Happy Day After Halloween

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Official Priddy Photo

I changed out my hangin' in Italy photo with my official Priddy Fellowship photo. I 'm just tryint to be all feng shui.

PattiMoo

PattiMoo is the name of my character in World of Warcraft. The whole Multimedia class is playing it this week on a 10 day trial. We are writing a paper on it, all about identity etc etc. Anyway, I have video game homework, I think my nephews will be really envious. PattiMoo is part of the Horde ( the scruffy bunch) as opposed to the Alliance ( the pretty bunch) She is a big cow-like warior. So far I've been wandering around fufilling quests for the Horde, mostly bashing things over the head. I've learned I don't really enjoy bashing things over the head, even in virtualy reality.

Weird

Today I'm strolling through the nearly deserted campus (Sunday) on my way home from the Priddy lab when I look up and see my former Alvin HS student walking toward me. I didn't know she was at UNT. It turns out we are both Art Education majors. It was an odd moment for both of us standing there in our UNT sweatshirts and jeans. Good to see her, and good to know she's going into art education

Hangin' in the Jupiter House

I had to get out of my apartment. I spent all day yesterday doing a time line of the history of art education from 1960 t0 1980. You wouldn't think there would have been a lot to put on such a timeline but everything affects education so before you know it you have Sputnik and the civil rights movement, the counter culture and the space program all crowding themselves in there along with everything else.
In the meantime, back in the real world, it is so so so so unbeLIEVEably beautiful here. It's perfect, in a nut shell. Sunny, bright, crisp, slight breeze the kind of weather that makes you want to find someone to walk hand in hand with. So this morning I grabbed my laptop and have found my way to the Jupiter House, the local cyber cafe with great coffee and pastries and big windows and a front door they keep open to the weather, and I am working here, because, let's face it, I have to work, there aren't any days off really.
Which brings me to the thing I've been thinking about this morning. I am really having to redefine what it takes to get things done. A whole new face to self-discipline. My old model of getting up early, staying to a schedule etc etc, just isn't working here. And I'm finding out how tied I am to that old model, it's taking some time for this old dog to learn new tricks. But I'm adjusting, I'm being a little more fluent every day.

LBJ and Bob

Me and Scott as LBJ and (psyco) Bob Ross respectively Halloween 2006

I'm really boring

Right now all I do is read and write. Snooze. . . unless of course you are really interested in what you are reading, which I am, but that doesn't exactly make great blog posts. However, back in real life. . . Denton loves Halloween. One of the fellows has decorated our lab and there has been candy everywhere. Dr. Davis brought treats to class on Monday and tonight as I was walking home I walked into a sea of the tiniest little munchkins you ever saw coming out of the student union dressed up as princesses and doggies and ancient war lords with plastic jack-o-lanterns filled with treats. Evidently trick or treat is off to an early start. Our prof even called off class for next Wednesday night, (not the case for the night before Thanksgiving.) Last Halloween I dressed up as LBJ, this year I think I'm celebrating Halloween as a geek grad student playing World of Warcraft. But that's another post

Nichole, Nichole Where Would You Go if Your Soul Really Was in Your Eyes

I was home this past weekend to attend the reading of Loueva's play (Title Above). The play is beautiful and the reading was a smash. Here's a quote from the play:

The Surgeon says: Love must be continuous in the memory of our cells, otherwise, how would we sleep as deeply as a map of the stars folded shut in a book about infinity?

The tree and the iris

All the rhizome is is a metaphor for how we communicate, access information, and function in the global village. We used to do it like a tree, hierarchical, two from one reproduction, now we do it like the iris ( a rhizome root structure) non hierarchical, reproducing in the multiple, like the video visual. It's a different way to visualize our world and how we access and navigate it. Lisa suggests that perhaps you may need a little extra curricular help visualizing it, well, that may be true, and it could be helpful, fun even. Hey, whatever it takes.

Huh? is right!

I loved Mon's comment to my abstract. Huh? is right Mom! It's all way out there theoretical stuff we are learning about new media. It's all about how it is changing not only our culture but ourselves. It's very interesting, but you really have to have your head all in it and know and somewhat understand the jargon to make heads or tails of it (a little pun for you mom). I posted the abstract just to give you some idea of what I'm trying to grasp in that class. If you don't know what variablility and transcoding are, you really can't get the point, it's not that you're a dolt, it's just that you are not a cyber geek! But basically, I was trying to address how this particular piece of art called World of Awe could be seen as presenting us with the question of what it is to be human and where it is we really exist.

Abstract of my first paper for Multimedia: An Analysis of World of Awe as a Metaphor in New Media

This paper examines how the new media piece World of Awe (1997 to present), by artist Yale Kanarek, plays upon the new media principles of variability and transcoding, as defined by Lev Manovich in Chapter One of The Language of New Media (2001) to build what Migueal Amado claims in Rhizome News will remain one of the “most significant metaphors for our present human condition created by contemporary artists.” The examination is restricted to the context of the borders breached and strengthened in the process of creating and accessing World of Awe and how these borders work to both reflect and create the metaphor and what it signifies. It asks the question of where the borders exist, break and fuse both in reality and hyper-reality and what the possible implications for both art and identity may be or become.

