Project 3

Typologies of Walking and Not Walking

America loves spending money, and in order for our capitalist market to survive we must inject money into the economy. We spend money out of boredom or for some form of entertainment. Once we’ve invested in new things, there are other things that get roped into the marketbasket and we get sucked into spending more and more. At what point do we realize that we have everything we need, and buying more takes away the benefits of the simple joys of life that are found within us?

I found a simple quote by Richard Wagner that reads, "Joy is not in things; it is within us," and was inspired to show it to others. I went out to a strip mall, with the quote hanging on both sides of a shopping cart. I walked around the parking lot, in a couple stores, and the walkways with the empty cart. More people tended to notice the signs outside; inside people were focused on finishing up their shopping lists. The quote was read by many and hopefully inspires new light on consumerism, because their is such a thing as overconsumption, and can be a problem in many lives.

An Experimentation With(in) Daily Life

The broom became another object I had to carry. I adjusted to its awkwardness while riding my bike to run errands and carrying other things. I didn’t think about it unless in stores or where people took a bit longer a gaze at me. I stopped and swept scatters leaves off areas of the sidewalk on the way to the library and used it to help tote my groceries back home, noticing that drivers took extra caution when passing me. I thought someone might stop and ask me why I had it while walking into Fry’s grocery store or Jones’ Photo, but the most I got was double glances then the gazers returning to their tasks. My roommates were in and out of the house with work, not noticing the broom sitting nearby as I used my computer. Every time the broom end brushed my bare leg I thought of the things that had been swept up with it and tried not to let it happen again. I thought about other changes in people’s routine like hairstyles and colors, glasses, clothes, watches, among other things that may seem drastic to the individual but sometimes means nothing in their day to day lives.

I Walk In Your Name

My loved one is the most compassionate people I know. He is the type of guy who will go in to a convenience store for something specific like a miniature cigar or a snack, and if a homeless person were to ask him for it r or something similar right after he got it, he gives it to them even if he doesn’t have the money for another. When he walks by a homeless person in a parking lot, he goes to his car, grabs as much change as he can, and gives it to him. He will play music on the streets and get tips from those who enjoy, and then give it all to the bums. These actions are done with and without being asked. Whenever I encounter a homeless person who asks for change, I always question what they are really doing with what they collect. I have a fairly strong impression that they use it for intense drugs and that is not what I want to help them do. My loved one has no expectations and no judgments. When he sees a fellow man in need, he helps if he can.

For my walk, I tried to find the places that I have seen the homeless. I grabbed all my change around my house and headed out. Maybe because this venture was so specific in its intentions and that mid-summer day is bringing in over 100 degrees in heat, I had more trouble than usual coming across them. There were many people out that could have possibly been homeless, but they weren’t sitting on street corners begging for change and I didn’t want to be rude. I saw one man near a coffee shop and later on the streets I smiled and waved as he did the same. This simple action made me feel like I did a good deed, even if it was small, as he smiled back at me and moved on. There was a man playing his guitar collecting change. He was by no means a bum, but I respected that he chose to perform for the public on such a hot day and contributed my thanks with coins. I ran into a bum after checking out a restaurant’s menu. He asked me for some money for food from Subway. I gave him four dollars and he gave many thanks. Then he rambled on shortly about his life before the streets, working at a Burger King that, at least in his eyes, unfairly fired him. He mumbled and looked around a lot; it was hard to understand him. He complimented my bike and talked about one he had owned. By the end of the conversation he told me he loved me and started walking in the opposite direction of Subway. I shook my head, but maybe he was just lost. Because of the lack of homeless I was seeing, when I went out for coffee and lunch at local restaurants I was sure to leave a generous tip for their kind services. Later I was buying a movie when a man tried to sell me rap CDs in the parking lot for a bus pass. I did not have change on me nor did I want a CD, but I went to the car I was driving, grabbed what was there, and passed it to him. He replied with a thanks, saying it was probably enough to get him on the bus. There was a part of me that felt guilty when I gave it to him because I felt like he was lying to me. I tried to resist this thought, tried not to hold expectations because there is no way for me to know for sure; it’s quite possible he was telling the truth.

