On Tuesday we had a lady come in and nude model for our figure drawings, it was awesome! We've been doing a lot of reading and analyzing so it was really nice to start some art projects. It took me a while to get in a drawing mind state, so my first couple of figures were slow and out of proportion, but after a while I got used to the smudgey charcoal and lines started to flow a bit easier. I would have liked a little more time with each position, even just a minute or so, but it was still so much fun! I'll definitely take advantage of the figure drawing opportunities that the school offers outside of class :) I sculpted a lot last year but I've never taken any drawing courses so working with charcoal was a new experience.
    Tuesday night we read an excerpt from Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which, as the title clearly states, was about the way humans see things. The most interesting thing in the chapter we read was about how photography has affected the way we see art and the visual world."The camera isolated momentary appearances and in so doing destroyed the idea that images were timeless." Before photography what you saw relative to your position and space was a unique experience and art was the only was to reproduce this experience for other eyes to see. Photography made it possible that anyone could see the personal experience of anyone else and perfectly capture a time and place.
     On Thursday we had a pretty chill class. We started off watching a powerpoint about Futurists, who seemed to focus their art on movement, time and space. It was a nice change from the more aesthetically pleasing art we had been looking at. The lines Futurist artist used to represent different senses brought us to a conversation about synesthesia, a topic we are also studying in my psych class! After that we listened to music and tried to translate the sound into images which we drew on the computer. We used some fancy electronic drawing pad that I really want to own now :) Our lesson reminded me of my art teacher from highschool who had synesthesia. She said she could visualise music, and he had a peice that reminded me of the Futurist artwork. http://stefanienagorka.com/drawings/drawing1.html
      For my research I've decided to look more into synesthesia.

SYNESTHESIA

 

 is a neurologically-based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

     Over 60 types of synesthesia have been reported by people and could possibly be as prevalent as 1 in 23 people. The most common type of synesthesia is known as color-graphemic synesthesia, where letters and/or numbers are perceived as colored. Someone with color-graphemic might see numbers like this:

      My first memory looks something like Chairry from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Pretty much what I remember is laying on my parents blue carpet, looking at their old ripped up chair, closing my eyes, and imagining the chair with a face like the one above and it moved closer and closer to me until it was almost touching me and then I opened my eyes. It really freaked me out! I don't really know when it was but I have such a clear memory of it. I also remember I was stuck laying on my belly and I was scared but I couldn't go anywhere so I assume it was before I could crawl. My dad also used to watch Pee-Wee's playhouse with me when I was just a baby so maybe it was a night mare... or daymare from that. After that my memories start at around two or three in preschool, mostly nosebleeds and sandboxes.

       In class on Tuesday we played a super fun game of Win Lose or Draw and discussed G.J. Winthrow’s What is Time?  That night we read excerpt 2 from What is Time? which I thought was a lot more interesting than the first. I thought the part about the flatworms was crazy. “An even more astonishing claim, first mad a few years ago in the United States, was that if the original trained worms are chopped up and fed to the untrained ones the latter absorb the learned behavior along with their food.” Woah! So my first question comes from this reading, the author then goes on to say “In none of these experiments is there yet any firm evidence that memory has really been transferred from one animal to another and it’s not just some substance that speeds up the learning process.” But he didn’t say they re-trained the worms to re-learn the behavior, he said the behavior was absorbed with the food right? So if worms have this new behavior all of a sudden that isn’t natural and wasn’t re-taught, then what other explanation is there other then they really did transfer the memory to the second set of worms?

      After class on Thursday my mom called me to tell me about an article she had read. She told me she felt bad because she always used to tell me to find one comfortable quiet place and make it my study room. However the article she had just read suggested studying in multiple places is the way to go because it's easier to recall something when you have multiple associations with it. That was interesting, but what was even more interesting was that we had just discussed the same thing in class about twenty minutes before she called! Weird...

