the alphabet, food, and keyboards. what more does a college student need?

*I did not have an invitation to the blog until today! This is assignment #1*
Like my peers, I was completely overwhelmed by this assignment because there was so many possibilities. Following the advice of the TED talk we watched in class, I decided to give myself some restrictions to 'boost' my creativity. I decided to do something on paper, probably because when I think of creativity I think of art, which in my mind is something on a wall in a gallery. Obviously doing something on a piece of paper doesn't narrow it down too much, so I decided that I wouldn't use any typical writing/painting utensil. I also limited myself to things I had available in my apartment, which was cleaning products and food. Next I had to decide what I wanted to put on the paper. I'm a terrible artist but I really like typography, so I stuck with that. I decided to write out the alphabet. I felt like I was really on a roll with the 'college student' theme; things you could find in an apartment, the alphabet (something we use everyday), but I wanted it to be a little more 'creative', so I decided I couldn't just spew out the alphabet from a-z. I ended up following a qwerty keyboard, which is the order the letters follow on a typical american laptop or desktop, starting with q and ending with m. This is what I ended up with:

It's not very pretty, and to be honest by the end I didn't feel very creative, but it did draw some interesting parallels for me. For instance, some of the sweet and colorful food I thought would show up more on the paper hardly came through at all. Some of the more bitter or gross foods, on the other hand, showed up really well. It sounds cliche, but it was kind of like life. Sometimes we do these really easy 'sweet' things with great expectations, but after the big picture is completed we can hardly see them. When we do 'bitter' things, however, they are like big bright yellow spots, even though they are kind of smelly, and we weren't really sure what we were getting ourselves into when first started putting it on our 'canvas.'

Carpet Art

Accidental Art:

So I was not able to take a photo and upload it. But I was sitting in my room yesterday and I was looking down at my carpet and I could see that there was something that looked like a figure in the carpet. So I drew it and it came out looking like a bear with a police hat on!

10 questions

For this post, I combined three activities. I sat in one place, found accidental art, and asked thought questions to examine it. I had to change my perspective a few times, especially once I got to my 5th or 6th question. I stopped looking at just my surroundings and started looking at myself and others on a more personal level.

The link: 10 questions

A Scale Model

As I made my search of accidental art today, I was an a hunt for the ephemeral. What would be existing today that probably wouldn't be there tomorrow? What would only I be able to see if I stopped and looked hard enough? This week's downpours gave me an opportunity for comparison. As I walked by the construction debris near the Wilkinson Center, I saw an interesting framing of the small scale and the macro scale - a pile of dirt aligned almost exactly as Timpanogos was many miles away. Immediately I could see comparisons that went beyond the immediate likeness. As had happened to Timpanogos last weekend, the mound of dirt, too, was a victim of weather and erosion. Before both stood a flat expanse of concrete that seemed insignificant in comparison and fell. Both of those plains bore the effects of the downpour, wearing parts of their respective mountains upon them, washed down by the rains.

If there were no watches, or clocks, or cellphones, or…

Time Observation-

           I spent most of the day sitting in The Wall restaurant in the Wilk. During this time I witnessed about 4 waves of increased customers. When I realized the waves of people were caused by classes letting-out I realized that each wave was evenly spaced by an hour.

          Once I realized that each wave was an hour apart, I was able to predict the waves by how many songs had been played over the radio. This leads to the second way I found to observe the passing of time. I figured each song was about an average of three and a half minutes long. When I realized I would want to eat something before class started I mad sure to order my food after the 11^th or 12^th song just to be sure I wasn’t going to have a long wait for my food.

           Traffic. During the summer months I sell home security. I spent all day, everyday either in the same neighborhood or driving all day in the car around town. I rarely had a need to look at the time during work but I would always know when 12:30 and 5:30 came around because of the immediate increase in vehicles on the road during lunch/rush hour. Traffic is very consistent and a dependable way of knowing what time it is.

the ground

The idea of accidental art really got me thinking. How is it that when I have such a routine, I miss the most obvious things that I come in contact with every single day? I was really focussing on this while I was walking around the last couple of days. I realized that the while I do look around and up, I hardly ever look down while I am walking. I have always just assumed that natural beauty does't come from something so mundane, practical, and even dirty as the ground. So, in an attempt to change my point of view, I decided to start really paying attention to what was beneath me. In the short period of time that I experimented with this I found that some of the most interesting and complex forms of art are ones that I come in direct and physical contact with almost constantly and yet hardly ever take note of.

The textures and unevenness of blacktop is something I had never really thought about, let alone viewed as beauty. The complexity of it really is amazing. 

The fact that this ground was wearing at different times and levels (the darker areas) added a really cool element that I may not have otherwise noticed if I hadn't been taking the time to pay attention to the ground.

Art. I think...

I don't think you could classify what I found during my walk as "art" per se, but I did try to look at things in a new way:

Some idiot planted this tree upside down. The green part goes in the air, not the dirt.

That guy made of leaves lost his ear.

A leaf that peed itself.

Twigs paddleboard, too.

Nice tribal tats, Library.

Craig Bishop