You Guys rock! Thank you for a wonderful class. Best of Luck to you all. 

Al

Take Home Exam Topics

TA10 Final Exam Topics:

 

Theater Company Hierarchy & Static categories (Howard)

Metapatterns (Volk)

The door (Aronson)

Image versus Sign (States)

Spectacle/Media (Aronson)

Metaphor (Borges)

George Tsypin’s use of steel and glass (Aronson)

The ideograph (Taymor)

The double image: showing off the mechanics(Taymor)

Space in space (Svoboda)

The formal theater (Robert Wilson)

Anti-illusionistic design (Appia)

Color projection color recession

1.2.3. point perspective

Complementary colors

Forced perspective

light and shadow: 1) specular 2) specular -edge transfer 3) shadow-edge transfer 4) shadow.

Motivated lighting: Identifying the source

Elevation Section and Plan

Ecstatic truth (Herzog)

Theater of the oppressed (Boal)

Collaboration

Ishioka’s creed: revolutionary, original, timeless

Foreman’s set design (Aronson)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final Exam, Assignments and Grading

Final Exam

Your final exam must be submitted no later than 4pm on Monday June 8th 2009

1. Save your file as f_lastname.doc (no wps, or word formats newer than 2004). If I can't open your exam I can't grade it.
2. The subject line must contain the name of the your attachment example f_jones.com.
3. Be extra prepared if you have had difficulty sending your assignments in the past . First make sure you can open it in word on a mac. Second make sure you send it early so I can let you know there is a problem - otherwise you may not have time to correct it before the deadline at 4pm.
   
4. Email your final to melanieaway@hotmail.com and no other addresses
   
1. Up until 3pm on Monday I will reply confirming your final has been received and has opened successfully. 
   
1. if you do not receive confirmation by 6pm on Monday forward your original to me, with a cc to Alan)

Grading and Assignments

How grading is weighted:

individual 35%:

final exam 15%
midterm 15% (C+ and lower can rewrite for up to a B)
questions 5%


group 65%:

blog 10%

interview 10%

live design 10%

stage design 10%
environmental design 10%
environmental proposal 5%
notes on reading 10%


individual extra:

drawings/ collages/ writing up to 10%
metapatterns notes & images up to 10%
shows up to 2.5%
questions up to 2.5%


definitions:

blog: should contain documentation of the group projects, reading notes, and documentation of the group's creative process( ie. meeting notes, collages, research images, sketchbook pages, brainstorms, emo poems, and emo drawings.)

presentations: entire group involved, rehearsed, organized, 15 minute presentations with visuals that can be presented on a mac laptop (thumb-drive, dvd, or cd. TEST! TEST! TEST!) 


stage design: fits on a table top, reflects a design for a specific type of theater(proscenium, thrust, arena, etc.), shows visually a transition between two states, ie. day to night, still to active, prosperous to poor. etc. 


environmental design: location outside of the theater, enhances an interesting space with the addition of visual elements. according to the description of the proposal

live design: with simple props and simple costumes, the entire group enacts a design that shows visually a transition between two states. total time including setup performance and break down= 15min. 


drawings/ collages/ writing: any recent drawings (variants on drawings exercises-no emo -drawings!), recent collages, and/or recent writings created individually that you would like me to critique, writings may be relevant to any subject (no emo-poems!). (submitted electronically to Alan) subject line = drawings/ collages/ writing and attachment name: save attachment as dcw_lastname_firstname.doc


metapatterns images: accompanied by notes on the reading on eres; visual examples of metapatterns ie. sheets, tubes, holons, clonons, triggers, spheres, centers, spheres, layers, borders, arrows, binaries, emergence, clusters, breaks, webs, networks, cycles, gradients. (submitted electronically to Alan) 
(submitted electronically to Alan) subject line = metapatterns images and attachment name: save attachment as mi_lastname_firstname.doc

Getting images into your documents

As visual artists you will want to show your audience what you do. Text just doesn't capture what an image can in terms of conveying meaning. This is a technology course, and so it is important that you leave this class ready to show the world your great ideas. And judging from the midterms, your ideas are fabulous!

How to insert an image

Inserting an image into a document is easy once you know how. Note: For some strange reason you can't just drag the image from the desktop into the document. 
Step 1: With your document open, place the cursor where you want the image to be placed.
Step 2: You have to have the image stored either on your computer (for instructions see below) or a portable flash/thumb drive attached to computer. The image must have an image extension. Usually you will use the smaller file formats jpg, jpeg, gif or bmp. Limit using large files like psd (photo shop), or tiff because your document will be too large to email easily. 
Step 3: From the top menu in Word select INSERT (it's between view and format). Then from the drop down, select PICTURES, then FROM FILE. Then you will get a window that pops up which looks like finder. Navigate to the image you want and select it. 
Step 4: The image will now be in your document but if the image you will want to resize it. Click on the image. Little black boxes will surround your image. Those boxes are handles. You click and drag on the handles to scale your image. Note however if you enlarge your image the quality will suffer. 
Voila, you have inserted an image. You can even insert a video following the same steps! 