While on this walk, I tried to imagine what sort of things brought the homeless to the streets. There was gossip about a bum who is commonly seen on Campbell Ave between Grant and Glenn with two fistfuls of grocery bags. The gossip suggested that he has money but is living on the streets by choice. I thought about why someone to choose to do so, mostly finding that money is the problem that won’t get solved anytime soon. It brings many stresses that to some are simply not worth losing life; I could see why someone would live without it, but considering the basic needs that would be difficult to find on the streets of a city without money, I wondered what could possibly be the best option for the sake of our mental health, though obviously some kind of middle ground is needed.

I may have more luck with interacting and giving to the homeless when it is more spontaneous and natural; when I’m not looking to help but someone happens to come along asking for it.

Infernal Noise Brigade

When a group like the Infernal Noise Brigade enters public space, it transforms the space, bringing life back to the streets, trains, or buses, giving people a reason to enjoy as their sounds resonant within listeners. Even as I sat at my computer watching clips of their marches, I felt their music within me and it gave me the chills, as if pumping energy into my body. The music was powerful and inspirational; it made me want to be a part of the movement. The artistic creation’s potential lies in getting people’s attention and causing a reaction in street performances and thus is an aesthetic based on relations and experiences. It provokes the public to participate in their performance, raise awareness and concern of political events, and an understanding or feeling of a collective life in hopes that its liveliness will carry into one’s day to day life.

Everything today is done to make money, and when such a time and energy investment is made to something that does not yield profits, shows their true commitment to what they believe in. Groups like INB are initiated by people who care, who want to bring pure, fun, live entertainment to people who can’t always get it, with timing that makes a bigger statement. The marches were done as carnivalesque protests; they grabbed people’s attention and thus a greater overall awareness of certain political events. It was nonetheless entertainment, but they weren’t trying to engage a particular audience at a particular time. It wasn’t like going to a concert; people weren’t always aware they were coming. They engaged anyone around who can listen or see whose life is interrupted by the commotion. They wanted to see who is accepting of the noise, who enjoys it, who will participates in it just by listening or dancing and who will be disregard or not like it and want it to stop. There could never be a specific response and this fact that they are never quite sure how the masses will react to their performance plays a role in the unexpectedness of relations within a given space. In street performances they, as Stevphen Shukaitis notes, “break down the wall between artistic activity as separate or removed from daily life because these forms can be inscribed within the flow of people’s everyday experience.” Their performance is based on potential relations with the space they are in and the interactions with people they are around, which is a part of the self-evolving artistic creation. This all contributes to the ephemeral characteristics of street performances, “predicated on the intervention or opening into a system of relations, connecting innovations that are passed along and mutated through the modulation of the relations in which they exist,” as Shukaitis states so well.

Private spaces would have inherently restricted some of the general public. The wall between and artistic performance and everyday experience would have stayed in tack as it clearly separates the artist and the viewer. The performance would have been tamed and controlled. If it were in a gallery or theater setting, it would lose its spontaneity because to some extent what is done in these spaces is expected, and those who expect it go to see it. It doesn’t allow people to be genuinely surprised by it and doesn’t give them the chance to react to it in the same why they might on the street. Thus they tend remain an observer in the gallery or theatre instead of becoming involved in the artistic creation in performances.

I watched a video a few years ago that had interesting ideas as far as entertainment is concerned: that all sports, music, television shows, movies, performances, etc are being used to distract us from what the government is doing. We fall back into our homes, courts, stadiums, theaters constantly and pay attention to more entertainment than the politics that control our lives. Without our attention as a whole, the government could get away with anything. When there is a street performance, however, we get the best of both worlds because it draws attention to political situations while entertaining and bringing the public together. On the streets, the audience is better able to identify with the performance causing an affective composition within both the performer and the viewer, a connection that is sometimes lost in a private setting. Street performances allow public spaces to be shared for a collective experience instead of individually like in private spaces. This in itself is also political because it works against the traditional and conventional distribution of ideas, images, and relations, as Shukaitis notes.

The people within the street performing groups generally use nicknames to hide their identities from employers because of negative associations. It is never really known who comprises groups like INB, allowing them a certain amount of anonymity. This does not question authorship because the performances aren’t about the individual, and they aren’t even about the group. It is more about their influence on the public, raising awareness in themselves and their surroundings. As individuals they are anonymous but as a group they are known and they try to influence people during particular situations because of the situation itself.

