious of how many books they have and I don’t. It’s funny how much I liked the article about having an anti-library, it made me really want to go out and get some more books!

After my looking around I made my way back down to checkout, hoping that the same attendant would help me so I could chat with her more. But she was busy with another student, so I went to the other attendant. This worker didn’t look like a student, but I figured I had one positive interaction, I’ll try for another. I tried to make polite small talk like I did before but got a much different feeling, almost annoyance, from the attendant. I was hesitant to ask for a selfie but determined to try. I asked them kindly, after explaining the class I’m in, that there was no obligation but it would help me out. I got a shocked and offended face, before the response “No. I will not do that.” and was then abruptly ignored. I was shocked, more so because of the tone and reaction to my question not the response itself. I stood there awkwardly, feeling like someone had poked my confidence with a pin, embarrassed as I left with a small line of students looking at me.

I kept thinking about how I could have turned the interaction around, if I had done something that would have made the librarian uncomfortable in any way. I couldn’t find any reason for the tone I was given, but like most things it will continue to gnaw at me for a long, long time. It’s not like I was yelled at, but I was certainly not kindly declined. I have already be declined once for a library selfie once before this, but it was more polite and not as embarrassing.

When speaking to people, we tend to make a decision on how we feel about them almost immediately. I try to be open-minded when people are cold, because you never know what they are going through or what kind of day they have been having. Although I am embarrassed and really deflated, I do hope that this doesn’t take away from my confidence too much, and I do hope that if the librarian was having a bad day, it gets better.

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Robert Irwin and Vito Acconci

There are countless people in this world who have a unique way of thinking, but 2 of these different thinkers that prove to be quite outstanding are Robert Irwin and Vito Acconci. 

Robert Irwin is a famous artist who participated in the Light and Space movement. Along with others such as James Turrell, Irwin was interested in how our senses and perceptions altered the way we viewed and understood things, particularly experiences.

Light/Slant/Volume was the name of this installation put on by Irwin. He has many installations involving the manipulation of light and space but this one is particularly fascinating to me. Irwin had once said, “ How is it that a space could ever come to be considered empty when it is filled with real and tactile events?” Take a look at the installation, would you consider it empty? There are no objects, nothing tangible, yet most would agree that there is in fact something there. Light takes up space, it creates this slanting volume. You could walk right through it if you perceive it literally or you could stand back, treating it as you would a wall or tangible barrier. 

I like to compare his light installations to the night sky. It may often seem void of anything, not a single star or even a passing by plane to be seen. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing there. Irwin has had some amazing pieces throughout his lifetime, but I really do enjoy this one.

Like Irwin, Vito Acconci was a different thinker. He did a lot of performance art, some of which was pretty criticized. One work that stood out to me was the Following Piece.

This piece stood out because I thought of the X-lab as I read about it. There is nothing more uncomfortable than feeling like you’re being followed, but Acconci showed us that maybe it is even more uncomfortable to intentionally follow someone around. Unless the person went somewhere private, Acconci would follow them around for the entire day. I connect this to the feeling of discomfort in the X-lab that accompanies some activities. By just following someone around, Acconci had to take himself out of his studio and into the world, experiencing something uncomfortable but doing it anyways. I cant say that the best way to be a more comfortable person is following around random people in your area, but it may have been just that that Acconci wanted.

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X-Lab Manifestos

In a world full of regulations, rules, restrictions, and deadlines, it can be easy to find ourselves doing the minimum and not going any further than we have to. We may be interested in something, but lack the drive to dedicate our time to it. With so many things in life, we don’t take the time to invest in our curious nature.

In the X-lab, we have uncovered a few manifestos that we can apply to sort of get in the habit of exercising out curiosity. The first thing that we need to do is accept discomfort. It is a feeling we get when we are unsure or if something is new, but if we never explored into these discomforts, we would never make it past the front door of our homes. To grow, we need to accept discomfort until we are able to transform it into something we see as beneficial and comfortable. Exercising these discomforts and challenging your limits is how we expand our boundaries of what we consider safe. To be safe with something, you have to feel unsafe first.

We also need to be comfortable with freedom, as it can be scary having the entire world at our fingertips. Learning how to use our time in a productive way when no one is telling you have to use it can be a challenge. From the day we began to walk, we have been being told what to do. It is no surprise when the loud voice of authority and endless stream of tasks stops, we find ourselves almost lost in all our time. When we are able to learn how to wield our freedom, there’s an endless amount of things we can accomplish and learn.

We also need to practice getting out of ones self, stepping away from our preconceived thoughts and really being open to the world and its possibilities. We need to frame our values as well as indulge our curiosities and research them. 