How to Get an Image into your Computer


You will want to save your images as jpegs or tiffs, and insert them in the way you have been asked - sometimes your professor, client or funding body will ask for attachments, or inserted in your documents. While jpegs are smaller size, tiffs are better quality and you can send them to printing services for professional quality publications. As a habit, I save my work as tiffs for printing, and jpegs for the internet and emailing... Note use jpegs if you are going to insert an image into a word document that you know you will be emailed.
1. Scanning: assuming you have access and artwork is appropriately sized for scanner
2. Cell phones: Many cell phones have a camera, and while the quality isn't always great, you will get the image you need in a pinch.
3. Camera: Best choice for quality - I'd be happy to go over lighting techniques for 3D models. If there is one technological purchase that is vitally important to you from a career standpoint it is a camera you are comfortable using. As an artist you are only as good as the documentation of your work. Sad but true!
4. Webcam on your computer, put the object in front of the camera and shoot.
5. And lastly ask a friend who has mad photography skills.

Hope this helps

Synesthesia

—and His Drab-Shoelace Brown, and His Weathered-Wood Black

Brian Boyd

Nabokov once said that we will never know the nature of thought. He may be right, despite modern brain scanning, but I’m not so sure. He also once said no computer could ever be programmed to play chess, since this would require calculating an infinity of moves in a finite time. He did not live to see Deep Blue (interesting color association belatedly noticed, as he might say) beat Garry Kasparov at chess. 
I suspect that we will at least discover much more about thought. Apart from the other obvious reasons, it’s a shame that Nabokov’s own mind was no longer in action when fMRI scanning became capable of identifying at least the site of particular brain activities, if hardly of offering us a clear window onto pure thought.
His brain would have been a neurophysiologist’s dream. What difference would each of these have made to the map of his singular mind?

• his advanced trilingualism (he wrote at the highest literary level in Russian, English and French)
• his gifts as a chess composer (he was invited to join the US national team)
• his other prodigious gifts for pattern, especially in word and sound (“senescent nonsense, says science”)
• a memory so overloaded that he complained about the burden of not being able to forget anything (be quiet, memory)
• his combination of artistic genius and scientific excellence (he rapidly became the world authority in the Lycaenid family, the so-called Blues, in his few years as a professional lepidopterist, in the 1940s, and his contribution to that small area is still regarded as world-class by specialists in this group: see Kurt Johnson’s and Steve Coates’s Nabokov’s Blues) 
• and perhaps most interesting of all, his highly developed synesthesia.

Oliver Sacks has told me how fascinated he was to learn that as a seven-year-old in the throes of fever Vladimir Nabokov lost his skills as a mathematical prodigy, and found on his recovery that butterflies seemed to have recolonized some of the mental terrain he had formerly dedicated to his concern for, for instance, the seventeenth root of 3529471145760-275132301897342055866171392.
Nabokov himself would have been delighted by Sacks’s work and by his interest. He had already been delighted when in 1949 a team of psychologists drew on his detailed explanation of his synesthesia in his “Portrait of My Mother,” only two months after the memoir’s publication in the New Yorker and years before it became, as planned, Chapter 2 of his autobiography. Before it was called Speak, Memory, the autobiography was entitled Conclusive Evidence, partly because Nabokov, still working at the microscope at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology when he began the project, had conceived it as both an artistic and a scientific challenge, an attempt to recount his life with the maximum art and the maximum precision in retracing the strands of his personality. Indeed Véra Nabokov wrote to one of the coauthors of the paper on synesthesia, objecting to the implication that the metaphors he had chosen to specify the exact colors he associated with each letter of the alphabet—“In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h”—were “a concession to literature. He says that, being a scientist (entomologist), he considers his prose scientific and would have used the same metaphors in a scientific article.”
Since that first 1949 discussion of Nabokov’s synesthesia by psychologists, there has been much more scientific work on the phenomenon, and Nabokov is almost invariably cited both for the artistic and scientific exactness of his report and as a prime example, along with Kandinsky, Scriabin and Hockney, of the association of synesthesia with artistic originality.