Because the articles and video clip were more focused on the action, I was left questions about the cause and how effective the Infernal Noise Brigade was in particular as far as politics was concerned. The most surprising thing to me about the street performances was the reactions they received from police. For their music making, dancing, rifle twirling, and energy to provoke and threaten cops so much to do a thing like tear gassing them shocks me because it seems like their attention-grabbing behavior to get people to enjoy themselves, others, and the music was innocent. Marching down a street is so non-violent that it makes the police look like they over-reacted to a performance that brings enjoyment and awareness on many levels including consciousness and politics, two things that are necessary for a well-lived life.

Critical Art Ensemble

The Introduction to the book of Digital Resistance explains the premise of “tactical media;” it is possibly a reconstructed and reconfigured form of avant-garde; participants, however, do not consider themselves artists or political activists in any traditional sense because to do so would limit their capabilities in social and knowledge systems, key components in their work. Before they were named, they focused on intervening in television, but because this was limited to only one media, they expanded to include other forms of media. Over time tactical media became more defined and structured; some were to some extent regretful because it placed boundaries on what they were doing while others appreciated the merging of many different fields whether as an activist, artist, or scientist because it acknowledged and valued each individual and group. The article explains that tactical media is a workable model that is shaped and reshaped; it challenges the government, displaying and critiquing its cover-ups and negativity, giving people a new way to understand and interact with the system that strives for power and self-interest.

Tactical media is ephemeral, leaving few material traces and a living memory. Though it can be secondarily represented through photographs and videos, tactical media is non-archival because it is an action that comes to an end. Sometimes monumental works can help solve the issue because they inscribe their imperatives within their spaces, but again I felt an example would enhance my understanding of how a monumental work could do so. Tactical media is a form of performance to be ephemeral and affects people during some sort of protest, and after the protest nothing is left but thoughts and feelings of what was.

The article needed examples that exemplified how tactical media was used though it was made clear what it was and why it was used. The conclusion implied that the text that followed would provide this but at least one clear example in the introduction could have made it more comprehensive. It was clear that tactical media was used to counteract the rising power of authoritarian culture and that in itself made me more interested and supportive of tactical media and its practitioners. I have a growing frustration with how we are ruled by money when money should be second to one’s internal state of being, one’s peace and happiness. Money causes unnecessary stresses because of our capitalist market but is somehow a necessary evil. I always wonder how and why it got this way and how it could ever be possible to decrease its importance in our lives, though I cannot even imagine what life could be like at that point. These thoughts make me more curious as to what tactical media practitioners may have done with regards to this troublesome issue. “For a brief time there was and continues to be a relief from capital’s tyranny of specialization that forces us to perform as if we are a fixed set of relationships and characteristics and to repress or strictly manager all other forms of desire and expression.”

Inside/Outside images

Inside/Outside the Scene

The cycle is never ending; my life's situations has caused positives and negatives and currently it is more focused on the negative. My perceived negativity is due to my lack of money. I hope and try to make enough to stay in Arizona by searching for better paying jobs and scholarships but right now I keep falling short, instead more things keep happening that I need money to pay for; car accidents, tickets, and possibly having to live on my own.

The tag I created reflects my hope for money; money that is not coming. At least not yet. I put the tag in places that remind me that I do not have a car and am back on my bicycle. I also tagged the areas where people can see it and maybe feel the same as I do. It feels like we will never leave the recession. And we will never escape the necessary evil of the dollar.