     In addition to our discussion of What is Time? we watched Momento, a movie about a man suffering from short term memory loss. I had seen it a few years ago and was totally confused, so it was definitely nice to watch it a second time. It most definitely related to everything we've been doing with the concept of time and memory and fit in with the strange warped time videos that we had already seen in class. We haven't finished it yet so I'm excited to get to class on Tuesday!

      I've decided to research memory in general because apart from our reading I know nothing about it. Hopefully I'll be learning a bit more in Psych 101! According to exploratorium.edu, there are three main subdivisions of memory; working memory, long-term memory, and skill memory. Working memory occurs in the prefrontal cortex. This memory coordinates long-term memories with sights, sounds, and feelings, so you can respond to events as they happen. Long-term memory stores permanent information ranging from a knowledge of yourself to your understanding of the world. It is processed in the hippocampus. The last subdivision of memory is skill memory which is processed in the cerebellum, and then stored in the basal ganglia. 

(Cerebellum) 

It is responsible for coordination and sequencing of movements. 

I also learned that hippocampus is the Greek word for seahorse :) It is the spiraled part of the brain. 

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html

Here's some cool links:

Memory Artist (there's also a section about time and memory) 

Sheep Brain Dissection

Earliest Memories Guestbook

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html <-- pretty much the whole site is interesting. 

I have to say, at 9:20 in the morning, it's nice to have a class that starts off with a music video. The first two classes we began our day watching and analyzing two music videos directed by Michel Gondry. Both dealt with time in odd ways, one in a cyclical way and the other questioning past and future. I thought the Kylie Minogue video “Come Into My World" was easy to understand and not too interesting, but when it came to "Sugar Water" by Cibo Matto I was a lot more confused and had a lot more fun analyzing it and putting together the time puzzle with the rest of the class. Time was a very important element in the video because frames were playing backwards and forwards yet somehow the director managed to line up everything perfectly. Michel Gondry definitely likes to mess with our perception of time. Since we watched the first video I’ve been thinking of the movie Run Lola Run*, a movie in which time plays the most important role. It is a twenty minute situation that is played three times, each time changed with a minor event. After watching it I felt like every single movement I made was going to change the rest of my life drastically. When I analyze time a lot I sometimes feel the same way and my brain hurts.  

In the first reading we were assigned, Jerry Saltz asked “Can art change the world?” but I don’t think that can be answered with a yes or a no. I thought about the New York Times I see every morning and how there’s always a large photograph on the front page that catches my attention. If photography is included in the question of whether or not art can change the world I think we would all agree that it has done plenty. It’s a more relatable insight to what is happening in the ever changing world around us. 100 Photos That Changed the World. I think if any of these (photos in the previous link) were painted or drawn they would maybe have slightly less of an impact but they would all be pretty powerful.

The second reading, What is Time?, by JG Whitrow, was surprising to be assigned for an art class. It was pretty much the history of time, something I have not read or heard much about, and something, like Whitrow said, most people can not explain. “Although there are many important ideas that most of us agree we do not understand, only time has this peculiar quality which makes us feel intuitively that we understand it perfectly so long as we are not asked to explain what we meant by it.” In this reading Whitrow does what most of us are incapable of and answers the question.

I would love to learn more about how our perception of time changes throughout our life as we grow. “Logtime is the cognitive hypothesis that our age is our basis for estimating time intervals, resulting in a perceived shrinking of our years as we grow older. A simple mathematical analysis shows that our time perception should be logarithmic, giving us a subjective scale of life very different from that of the calendar. Our perception of aging seems to follow the same (Weber-Fechner) law as our perception of physical stimuli.” (http://www.kafalas.com/Logtime.html)


I am a bit confused about the meaning of cyclical time... I feel like everything we do and the way we keep track of time is in cycles. Weeks, months, years and then we repeat. Is that not what is meant by cyclical time? 

*I see you’ve mentioned it in the syllabus!