Curiosity, openness, and discomfort are the 3 key elements for the X-lab, but could also be for life itself. In everything we do, we should attack it head on no matter the discomfort, with a spark of curiosity in our eyes and an open mind.

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Time

Everyone has said it, the weekend went by too fast.

It just flew by, in a blink. And while we feel like the days during the week go by slow, they are truely going at the same speed. I’ve been having trouble lately thinking about the passage of time. How quickly it can go, and how I will never be able to get it back. How we only have rented time on this earth, and it won’t last forever.

Time is beginning to become a hard thing for me to think about without it consuming my thoughts. It’s hard, trying to wrap your head around the fact that time is the one thing you can never get back. I feel anxious and worried simply writing this post.

But this is why I try to be more positive and proactive, because what time I have I want to make the best of. What time I have I want to spend doing what I enjoy.

Everyone has said it, life is too short to waste it being unhappy. I want to form good habits, to be curious and absorb as much as I can. I want to spend more time creating, more time being happy.

We all should spend more time on what makes us happy

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There’s something about antique stores that transport you to another time. Every individual item has a life, has a story. Upon visiting Hunt and Gather, I was on a mission to find a comb for my music box but it turned into a really neat experience. I love antique stores, you never know what you’re going to find so you’re forced to leave your expectations at the door. I went into Hunt and Gather looking for something specific (which I should have known wasn’t going to pan out) and found everything except for it. But that’s ok! Upon entering the allegedly small looking store, I quickly realized how extensive it really was. I also quickly realized that I wasn’t going to find a comb, but figured I’d look around anyways. I wasn’t in a rush and I was already seeing things that caught my eye. I began near a bench with a mandolin laid atop if it. No strings, pegs, or bridge but it looked like the woodwork was solid. $35. I wondered who had owned it before it made its journey here, if it had been loved and played or simply bought and forgotten. Not too far away was a stack of violin molds. What kind of life did these $18 molds have before entering the shop? This seemed to be the question I kept asking as I made my way through the framed anatomy prints, license plate numbers, bowls of gears, stacks of posters, mounted antlers, bins of jars, and much more. Although there was a massive range of i teams in the store there was that one thing that linked them all to each other: they all had a life before coming here. And you could tell, when you saw an object, picked it up. Held it. It seemed to have its weight plus a little more. The scratches and faded colors on the surface showing that it’s been in someone’s else’s hands before your own. There was a wall filled with old photos, all different. I always wondered how they made their way into antique stores. Every single person in each individual photograph had a life, a family, problems, accomplishments. There is so much more life than meets the eye. I had a wonderful time looking around and finding a few treasures that I just couldn’t pass up. In all, I think the trip there won’t be my last and I will definitely return again.

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Blue Skies

“We know the sky’s blueness even before we know it as “blue”, let alone as “sky.”

-Robert Irwin

This is how Robert Irwin describes experience as a sense or perception, and it is just a fascinating concept to me. It’s just like when someone says “you had to be there”. They could describe it to you, in full detail, but you would never experience it like they did. You could never fully describe the sky’s blueness to someone who has never seen it. You experience something first, then only after that do you label it and sort it in your head.

I think that most of us can now think about experiences that we’ve had that we couldn’t possibly explain to anyone. It is simple to tell a story but impossiblt to relay a sense or exact feeling. We’ve all had things in our lives that we can look back on and remember what we felt. Experiences, even old ones, are coupled with these perceptions only we can understand fully.

Irwin also stated that everything is rooted in experience, so we all as individuals have experienced events that we have a unique set of senses atattched too. No one person is going to have the same set of experiences, and that could be a core factor that makes us all unique.

The sky’s blueness is an experience, different for everyone, even after we all label it as a “blue sky”.

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Laurel Broughton

Meeting Laurel today was a fun and different experience. Like what many of us agreed upon, it was really odd to meet someone for the first time over Skype. It would begin to feel like we were watching a video and you would have to snap yourself out of it to remember that it’s a live stream connection happening in real time.

Technology is such an amazing thing, but meeting someone face to face feels so much different than meeting them over a screen. It would be really interesting to see how a conversation with Laurel would differ in person versus over the webcam.

As for her work and the questions we asked, although she said she does not have any manifestos I think that maybe she does. What Laurel seems to base her work and everything she does off of is curiosity. Everything is focused on being curious and exploring why she’s curious about it. I also loved the fact that she said her work is a continuous path, that there isn’t one specific project that makes her who she is or defines all her other work. What she does is an accumulation of her past curiosities and discoveries, which is amazing. So in a way, I do feel like Laurel has a manifesto that she lives by.

If I had to name that manifesto, I think it would be always, always be curious. And I think for Laurel it’s more of a feeling than a rule, something that she doesn’t even need to think about doing, she just does it. I hope to be as curious as she is, because it really does seem to produce some great work.