The Route: Cocooned vs. Engaged

I loaded my Ipod with fast, mellow, and slow songs that usually influence a happy, peaceful, or sad mood. I listened to artists like Xaphoon Jones, Nightmares on Wax, the XX, MF Doom, and Joanna Newsom Even over the music I heard the loud basses and engines passing next to me on the road. As I passed people, they were usually standing or sitting around waiting for the bus. I would look down or straight head to avoid eye contact and successfully avoided conversation but it felt like I wasn’t paying them much attention to begin with. When the faster paced songs played, I felt the rhythm within me and all I wanted to do was sing and dance along. I paid less attention to details to my surroundings and just enjoyed the music. During these songs I get the chills because they sound so good and nothing else matters but the music and it put me in my own little world, the phrase used so commonly. It made my walk to nowhere more enjoyable and passed the time faster. When the mellow instrumentals played, The beat was still felt but somehow I was less distracted by it, paying more attention to things around me from the cracks on the ground, to the people passing me by in cars as I waited at stop lights. I noticed more of things I enjoy about Tucson from the trees to the paint-peeled or rusted parts of buildings. I noticed restaurants that I wasn’t very aware were there before. The music did seem to enhance my vision as colors seemed to stand out more, especially red. When the slow songs played, my mind wondered to my stresses not having roommates or place to move to my roommates moving out of Tucson to my lack of money to the struggles of my family to the car I just received that now has three flat tires and doesn’t start. It was like I wanted to be sad. There are many life situations that feel like they were meant to bring me down and I wanted to dwell on them, I wanted to feel bad for myself. The music sounded beautiful and a beautiful saddened soundtrack for my stresses that usually didn’t even relate to the song. I was back to not paying much attention to what or who was around me.

On the way back, I took out my headphones. When I passed people I tried to make eye contact but most of them were avoiding eye contact with me. I could tell because they did it in ways that I do to avoid eye contact. When eye contact was met, they either looked away or gave an expression that said hello. On two occasions the person said hello as I looked at them. I usually had that mild expression of a hello on my face as well. At this point however, maybe just because of the heat, I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings. The sounds of the road especially when cars with loud engines or basses would pass would annoy me, causing me to call them an asshole to myself. I felt rushed and I paid more attention to the sweat drops falling down my body. I should have brought water.

Mapping Social Territory in Space

During this walk I explored hip-hop culture because even though it’s been done before, I have never done it. I tried to take not a path that was so obvious, and I found mostly graffiti. During my walk, I started to compare the video Style Wars with modern day Tucson and all I got was more questions. I wondered if the hip-hop culture could still be deemed the one creating the graffiti and tags and if so, being so close to the border I wondered if it is still mostly compromised of black people or if they are Mexican or other races. I wondered if graffiti was still used for the same purpose as in the video to give a sense of ownership and power in Tucson because life is not as difficult as it was for a black person in New York City back then. I wondered how long the graffiti and tags had been up and how long it’d be before it was gone and how they got into spaces that were fenced in and sometimes even barb wired. I also wondered if the fence was present when the graffiti was done, why it was so important to do it in that space instead of all the other open spaces; does difficulty of location prove something in particular? I wondered that if they were putting up their graffiti to be heard and seen, then why they were doing so in paths that are usually walked. Who were they trying to be seen by and was it still for some form of ownership? Was it now just being done for fun? Has graffiti lost its meaning?

Style Wars

Graffiti art is art that’s going to be a part of New York City’s history forever. Among many things, NYC will always be known for graffiti because it will be painted and repainted trains, walls, bridges, etc. The tags are invented and re-invented, relevant to the city’s culture, and they fully developed with style and color. In a city where the kids own nothing, creating symbols allows them embellish their personal lives, and when collectively done it brings life back to areas that were and are broken down and uncared for with dull colors and an undertone of sadness and poverty. There are no real visual aesthetics in these parts, allowing graffiti to make the area vibrant and lively.

Hip-hop culture bombs the city by painting their name and style on as many surfaces as they can. By doing so, they are able to send a message across the city to the many other city dwellers. They create something to own while also getting recognized by others. Otherwise no one assumes power in the demographic because most are jobless, uneducated, and uncared for. They feel have no other power, no other talent that can give them any control or recognition until they discover self-expressionistic power of graffiti, a language of freedom.

When the graffiti of NYC’s hip-hop culture is contrasted to the modern day Banksy, two major things change: the first is that Banksy is economically stable; the second is that much of Banksy’s graffiti carry a heavier political message than a message of personal power, ownership and existence which takes more priority in hip-hop culture. Banksy chooses to use corporate spaces to strengthen his message and get his point across to the people of higher authority, the source of the issues, namely in Israeli. Tagging is a means for exercising power because it can have a strong influence on those who see it, though if it’s negative or positive influence is debatable. While graffiti is a form of ownership, where it applied to trains, buildings, sidewalks, billboards, buses are owned by the government, not the kids who put the graffiti there. To this regard, graffiti artists extend the meaning of owning because graffiti claims a part of ownership of the surface that was not the artist’s to begin with.