Rhizome Navigation: Blogosphere Visualization

In case you are dieing to know what a rhizome might look like in new media

Up to my A** in Alligators

other than that life is pretty boring: get up, read, write, go to class, sleep, get up, read, write, go to class, sleep, repeat. Life is all in my head at the moment. The stuff in my head is pretty interesting however. Right now I'm doing a paper on Philip H. Phenix. When he was 19 yrs old (1934) Albert Einstein called his professor and asked to meet him because his senior ( he was a college senior at 19, let's start there) thesis was that astounding. He went on to teach at Teachers College , Columbia University for about 30 years, his legacy is mostly what he wrote about the quest for meaning and the moral curriculum. It's facinating to me, but everything I'm reading about is. The trick is to know when to stop reading and start writing.
The other thing I've been reading this week is the rhizome. I'll let the video clip clue you in on that.

Le Grand Content

This is what I'm learning in a nutshell. Now you are all up to date!

Ahhh Autumn

I had to grab my sweatshirt to be able to sit comfortably on my little patio this morning! It was a perfect autumn ( Texas style, let's not think New England) today. I took my work, by that I mean my laptop, out on the patio and stayed there until I had to go to the Denton ISD Fine Arts Council meeting, ( as part of my Politics and Advocacy class) and then on to my Multimedia Class from there. In MM we discussed hypertext and its implications and then played with a program called Scratch, which is geared toward children. Of course it's still way out of my league but it was fun.
But back to the weather, ain't it grand? I found a local fruit and vegitable market and bought a little bitty pumkin and set it out on my patio table. Fall, Bring it on.

Fun at school

I spent yesterday morning at a Denton ISD art teacher in-service at Billy Ryan HS. It was really great to be back among my peeps. I spent most of the time asking them about their education in art education and how it has paid off in the "real world." Most of them felt like the theory has been really valuable and that the "practical" classes like How to Write a Lesson Plan have turned out to be really impractical. This supports my theory that more theory needs to be made available to public school teachers and more practical experience needs to be made available to university professors who are training those students.

Do schools today kill creativity? (Ken Robinson, TEDTalks)

A Day of Music

My fellow fellow Maira has her doctoral recital (flute) on Monday and since I have class then and will have to miss it, I attended her rehersal today. It was wonderful. Her mom is in town from Iowa ( small world) and we sat together as the audience and air applauded ( since they were working and we didn't want to distract but just had to clap) Maria fluted her way throught time and style from the Baroque to 2007. She is quite the thang.

Then, as part of my work with Denton ISD I went to the Golden Triangle Invitational Marching Band Contest. It was fun to be back in High School land. I was surprized at how young the kids are! How soon we forget.

My new friend YA

I've been meeting with YA, an art educator here from China pursuing her doctorate in Art Education. We've been comparing notes on the state of art education in both our countries. There are many similarities, I would say more similarities than differences. And we share many of the same concerns, such as how to find a practical way to integrate the arts within the arts themselves and within the greater scope of the curriculum, how to maintain teacher autonomy while still addressing accountability and so forth. I find it fascinating that coming from 2 entirely different cultures and histories, so many of our issues are shared. The world is shrinking, it is flat perhaps. And that was another one of our shared concerns, how do we maintain our cultural "identities" our heritage ( much more a concern in China whose heritage is so much older and established) in our new global village.

Theory Weary

I've been living in theory land all week. I facilitated the discussion tonight ( along with my classmate Kristina) in my Multimedia class on the Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Halloway in contrast/comparison with Requim for the Media by Jean Baudrillard. We had really interesting conversation around Identity, Community and Intersubjectivity in the age of new media with a little Marxism thrown in. My brain is in pain, I have brain pain, from stretching it out to cram in all the remediation on basic socialist and feminist theory neccessary to get through any given paragraph either of these writers ever wrote. But now I am definatetly knowlegable enough on these subjects to completely misrepresent them. If I were a cyborg I would open my head right now and repalce the chip.

Nichole, Nichole, where would you go if your soul really was in your eyes?

If you are in Houston on the 21st of October, my friend Loueva Smith is having her play, (or verse-drama by the above title) read at the Heights Woman's Club, 1846 Harvard, at 3pm. Please join us. I'll be there and Cliff is reading a small part ( the only male role) of the anaesthesiologist.

Everybody would have fun participating with Steve

There is a very egalitarian research project being conducted right now that everyone, including your 4 year old, can participate in call the Steve project. (Click here) Add your own tags, have your students tag- it's fun. And it's interesting to see what others do.