Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist. He is also a figure skater. I think that probably for him, both are forms of art. To hear him talk about physics or figure skating (or both at the same time), his incredible creativity and artistry is quite apparent:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/secretlife/scientists/michio-kaku/

He uses mathematics to express his ideas and theories about the world around him, which it seems to me, is a kind of creative outlet for expression, albeit one that I will probably never be able to fully understand. While I may not be able to gleam any meaning from the pages of equations that Kaku writes, they hold meaning for him, and for others. Nonetheless, Kaku is very good at explaining the meaning of physics theories in a way that allows people without specialized physics knowledge to grasp some meaning from them, which opens his artistry up more to everyday people.

Caleb Bushner Video on Sustainability

Caleb Bushner Video on Sustainability

I was poking around the AIGA's Portland site and found this really interesting video on sustainability and the best way for designer's to think about putting sustainability into design. Please watch past his whole show about being the most sustainable person in the room.

"Human Cost" - Anniversary of BP Gulf Oil Spill

I came across this YouTube video about a news story out of London. I think it is an interesting story and video, but I particularly like the irony at the end of the story.

ARTISTS STAGE OILY PROTEST AT FAMOUS TATE MUSEUM

From Andrew Price at GOOD Magazine

Yesterday London's stately Tate Britain, the oldest gallery in London's network of Tate museums, got an unexpected new installation. On the anniversary of the BP oil spill, a group of artist-activists removed a bench in one of the museum's large galleries, and poured "oil" (actually a mixture of charcoal and sunflower oil) over a naked co-conspirator who lay on the floor.

Why? The unsanctioned performance piece, called "Human Cost," was a protest by the group Liberate Tate, which has been trying to get the Tate Modern to end its relationship with BP—a relationship which basically consists of BP buying good publicity by giving the museum money and then putting its logo everywhere. As Terry Taylor, a member of Liberate Tate, said, "Oil companies like BP are responsible for environmental and social controversy all over the world, and we can’t let their sponsorship of institutions like Tate detract from that fact."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4-vGbsBLKM

Here's the irony, though: Liberate Tate was actually founded during a 2010 workshop on art and activism sponsored by the Tate. During the workshop, the group says, the Tate tried to prevent participants from doing anything that would embarrass the museum's sponsors. Suffice it to say, that kind of backfired.

Project #3 - Tim Wise

Tim Wise, what an interesting man. I must admit, having only his articles as an introduction to him was somewhat unsettling. His word choice and topics of discussion intimidated me. However, within the first few minute of Wise's lecture, I was reassured. He is smart, funny, and to a certain degree, easy to follow. And considering what Wise was discussing, these were all qualities that were much appreciated.

The inspiration for this illustration came from one of Wise's last stories. He shared with the audience and evening when he was at home with his wife and children and they were watching a movie, "Bruce Almighty". His youngest daughter asked if Morgan Freeman was God. Wise explained Morgan Freeman was not God, but an actor simply playing the role of God. Upon explaining this, Wise's eldest daughter piped in claiming that couldn't be God because God is white. He knew that statement was coming, the entire audience knew that statement was coming. But what really impacted me was the fact that he does not condone or support this idea in any way. His home contains no pictures or illustrations of God. Still, racism had managed to creep it's way into him home, and it was poisoning his children. I held onto this idea and decided to run with it for my project.

I chose to create an outline of the U.S., but not the states. I thought this would create a better sense of racism as a national issue. I then places poison beakers throughout the country, with one being tipped over and spreading in the middle. The beakers contain black "R"s which vaguely resemble skulls and crossbones. It was to emphasis the seriousness of the issue, and I also thought it looked pretty cute. I also chose to include the statement "RACISM: is poisoning our children". I went with the American Typewriter font. I wanted to make the point that this issue was and is newsworthy.

My final product looks nothing like my original sketches, but I am extremely happy with and proud of how it turned out in the end.