The imaging of hip-hop culture defies societal expectations because society does not expect its’ properties to be defaced by a usually low class citizen who uses graffiti and tagging thereby having a little ownership in their lives. Graffiti and tagging do not defy stereotypes of social scales because they are stereotypes of hip-hop culture, namely people f color. Only when white kids use graffiti might it be considered to defy stereotypes, however, white kids are attracted to graffiti for the same reasons black or Puerto Rican are: they share certain aspects of life that urges them to find something to let their voice be heard, take ownership of that voice, and establish an identity.

In break dancing, the hip-hop culture uses their body as a medium to for self expression. They feel something inside of them and they just let it out, usually for crowds to see and others to rebuttal. It gives them something to do, something that is free, competitive, and enjoyable. It gives them power, it liberates them, getting their adrenaline pumping. Because many break dancers are also a part of low-culture, it is another activity that can bring a little life to the environment.

People get caught up in routines that they don’t really notice their surroundings. They walk with music in their ears or looking down at their feet, avoiding the uncomfortable gaze and zoning out into their own world. If graffiti brings people back into consciousness in their surroundings, then people should appreciate it. The graffiti brings a voice and a life to the usually low-class communities, giving them something visually aesthetic to look at besides drab buildings, dirty streets, and uncared for lives. The graffiti speaks for the whole community who are just like the artists who put it there. Though it only the hands of a few put the graffiti up, it gives a collective voice to everyone who lives there because they are living that same lifestyle.

In my eyes, quality is more important than quantity. Who wants to see a bunch of shitty tags put on graffiti that obviously did not take a lot of time and effort? A graffiti artist would get more recognition and power for single work that is visually aesthetic over the tags that ruin its aesthetics. More people would see quicky done tags in more locations, true, but its not as respectable as one done on a grand scale or with great attention to detail. The video only really talked to one person who spent his time bombing other works around the city. Maybe this is done because some feel a greater inequality than other graffiti artists, maybe they are jealous, maybe they are just bored. It’s true that more people would see tags if one went for quantity of quality, but people who see it may not give it much appreciation if its poorly done, ruining another work. With as many different private spaces that are available for graffiti and tagging, though some areas will be more populated than others, it doesn’t make much sense that one does not they could find a blank space for them to work on and create something visually appealing that others can enjoy as well. Maybe they bomb other graffiti because they are jealous/impatient that they cannot do the same thing. While graffiti is more cultural, bombing seems to be more of an ego booster, that they can claim more than graffiti.

Graffiti loses intensity as it is taken off the train and displayed in a gallery because of the nature of applying it to private property. Because it is an illegal activity, for one to be able to create a complex work and get away with it, it is impressive and speaks louder as far as their courage, stealth, and skill is concerned. When working on a canvas, it is a much calmer situation for the graffiti artist, giving them plenty of time to develop the quality and to fix or reconsider different parts of the work. This is not to denounce their talent, as either way it is respectable, but because of the restrictive nature of applying graffiti to trains, buildings, walls, billboards, and other properties that is managed by those who have power, it has that much more voice and intensity than putting graffiti on a personally owned canvas and hanging it in a gallery. It has a stronger expression on a billboard than a canvas because of what it takes to put it there.

Michael Bull's Sounding Out the City

The three articles, “The World of Personal-Stereo Users,” “Refiguring the ‘Site’ and Horizon of Experience,” and “Empowering the Gaze: Personal Stereos and the Hidden Look,” from Michael Bull’s Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life , all describe how walkmans, and now mp3 players and cell phones, affect our perceptions within city spaces and how it affects our state of being. Although they felt rather repetitive as a read as a whole, they still thoroughly and effectively explained many relatable experiences while using a personal stereo.

It is interesting that so many different experiences could stem from a single, simple activity. I could certainly say I can relate to nearly all of the experiences mentioned from music putting me in my own little world to not being able to sleep without it playing. We are conscious and subconscious of what music will make us do or think, we try to make the music fit our mood, to avoid conversation in certain situations like riding the bus, to make other tasks more interesting, or to put us in our own worlds. These days it is easy access to music worldwide, with a variety of genres and artists, we can find so much music to affect us in different ways depending on our tasks and moods, though not all seek a wide variety. It makes us feel like spaces are more aesthetic and lively, gives us more security and confidence, enhances our moods, and promotes productivity.

