Avery's eBook

Linking reading to objectives (3/2)

In Kylie Peppler's book, New Creativity Paradigms, Peppler states, "What's called for is a general framework for understanding, analyzing, and appreciating interest-driven art learning that usually occurs outside the classroom." pg 14.  Peppler goes on to create a rubric for just that purpose.  I think this rubric will be very helpful for me as I go on to teach.  One of my personal learning objectives this semester is to develop myself as a teacher, and especially as a teacher of new media.  I hope to use this rubric in the future to assess my students' work both inside and outside of the classroom.  I can use it to gauge which competency areas my students are proficient in and which need to be developed more in class.

The data in Chapter 2 shows us that all teens are exposed to new media for almost the majority of their day, but the content is created mostly by suburban teens in wealthy households.  To me, this illustrates the importance of teaching new media in urban underprivileged areas.  Teaching content creation tools in these areas could even out the playing field.  This is a good thing for me to keep in mind as a future teacher.

Privilege and Beauty (digital collage) (3/1)

With everything that's going on in the world recently, I've been thinking a lot about privilege.  As someone who has experienced a lot of privilege, I'm not sure how to speak out about all of the innocent men that are dying.  I'm not even sure it's my place to.  But I am trying to find ways to say something without being insensitive, ignorant, pedantic or heavy handed.  I think new media is a good medium in which to explore these topics.  

With Photoshop and Brushes you can work with actual images from the news to create a collage to express what you're trying to say.  I created this piece after seeing this article floating around.  When asked to name a celebrity that represented the ideal form, all survey respondents picked white people.  It happened again in this survey conducted by Samsung and these digital renderings of ideal male bodies over time.  To me, these surveys illustrate one of the many ways unconscious bias trickles into all of our decision making.  I took the ideal male form from the first article and used it as a basis for my central figure.  I wanted to take this 'beauty' and show how ugly he really could be.  I stood him on top of a pile of American bison skulls.  This image of skulls is from the mid-1870s when white men attempted to eradicate the Plains Indian Tribes by killing all of the bison, thus making their main source of food extinct.  Behind it all, Trump's face smirks down on the scene, representing the ultimate privileged white male.

On/Off Artistic Response (2/3)

A video response to the frustration of waiting for an iPhone to turn on.

A few images taken on my replacement digital camera.  They are pixelated and slightly blurry, but I like them for what they are.

On/Off Experiment (2/2)

This past week I have been making a point to completely turn off my phone and computer whenever I step away from them, rather then just putting them to sleep.  This simple change in my behavior has had a lot of surprising consequences.  While I could usually turn the computer on and walk away or read while it loaded, I found myself incredibly put out by the 45 seconds that my phone took to turn on.  I started to make choices about what I would turn the phone on for and what I would just do without.  A lot of silly questions that I normally would have googled went unanswered.  I could no longer quickly glance at the time and weather, and once this week I showed up late and rain soaked to an event.  I would turn the phone on to take photos of specific occasions, but little things noticed on walks were left undocumented.  I would have to turn my phone off while I was waiting for a text, then make a conscious decision to turn the phone on again later to see if I had gotten a response.  This trimming of moments lost to constant phone checks left me a lot more present in the current task.  I found I was a better reader, and I was more present in conversations with my friends.  The times I was most put out by the inconvenience of a phone that wasn't readily accessible were those brief moments I was left to myself in a public place.  For example, that dreaded moment when you are left alone in a bar because your friend has gone to use the restroom.  These moments weren't long enough to be worth turning the phone all the way on and off again, but without this social crutch I was left awkwardly and intently staring at posters while I waited.  Despite the discomfort, I found this experiment to be incredibly valuable.  I plan on continuing to set aside time in my day where my devices are completely off and I am more focused on the present.

All that being said, I do have to admit to a little bit of cheating. I carried a few objects with me to make up for the loss of the conveniences my phone provided.  After the first time I showed up late to something I started wearing a watch again, and I tended to bring a raincoat with me everywhere just in case.  For those horrible moments I was left alone in a public space I carried a book, because god forbid I be forced to make small talk with strangers.  I also carried a cheap little digital camera to capture those brief moments that caught my eye while traveling around the city. For all my unanswered questions, I carried a notepad so I could look them up the next time my phone was on.  With the extra weight of these items in my purse I was left wondering at all of the things an iPhone is to us.  I'm carrying all these extra things just because my phone is not immediately available.  Imagine how much more I'd have to carry if I had lost my phone entirely! We put so much into these fragile pocket-sized devices.  The amount I rely on my phone scares me a little bit.  As I move forward, I plan on turning my phone off more often, and for longer periods of time.  Just to reassure myself that I am capable of surviving without my digital safety blanket.

The things I carried.