Green Graffiti

The following article: "Green Graffiti: Protest Art Gets Environmental" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/green-graffiti-protest-ar_n_660458.html#s119069&title=Santa_Ursula_Mexico) asserts that graffiti is green in the sense that it saves paper and other production materials. One could also subtract the environmental cost of running a gallery and hosting gallery shows. However, something about the metallic spray can and the smell that accompanies graffiti makes me doubt its true "greenness". Still, the art featured in the article draws attention to environmental issues by using pre-existing and under-utilized urban spaces that are available to anyone who walks by. Which seems pretty cool.

Project 3 -- Tim Wise Blog Images

Our last assignment was to translate Tim Wise's ideas from writing into image since his blog is so woefully inadequate in the image department. The first part of my process in creating a design was looking through the many ideas in our Tim Wise reader and sketching the ones I felt I understood well enough. There were many sketches, but most were pretty much comic vignettes. I knew this would be a problem for me since I can't freehand very well and it would be a bit much to collage some of the little stories I had sketched out. With this in mind, I took a different route in my later sketches and tried to make them as abstract and conceptual as possible. I did a few of these then moved into Illustrator.

Once in Illustrator, I tried to realize the most abstract design I had made, a kind of flow chart that outlined privilege and choice in the terms of education and job opportunity. I liked this idea a lot but I had hard time keeping it simple and legible as good design should be so I scrapped it and started goofing around with another idea, this one comparing the idea of the "welfare queen"(a term invented by Ronald Reagan in the 1970's about a kind of woman from south Chicago) with the fame of teenage mothers from the MTV show 16 and Pregnant. I looked at pictures of TV in windows -- the kind you see in old movies where a character walks by a shop window and sees a TV playing something -- for inspiration. I traced some pictures and simplified them until I had the two mothers. From there I fiddled with how I would display them, that is, would they be floating or would they be in a real place. I chose floating because I thought it best to keep only the essential parts of the images. I fiddled some more, added some text, and then was finished. I probably spend about five or six hours working designs in Illustrator I didn't use any part of before I arrived at the final design.

Tim Wise

Having Tim Wise was so cool. Mostly my research for project #3 consisted of reading the packet of his articles and taking notes and attending his lecture. My notes were very informal; I really just wrote down anything that struck me, paying special attention to ideas that threaded themselves through more than a couple of his articles. Then I took those notes and the key ideas that stood out to me the most were the ones that I brought to m sketchbook.

Some of the ideas I worked with were the ideas of colorblindness, the danger of not addressing racism, and privilege. I played with the idea of visually representing racism as a cancer that grows quietly and silently, so one of my sketches involved a person, or at least the outline of a person, in black and white, with the word racism in a mass in color, with circles of color going out from the word to try and express the spreading and growing of racism within people. I wasn't sure that the message would really get across with this design, though, so I continued sketching.

My next sketch dealt with Tim Wise's assertion that racism physically wears on the bodies of people of color. However, I was worried that working with this concept would easily become victimizing of people of color. I wanted to be respectful and try to find the balance between recognizing the suffering that racism causes and yet also not speak for people of color or victimize them. I didn't see myself finding that balance in this sketch so I went back to square one in the sketchbook.

The next concept that I worked with was the idea that the lenses of privilege that we all have affect us, and the way that we view the world, ourselves, and others. And often they affect us without us ever realizing that they are affecting us. With this idea of lenses, the image of glasses came into my head. Specifically, I thought about a hodge-podge of unique, vintage-feeing glasses and sunglasses. So I had this idea of glasses. I matched it with the idea of selling a product, and needing a disclaimer, so I developed the disclaimer at the bottom about the way that these lenses may affect our ability to change, have compassion, view reality, etc.

From there, it was a matter of putting it all together in a way that was visually pleasing, which took a lot more time messing around with different glasses, colors, angles, and styles, than I had expected. Eventually I had to pair down on the number of glasses that I had selected, which made it a lot cleaner and simpler.