Each article’s use of quotes made the reading as a whole more comprehensive and relatable because they took the quotes from average people who use personal stereos. The quotes were easy to read and supplemented each article’s overall point well. They help to emphasize the argument of how personal-stereo users play music to replace the environment sounds from nature to technology to evoke a certain mood or state of mind. The quotes emphasize how it is typical of users to seek comfort in music, to engage with their surroundings and day’s tasks but also to disengage from them. It stimulates and creates more entertainment while doing things but it also can keep us trapped in our minds, paying less attention to what we are doing and the world around us.

I took a class last summer that inspired me to take off my headphones and listen to the world around, to be conscious of all its sounds, as if listening to music was a distraction from life itself. But music is very much a part of life; even the natural can sound musical at some point. Music can be considered another way to enhance life, especially when considering act two of “This American Life” audio broadcast; maybe the mechanical drone around us is subconsciously negatively affecting our moods with sad chords and augmented fourths. Maybe music is a positive influence on our life, enhancing the experience of even the simplest task, but I do not mean than it cannot be negative like in distracting us in a situation that can be harmful or supplementing sad/bad moods.

Ephemeral Site

There was a library of books at this site, from kid books to adult novels, newspapers to bibles. It felt like the book in the area had a considerable about of time to waste here, if they had indeed stayed there for some expanse of time. Right away I felt like I wanted to use them in my ephemeral project, though the idea is not very relevant to the location it was conceived.

Even with so many people complaining about not having money, there are still many out there wasting their money on material possessions. As much as reading, writing, and the arts are promoted activities for free time to enhance your knowledge and save money, shopping is still one that dominates the wasting of time. With all this shopping done, money is spent on items that are overpriced and that don't last. But despite it all, we shop, because growing up in America trained us to spend money. Despite what kind of wall has been put up to discourage spending money and wasting time, like instead encouragement to read books, shopping still is overall more appealing to the population. But can't reading and knowledge just go to waste too?

Desire Lines

I discovered broken desire lines near an Industrial site south of downtown, just beyond the end of a bike trail. Some lines were more defined than others as a stumbled through bushes, rocks, giant tires, plastic bottles, shopping carts, books, clothes, and bedding. The area looked like a dump site most likely from illegal immigrants. I wondered what exactly their situation was for them to need to completely abandon their goods at this particular location. I wondered if they had to live and sleep in this area, in hiding or maybe because they just had nowhere else to go. There weren't many bags of things area, but everything was sprawled out as even they had all been emptied out of backpacks. Was this drop off point forced or personal choices? I saw documents dating as far back as 2005 and I wondered if there had been items put them earlier or more recently.

Mapping Senses (walk1)

Mapping Senses (walk1)

I took a stroll down an alley starting in the Sam Hughes neighborhood. It is apparent the amount of attention paid to the visual aesthetics of the neighborhood from the road but I wondered how apparent it would be, or wouldn’t be, in its alleys; I wondered how the alleys would reflect the neighborhood. There were many aesthetic areas, some broken down, some glammed up like on the road.

My first walk, I focused on hearing. The most predominate noise was the sound of my footsteps on the gravel, the moving pebbles and rocks under the weight of my body. The birds had a pulsating chirp, seemingly random with the rise and decline of their noise. The whoot of an owl was also mixed in with the chirping. I heard the wind pushing through the branches and leaves of trees and the lizards shuffling around the bushes startled by my loud steps. I heard the hum of traffic passing in the distance and planes and jets in the sky.

My mode of attention the second time around was sight. I paid particular attention to the cracks in the road and the shadows of the trees. There is something fascinating about the movement of trees’ shadows on a windy day that I can’t quite nail on the head. There were areas that seemed a bit less taken care of with piles used wood scraps and boards, graffiti or untamed plants. There were many bright colored walls and doors in what seemed to be more well-kept yards, but were of less interest to me compared to the paint peeled walls and the rusting fences.

