Wk 11: Your Turn!

Activity 11: Your Turn!

OMG, just 2 weeks left! We started this course 10 fast weeks ago looking at The Broken Man in the Lascaux caves in Southern France. We said that The Broken Man had been on a vision quest and died to his initial mortal existence to returned as a Shaman for his people.

Detail of The Broken Man in The Shaft at The Lascaux Cave in Southern France. image is a stick like drawing of a "broken man" so referred to because he seems to have a broken neck, and "man" because he has an erection which is consistent with a broken neck. Nearby is a bird totem and while the man's body seems human, he has a bird head and instead of hands, talons.

Broken Man, Lascaux, France, 17,000 years ago

You too have been on a sort of Art & Contemporary Culture Vision Quest these past 10 weeks, thinking about Art History, Artists OTW, and trying out Drawing, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Web Design, Vlogging, Performance Art, and more! Last week you metaphorically joined The Broken Man in ending your journey with your Landscapes with a Corpse Activity.

For the last 2 weeks it’s time for you to be a Cultural Shaman! Hopefully the 10 activities I picked for you were well chosen, gave you an intro to lots of things, and let you think about ideas. But even if they were, I’m still not you. I don’t have your life journey, your passion, your experience, your interests.

At last it’s time for Activity 11 – Your Turn. This week you pick any art activity you’d like to try and give it a shot. If you want to kick ideas around you can hit me up here on the website with a comment or chat message. Or email. Or chat with a classmate about your activity. If you want to. Activity 11 is all yours. You don’t need any pre-approval. If you know what you want to do, you’re welcome to just go for it. Full details on the Activity 11 – Your Turn page.

Next week we’ll finish up with Activity 12 – Teach One where you complete your shamanistic journey by teaching an Art Activity or Art Idea to others.

Discussion Groups

There are no discussion groups this week!

You guys have been great sports coordinating schedules, dealing with tech, and trying to make our discussions successful. Heather, Jenn, Shamir & Ricki have been generous to facilitate this last month of discussions. For these last 2 weeks, I thought I’d free you from the task of finding time to meetup, and just ask you to answer 1 extra question on your blog. Unlike the regular academic year, these summer classes don’t have the University Evaluations that I’m sure you’ve filled out plenty of. But your feedback is still valuable. Your feedback really helps me make the course better for future students. Do feel free to be completely honest!

group of people chatting on a London street in 2013

photo by Gerald Streiter

Unfortunately the university never shows you the results of the evals you fill out. If the university published that info, we wouldn’t need RateMyProfessors.com. But since they don’t, we do. Apparently it’s kind of complicated: I’ve been told that the average score for Liberal Arts faculty is about a point higher than for the average Science & Engineering faculty. IDK if that’s true, but you can imagine that harder classes might have lower scores and it could all be messy. Anyway, if you liked Art110, and ok, even if you didn’t, I do encourage to leave some comments on RateMyProfessors.com. I’m sure you know better than me that students want some idea of who they’re signing up to spend 4 months with.

BTW even though the university doesn’t publish eval scores, I do voluntarily publish mine. You can see them on the “Glenn Zucman” tab on the spreadsheet on the Hall of Fame page

Discussion Questions

One
Your Turn
There is no question 1 this week! Since we don’t have discussion groups, you don’t have to discuss your activity with yourself! You can just do it and blog about it in the normal way.

Two
The 21st Century
In the video I talk about Images that Think, and the idea that today images have agency. In the past an 8×10 print could only do whatever you physically did with it. Today on sites like Flickr and others, images can get together and do stuff even while you’re asleep. What do you think about that? Awesome? Creepy? Once again the idea of licenses and intellectual property comes in. © All Rights Reserved images are a little bit like “slave” images in that they can’t go to the party and create new forms. But Open Content images can go make new things. Like that Scene Completion software that lets you create the perfect vacation image from an imperfect one.

What do you think about Scene Completion? Is it more real than real because it depicts the way your vacation experience felt? Or is it fake because it depicts a scene that your human eyes never physically saw?

What do you think about Seam Carving? Is it obscene to take a sublime photograph that Ansel Adams spent days just measuring the light for, like Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941 and “carve” it up to fit your phone? Is it a wonderful convenience to have an otherwise tiny picture of your sister with her new baby be big and bright on your phone?

Three
Joseph DeLappe
As you see in the sample videos I’ve included, Joseph DeLappe has created virtual performance art works in many game-like environments like Second Life, America’s Army, and Chatroulette. In Second Life his Gandhi avatar had fans and a following. In America’s Army he annoyed players and they voted to kick him out. On Chatroulette where he read Michel Foucault‘s thoughts about The Panopticon, everyone just seemed to ignore him.

If you encountered DeLappe or his avatar in each of these 3 virtual places, what do you think your reaction would be?

Group Discussion at NSO Event by Penn State

Four
About Discussion Groups
Since we don’t have discussion groups this week, this is a great time for you to do an extra post and LMK your experience with, and thoughts about, our discussions this summer. The groups mainly had 2 goals: to let you discuss and help each other think about the ideas in the class, and also to get to “meet” your classmates in an online class where you might never interact with them otherwise.

For the discussions that I participated in, they were almost all Google Video Hangouts, and with an exception or two, we mostly didn’t have many tech difficulties. But from the screen caps that you guys included in your posts it seems like you mostly did Text Chats rather than Video Hangouts. Why? Were there tech difficulties? Or did you just not like F2F video, preferring text format?