Pearls of Wisdom from eetiquette.com (2/1)

Advice to live by in the digital age from eetiquette.com

Responses to the Reading (1/4)

Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff, Chapter 1

The expectation of immediacy the article discusses is a concept that I spend a lot of time thinking about.  When iPhones first came out I was turned off by the fact that my friends now stood around with their noses in their devices.  I held out for a while, and when I finally purchased my own iPhone I tried at first to be really conscious of my usage of it.  But now I am sorry to say that I am just as glued to my device as any other millennial.  The smart phone almost feels like the new cigarette: it's what you use when you're alone or waiting and you want to look like you're cool and aloof.  Plus, it's addictive and potentially causes cancer.  But we don't only check our phones out of boredom.  As the article asserts, we constantly check our phones because we feel like we have to.  Who hasn't had the experience of leaving their phone unattended for an hour or so only to return to 80 new messages from group text explosion?  But none of this anxiety is necessary.  We can choose to live without it.  As Rushkoff explains, it is only a matter of setting boundaries.  This summer I was away working at a camp in Maine for two months.  I had no cell phone service, and limited access to wifi.  And I survived.  When I returned, everything went back to how it had been.  I hadn't lost any friends, and my Instagram posts were met with the same scattered likes and responses they had gotten before.  Yet here I sit, writing this post with my phone right next to me, constantly checking to see if it buzzed without me noticing.

"Rather than accepting each tool’s needs as a necessary compromise in our passively technologized lifestyles, we can instead exploit those very same leanings to make ourselves more human." (Rushkoff, page 34)

I LOVE this quotation.  Technology is a tool.  We must be conscious of how we use it to further our own happiness and not allow ourselves to be enslaved by it.  Our phones and our computers are there to make our lives easier and better, not to create new stressors and pavlovian responses.  We all must work on prioritizing our own happiness and only allowing new technologies into our world that further our happiness.  For example, I can use my computer and phone to plan a weekend hiking trip with my friends or a bike ride in Central Park.  Then I can put the devices away and allow myself to be fully immersed in the experience.

Bitforms Gallery, a Space for New Media (1/3)

Bitforms is a Lower East Side gallery that exhibits artwork by emerging artists that are working in new technologies. The gallery specializes in the fields of digital, internet, software-based, and new media art.  It's current exhibition features work by Casey Reas, a software artist whose work is displayed on computer screens throughout the gallery.

Visit the gallery's website

Objectification and The Gaze: The Works of Jordan Wolfson (1/2)

Jordan Wolfson is an artist based in both New York City and Los Angeles.  His works include collages, performances, and digital animations.  He is best known for his most recent foray into animatronic art.  Wolfson's (Female figure) (2014) is a scantily clad animatronic female form programmed to gyrate and lock eyes with its audience.  The figure is smudged with dirt and grime and wears a partial witch mask.  Wolfson uses new technologies to make art that dances in the uncanny valley.  (Female figure) is designed to make the viewer uncomfortably aware of his or her own gaze and the damage done by the objectification of woman.  His latest work, Colored sculpture (2016), features a cartoon-like male marionette suspended from a framework of trusses by heavy chains.  The chains are connected to hoist trolleys that move along the trusses and lift and drop the marionette in a coordinated dance.  This sculpture also features animated eyes that gaze helplessly at the audience in expressions of pain and fear.  Again, the viewer is made to feel like her or she is witnessing a sort of torture and to feel empathy for the lifeless figure.  Jordan Wolfson is heavily influenced by the work of the artist Jeff Koons, but Wolfson's work pushes pop culture images into the digital age.  By adding the extra element of animation Wolfson creates pieces that seem to live in the world with us rather than existing solely as objects.  His use of technology leads us to question technology itself.  What are we creating and how do we move into this new frontier safely and ethically?

About Me (1/1)

I graduated from Bowdoin College in 2008 with a degree in Visual Arts and Art History.  After college I went right on to Teach for America.  I applied to be an art teacher, was trained to teach Kindergarten, and got placed as a 5th grade teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  My two years teaching in South Dakota were some of the most challenging and rewarding years of my life.  I was the only 5th grade teacher in the school and I had my class of 27 students from 7:30am to 4:30pm, often without an aide or any specials.  Our principal required that we teach only reading and math, but I made a point to incorporate as much art and creativity into my lessons as I could.  I even snuck in the occasional science, history, or art lesson when my principal wasn't looking.  After Teach for America I took some time off to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, a 2,181 mile footpath that extends from Georgia to Maine.  I documented my journey through two blogs and a drawing each day.  For the past five years I have been working as a scenic painter and prop fabricator at The Specialists Ltd in New York City.  Our company is committed to staying on the cutting edge of fabrication and I have had the opportunity to work with laser-cutters, vinyl cutters, and UV printers on a regular basis.  In my spare time I have experimented with Arduino microcontrollers and 3D modeling programs but I still have a lot more to learn.  I am very excited to be furthering my education at Columbia Teachers College, and I plan on spending as much time in the Thingspace and Myers Media Art Studios as possible.