On the third walk, my attention was on touch. I could feel the ground go from a solid, concrete surface and break down into rocks, gravel and sand. As the ground became more sandy, my step was softer. I could feel the individual rocks and the cracks from the disturbed ground through the soles of my Vans. I felt the wind hit my moistened body from the hot weather, breezing through my hair and cooling me off ever so slightly.

Rivers and Tides

The projects that Goldsworthy pursued were usually near rivers in the video. Because he was familiar with these locations, he was able to anticipate the cycles that the areas usually undergo and therefore he gave himself sufficient time to work on the projects before the tide or something else came to further develop the works, though there was sometimes setbacks like the with unstable sculptures. He had to account for the expected and unexpected natural occurrences of wind, tides, and animals, among other natural forces and how they may affect the project when he stopped or finished working.

Early in the video, Goldsworthy states how “there are always obsessive forms,” implying that certain forms can be found all over the world like the twisting rivers and tides in the video. However, each river or tide has unfamiliar aspects as well; as a whole they do the same thing, but when observed more intimately, as Goldsworthy does, there are details of one river are found to be vastly different from others. Another example is that we are all human, and we will all do certain things because it is a part of human nature such as eating or learning but what and how we eat or learn varies from person to person.

Goldsworthy creates an ice sculpture on top of a rock that mimics the shape of the river. Upon completion as the sun was setting, the light hit both sides of the rock and illuminated the ice from behind, causing a glow that he did not plan and allowing him to become excited about the work’s potential. The potential he expresses here is found within earth and time. The behavior of earth over an expanse of time can successfully or unsuccessfully enhance the beauty and meaning of an ephemeral work. It is not always possible to expect everything that may happen at a particular site and because of this, potential is always found.

Throughout the video with each of Goldsworthy’s projects, we are reminded that “the very things that bring [a work] to life is the thing that causes its death.” Earth and nature allowed his works to be created, and earth and nature destroyed his work. For example with his ice sculptures, ice was created by the cold climate at the river causing the water to freeze into icicles. The water creates the work, and when frozen with the sun shining down on it, it is melted and, in a sense, is destroyed. At low tide, part of the river’s bed is exposed and it is possible to make a work like the dome of branches on the soft sands but when the high tides comes in, it takes the dome with it and destroys it slowly. These examples reiterate that the things that allow a work to exists, specifically here in nature, are the same things that destroy it; the nature of things give what one needs to create a work and take away from a work because of that same nature.

Goldsworthy does not believe that his works are destroyed even though his works get broken down by nature; instead he sees them as being evolved, mutated, or shifted. He does not create his works to last forever because he knows they cannot; he creates them so they can be changed in some way by their environment. When something is destroyed, it is no longer possible to use or repair it, and it usually has quite a violent connotation like a fire destroying a house. Goldsworthy’s works are “destroyed” peacefully and quietly; they are slowly broken down and it is entirely possible to rebuild. Sand castles are another example of work that is taken away by earth; depending on the tide, the time to do so varies but the sand is always there to rebuild. The power here is that the work never dies and is actually never destroyed. The process of its transience can be considered art and we still can have it again. This can also be reflected in the human experience; an example can be the act of recycling where things are used until they are in some way useless, then later reused as something else. Recyclable items can be transient but they can also be reused.

Time, or the great teacher as Goldsworthy refers to, has taught him about place. In each place he works, he has different time constraints in order to finish his projects like the rising tide or the setting sun; time gives him a certain frame to create his work to the point that if he runs out of it, he cannot complete his project, he cannot change time. It introduces insecurities and unexpectedness because he doesn’t always exactly know what each project will be until he shows up to the site. He can expect many things out of nature like the incoming tide, but he can’t expect that project will fall over four times or the animal that will scratch against the work and knock it over and he doesn’t always plan how sun will impact the work. But those very things can create more powerful art making for Goldsworthy because it, like the objects he uses and the sites he builds upon, is natural.

Despite the frustration, he does not consider the inability to finish a work to be any sort of failure, like when he was creating his egg-like stone structure that fell down as many as four times, setting him back and causing him to be unable to finish the work. Instead he treats these unfinished projects as learning experiences. It teaches him more about earth and the materials he uses and creates a stronger connection with them for future projects as he learns his limits with time and the different natural materials he uses.