Nabokov had an unusual insistence on precision, in understanding either the world or a work of art, and an unusual insistence on freedom, in responding to the world or a work. When asked in 1930 did he think contemporary writing was and would be influenced by Proust, he insisted that this was almost impossible to tell, since writers A and B would each read Proust differently, and even if they were influenced by him, this might not be noticed by reader C, who would read him differently again. He would have been charmed by Jean Holabird’s precise but imaginative rendering of his As, Bs and Cs in her AlphaBet in Color.
Part of Nabokov’s passion for precision was his passion for color. He was born a landscape painter, he once wrote, and as a boy he had one of St. Petersburg’s finest painters, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, as his private drawing-master. His eye for color—for nuance of tint and nuance of term—was surely sharpened by his love of butterflies, already intense by the time he was seven, and his searches for technical descriptions of them in guides in four or five languages. He noticed color in literature, praising Gogol for seeing so much more than the conventional labels: before him, “the sky was blue, the dawn red, the foliage green, the eyes of beauty black, the clouds grey, and so on. It was Gogol (and after him Lermontov and Tolstoy) who first saw yellow and violet at all. That the sky could be pale green at sunrise, or the snow a rich blue on a cloudless day, would have sounded like heretical nonsense to your so-called ‘classical’ writer.” In his guide to Nabokov’s short novel Pnin, Gennady Barabtarlo records 238 uses of color terms from amber to yellow via amber-brown, cadmium red,
emerald-and-gray, magenta, mahogany and mauve, opalescent, pearly and platinum, slate-gray, snow-and-rose, straw and strontian. He even provides pie graphs and bar charts of the colors (the red-orange group had the highest bar, the fattest slice of pie—colored in by hand, in my copy, by Gennady’s daughter).

On color and light or art and science in Nabokov I could write much more. Nabokov makes the rainbow a leitmotif through Speak, Memory. When he drew and colored invented butterflies for Véra, they were often in magic spectral arrangements (see, appropriately enough, both Véra’s Butterflies and Nabokov’s Butterflies). Nabokov studied light, shadow, reflection, color, in the atmosphere, on butterfly wings, in paintings (his projected but
never completed book Butterflies in Art), in the marvelously poetic hyperrealist canvases he
invents for some of his favorite characters, like painters Cynthia Vane (in “The Vane Sisters”) and Victor Wind (in Pnin). He spent a good deal of time among rainbows while chasing butterflies in the Rockies, an experience reflected in these lines from the poem he wrote for John Shade in Pale Fire:

My picture book was at an early age
The painted parchment papering our cage:
Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun;
Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon
The iridule—when, beautiful and strange,
In a bright sky above a mountain range
One opal cloudlet in an oval form
Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm
Which in a distant valley has been staged--
For we are most artistically caged.

(His wife later explained “iridule” to a curious reader: “We have often had the occasion to watch it at Telluride [Colorado, in 1951]. It is single [i.e. not a double rainbow, like the “Twinned Iris” of the previous line], fairly rarely seen and most attractive.”)

At the end of his discussion of his colored hearing in Speak, Memory, Nabokov, who always had an eye for the incongruous, closes his description of the rich colors he sees in letters and sounds with this remark: “The first author to discuss audition colorée was, as far as I know, an albino physician in 1812, in Erlangen.” He matches that with an even quirkier combination in Ada, a parody of his own colored hearing and its albino describer. Van Veen, the novel’s narrator, a philosopher and psychologist, is invited to inspect “a singular case of chromesthesia”:

One Spencer Muldoon, born eyeless, aged forty, single, friendless, and the third blind character in this chronicle, had been known to hallucinate during fits of violent
paranoia, calling out the names of such shapes and substances as he had learned to identify by touch, or thought he recognized through the awfulness of stories about them (falling trees, extinct saurians) and which now pressed on him from all sides, alternating with periods of stupor, followed invariably by a return to his normal self, when for a week or two he would finger his blind books or listen, in red-lidded bliss, to records of music, bird songs, and Irish poetry.
His ability to break space into ranks and files of “strong” and “weak” things in what seemed a wallpaper pattern remained a mystery until one evening, when a research student (R.S.--he wished to remain that way), who intended to trace certain graphs having to do with the metabasis of another patient, happened to leave within Muldoon’s reach one of those elongated boxes of new, unsharpened, colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) makes one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows, the tints of their painted and polished woods being graded spectrally in their neat tin container. Poor Muldoon’s childhood could not come to him with anything like such iridian recall, but when his groping fingers opened the box and palpated the pencils, a certain expression of sensual relish 
appeared on his parchment-pale face. Upon observing that the blind man’s eyebrows went up slightly at red, higher at orange, still higher at the shrill scream of yellow and then stepped down through the rest of the prismatic spectrum, R.S. casually told him that the woods were dyed differently—“red,” “orange,” “yellow,” et cetera, and quite as casually Muldoon rejoined that they also felt different one from another.
In the course of several tests conducted by R.S. and his colleagues, Muldoon explained that by stroking the pencils in turn he perceived a gamut of “stingles,” special sensations somehow allied to the tingling aftereffects of one’s skin contact with stinging nettles . . . , and spoke eerily of the “strong” green stingle of a piece of blotting paper or the wet weak pink stingle of nurse Langford’s perspiring nose, these colors being checked by himself against those applied by the researchers to the initial pencils. In result of the tests, one was forced to assume that the man’s fingertips could convey to his brain “a tactile transcription of the prismatic specter” as Paar put it in his detailed report to Van.

(Note that phrase: “makes one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows.”) This passage might seem mere whimsy, but Nabokov loves to hide fact at the core of his most extravagant fancy. There is a famous case, first reported in 1922, of a late-blind subject with chromatic synesthesia, Thomas Cutforth, for whom it took the form of colored Braille as well as colored hearing for words, letters and syllables. Recently two neuropsychologists have reported “a man who, after becoming blind late in life, acquired a kind of synesthesia (tactile stimuli on his hand evoked a sensation of ‘movement, expansion, or jumping’).”
But I still think neuroscientists would have found Nabokov’s brain even more of a 
revelation to test, in all its shifting tints, on their fMRI screen.

Vladimir Nabokov was also, as the leading American Nabokovian, D. Barton Johnson, has described him, a “man of letters.” He signs himself into Lolita as Vivian Darkbloom, refers in Speak, Memory to “Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine,” and has a Scrabble game donated to the central family in Ada by Baron Klim Avidov. He builds an acrostic into the final paragraph of “The Vane Sisters.” His most alphabetical novel, Pale Fire, set in Appalachia and Zembla, ends with an index that runs from “A., Baron” to “Zembla,” but in a sense may start, as I explain elsewhere, in the home of the “alphabetic family” of the Goldsworths, who have four daughters, “Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12) and Dee (14).” “Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth’s boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen” (from the historical bodice-ripper Forever Amber to The Prisoner of Zenda). The beginning of John Shade’s poem “Pale Fire” showcases not only Nabokov’s eye for reflection, and pattern, and rumination, and nature, but also the a-z motif, and the bright cloudless blue that dominates the whole novel, my favorite hue in all his work:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane.

Azure: alphabet and color combined. 
But let me give the last word to a novel about which I could write—have written—much, much more: Ada, a kind of twinned Iris or hypertrophied reverse of Speak, Memory’s rainbow. In a world where electricity is banned as improper (and electricity is, after all, shocking, isn’t it?), and hydraulic surrogates have to be found, Ada’s great-grandmother pipes a stream on her estate to make it “carry vibrational vibgyors (prismatic pulsations) through a system of platinum segments” to replace the now proscribed or desubscribed old magnetic telephone that connected park with manor. Van and Ada are separated for four years after their first summer of love—“‘our black rainbow,’ Ada termed it” (note the cover of this book)—and write to one another in code, ruBkrE for “lovely,” for instance. Eighty years later Van writes his memoir of their love, Ada, which is tapped out letter by letter by their typist, Violet Knox, and edited after their joint death by their secretary, Ronald Oranger, who informs us within editorial brackets that he has married the typist—now Violet Oranger.

Notice—I just have—that Violet and Oranger form the beginning and end of Ada’s acrostic spelling of the spectrum: vibgyor.

Bring in your collages Tuesday May 5th

Along with your sketchbooks and drawing supplies please bring in your collages tomorrow. We are going to do our next series of drawings based on your previous work. 

Environmental Design Proposal

Environmental design proposal is a 100-200 word document that is a description of the physical parts of your environmental design. Your environmental design, to clarify, is a group project where the group decides on a location that is interesting visually that you would like to make additions or alterations to in order to make a visual statement. The proposal is the who, what , when , and where; communicating to me that your work will be safe and legal. 

who: what specific persons will perform what tasks?

what: what is the actual physical material used to alter you scene?

when: when will you install, document, and de-install the material you used to alter your scene? ,

where: Where is the specific location("at the beach" is not a specific location) Do you need permission to work in this location? Is is accessible to everyone?

It might be good and wise to include a concept sketch photo or site plan. 

Interview guidelines:

Interview guidelines:

Design requires research. Often times you will need to find an expert on a subject and crystalize their unique perspective with images and words. This requires an open dialogue. You can either approach this work like a journalist or as an oral history project(The latter is much more difficult and requires some training see http://www.doingoralhistory.org/Workshop/Trans_wshop.htm) Talk with you group and decide on subject you would like to find out more about.  Perhaps this will require a discussion of the subject of your final projects. There is an example on my blog Pile of Dirt. It is an interview I conducted via email with fashion designer Jade Chiu. I met her on a plane a few years ago and I thought she would be and interesting subject.  Come up with about 10 questions based on what you already know about your subject and record their responses through transcription,  audio, or video. Post the work (the documentation of your process, the photos, and your interview ) on your blog. This is going to take a lot of planning and coordination so start as soon as you all can.