When Goldsworthy’s projects are taken out of his specific sites and placed within a museum, they are removed from their natural environment and placed within a room where it loses its connection with nature and what nature may do to it. The shift in location makes the works less meaningful and comprehensive because it seems out of place and has no connection with the room like it does within nature.

Sheep had a significant impact on the landscape of Scotland. There are no trees because forests were turned into farmland for sheep. Goldsworthy explains how sheep affect the grass and how they flow through the land in a similar way that the river does. Humans, however, have a stereotypical view of sheep as just wool-makers; this keeps us from fully experiencing Scotland, in particular, because we have limited our view of how sheep can really impact the land. Goldsworthy has a wall built that reflects the movement of the sheep and the river through the land with wool stretched on the top of it to imply that they are more than just wool; that they move throughout the land and change the way it looks along the way.

Joe Sternfels’s “On this Site” can be associated with Goldsworthy’s project about the presence of sheep in Scotland because they both deal with an absence of what was. Sternfels capture images of places in the U.S. where tragedies took place. The photographs give an impression is something is missing because of they don’t really have a subject and they have a rather sad mood to them. There are no people in the pictures, only places of where they were. Before the sheep in Scotland, there were forests and people; both had to be removed or relocated to make room for the sheep allowing Scotland’s landscape as a whole reflect that people who were once there were replaced by sheep.

About a third of the way through the movie, as he was introducing the concern with sheep, he mentions that there is a dark side to pretty, pastoral landscapes. It only took this one line for me to realize that when I visit a place, unless there is obvious evidence pointing to its past, I do not tend to think twice about how that place is able to exist as it does when I am there. Lands of the U.S. have so much history, but, as history is my least favorite subject, I pay no attention to it. If I did, however, it could quite possibly change my impression of the place and give birth to more ideas. This has caused me to be a bit more curious of a place’s history and how I may be able to incorporate it into my works.

This American Life: Mapping

The audio broadcast by Ira Glass broadened my understandings of a map; I did have a rather narrow view of the word but I don’t disagree that the maps that have been created related to other senses are maps. I had indeed never considered mapping by a specific object in an area like in the first act in Boylan Heights or other ways mapping could mean like in act three with regards to the electronic nose.

The subjects presented in each act seemed like experiments in a process that is rather similar than the creation of art, which can also be considered an experiment. Some experiments are more interesting and/or useful than others which were the overall feeling I had about the broadcast. The second act about hearing was by far the most interesting and useful experiment in the recording. For a long time I put on music to listen to while doing a variety of tasks. It wasn’t until last summer that I turned it off and listened to the sounds around me. I never went beyond just listening to the sounds as they were. When the sounds were translated to different chords that subconsciously affect our moods in act two, my attention was absorbed.

Much of our time is spent indoors and so we mostly hear the mechanical noise of our interiors when we listen closely. It makes sense that these noises can be represented through musical chords which inherently have moods associated with them but I had never considered it before. It only makes sense that there are so many unhappy people in this world. With technology taking care of everything, it is always around. Computers may be a primary example because many people work in front of them: according to Toby Lester, the hum of a computer is a G minor which is naturally sad. It is almost no wonder, considering that some 70 percent of what affects our thoughts is subconscious that computers and other technologies that drone in the same chord subconsciously make us sadder and irritateable. It only made me curious of more sounds and combinations of sounds, outside of the main three Lester spoke of, that subconsciously affect our moods.

The third act about the electronic nose was the most daunting. If we can make technology associate smells then it seems more possible that one day humans will be machines. The progress they have made with the nose is quite impressive with regards to intelligence, but it is absolutely terrifying to me. If only the fittest will survive, then it feels like it will definitely be possible to create a machine human that will be more fit for the world, namely after exhausted resources. As mentioned in the act, a machine can never achieve complete humanness because they can never have a brain like ours but as much as technology has advanced so far, maybe there’s no telling how much more advanced it will get.

The last two acts were the most uninteresting to me. The sense of mapping was present but I am hoping more inventive ways to map with touch and smell will be discovered and shared. I probably feel this way because they were mapping in a sense that I was familiar with, though I didn’t necessarily call it mapping. The broadcast overall effective in getting me to step a bit further out of my box and reconsider different ways to mean.