Link to my Learning Agreement
This week I organized all of the Polaroids I’ve taken thus far into mini books to help organize and protect the film. I’m still working on finalizing the list of “bucket list” items I want to complete, as well as what the journal entry prompts will be. Besides the pretty big gap in research that I have with this, my project doesn’t feel “substantial” enough right now, if that makes any sense.
Some of the photos below!
(above is from the museum I went to, below is from my trip to Israel!)
Additionally, I did a critical response workshop with fellow Arts Scholar Adriana Alonzo:
Critical Response Process-w/ Adriana Alonzo
- Likes how this project has an air of “fulfillment”
- “Fun” premise; Makes it real life, not a HW assignment
Artist as the Questioner:
Research angle: the mental health benefits of traveling, journaling; Research the individual aspects of your project
- Logging mental health over a long period of time
-follow up research on the ones I enjoyed
- How many “experiences” do you plan having; do you know
Goal between 10-12; subsections within each “header”; don’t have final list
- How are you going to set up website?
Current plan is to have a gallery, but also direct links to each experience; A more clean cut design than the original scrapbook
- Any research on website?
Probably gonna have a page about that; be the home screen? (maybe not)
- Do you like the experiences I’ve brought up?
“It’s cute! I think the mix you have is good; always people to relate, like you want”
I had my advisor conference today with Heather and she gave me some really great advice on avenues I can go down for the research end of things. One thing Heather said that is really sticking with me is what she said about making this an experiment of sorts—I’m not just going to complete these bucket list experiences, but having a common theme/experiment throughout that will help me connect them. What if this experiment was prose related? I wanted to add in a writing element other than journaling originally so this could be my opportunity to do that.
I’ve also decided to use Wix for the final web format. It’s easy to use but also has the opportunity for “advanced tinkering,” as I like to say.
I’ve had a breakthrough today—I was hanging out with my writer friend and I remembered a while back she was talking about how one of her english classes had them do an assignment where they had to “people watch” for thirty minutes once a week and write down some of the conversations they overheard. My friend used this to help better her dialogue in her writing. I’ve decided to emulate this but take it a step further: I’m going to go to places I’ve always wanted to go to, but I’m going to people watch at these places—write down snippets of conversation I might overhear, etc—and then choose a subject/person to write a short story about. This allows me to not only experience new things, but try and put myself in a new mindset, context, by writing in these places about someone/something else. Because there’s a new, more time-consuming and creative-consuming element to this capstone, I think it’s wise that I aim for 5-6 total pieces/experiences instead of the originally intended 10-12.
I had my first look presentation today and overall I’ve gotten some really good feedback from everyone. I still need to thoroughly go through the flashcards I got from everyone, but so far everyone seems to like the direction it's going, even giving some great suggestions for what format the stories should be in (flash fiction maybe? Or even dabble in poetry as well) and how I could narratively tie all the stories together. Below is the google document I used to succinctly point out the differences and similarities between this “new” capstone and the old one.
A Collection of Stories Inspired by People (or Wizard) Watching
Still involves me going out and trying new things; simply asks me to be more engaged with my surroundings and other people there
Still involves reflection/journaling on my part
Still involves a photographic complement
New narrative element- I’m writing a short story about a person experiencing the space I’m in;
Possibly contrasting and/or complementing that story to my own personal emotions tied to that space
Story is going to be the main focus, while my own thoughts are going to be secondary
Fairly new idea, so I’m working on curating a new list of sources, but I’m going to primarily focus on researching the benefits of people watching, actively being creative in a new space (seeing how that affects my writing process), etc
Today I started messing with Wix a bit. I’m definitely jumping ahead on my schedule and ignoring what I should really be doing (research!!) but I’m giving myself some breathing room to get my thoughts and such accumulated to this new idea. I don’t want to share any pictures of my website bare bones until
My goal for this week (on top of research) was to compile a rough list of the places I want to go for writing this story. A lot of the preliminary reserach I’ve done on writing/being creative in a new space suggests having a “control;” this means, in regards to this particular project, that I need to write in a space I’m familiar with and see how that differs from writing in a completely new space. Then there’s also the question of how I’ll write at the beginning when I’m first introduced to the new space, and then how’ll write once I get slightly more acclimated to the space. Regardless, here are my ideas for where to people watch/write as of today:
(1) Starbucks route 1 [serves as my control for this “experiment”]
(2) Bookstore/Restaurant (I’m visiting one next Thursday for a comedy show)
(3) “Somewhere” in NYC (visiting w/ scholars—write during free time?)
(4) Center of a campus (not UMD— maybe Towson? over Spring Break?)
I don’t want a totally “complete” list yet, as I want opportunities to present themselves as I go along, but I still think it’s good to have a basic list of things to do. I think the first thing that I’ll end up doing is either the Starbucks one (my control) or the bookstore/restaurant since I’m attending a comedy event at one next Thursday.
I haven’t really made much headway in research, writing, or anything to be honest. I had a pretty busy weekend—worked most of Friday and all of Saturday— and now I’m starting to get a little bit nervous. I’m switching up my weekly plan a bit and having this week be primarily research and working on my annotated bibliography. Then maybe I’ll have a good idea of how I want to go about people watching for the comedy show this Thursday.
Last week we had arts scholars alumni join us for our weekly discussions. While I was expecting a plethora of great advice from each of them, It was also great to hear about how they each struggled, and that changing your mind is okay.
Tonight we heard that school is going to be closed down for the next month or so because of the current worldwide health situation (it might be a pandemic. we don’t know yet). As much as I hate to admit it I’m more annoyed than anything, but I understand how paramount safety and health is over any frustrations I might have. I know we’ll adjust accordingly. I hadn’t really thought about how this was going to affect my capstone until now. Hopefully I’ll still be able to travel to new places. Everything’s pretty hectic right now so we’ll see what the next few weeks bring.
Creativity; Time Management Chosen Technique: Incubation. While I’ve utilized “taking a break” while I’m working, (going to take a walk, etc) I’ve never really considered it in the context of “this is my time to let my thoughts marinate.” I really enjoyed reframing my mindset while taking incubation breaks and found that it allowed me to not only work longer, but more effectively.
It’s been an interesting month to say the least. I’m going to have to change my capstone quite a bit in light of the rest of the semester being online and not being able to travel to write my pieces. I’m really not quite sure what I’m going to do, but we’ll see. I have nothing to show at this time. I have my research but I haven’t dived into writing because I’m unsure of what direction to go in. Perhaps after I talk with Heather I’ll have some more direction.
Curation Rapid Prototyping Exercise: essentially, my sketching revolved around the various menu tabs I want for my website.
- An Artist’s Statement/Process page (BTS)
- A central page for someone to visit that organizes all of the pieces onto one “table of contents” that links to each pieces individual page
- An individual page for each piece
Second Advisor Meeting: 4/9/20
I met with my arts advisor (Heather!) over ZOOM today and thank god because I can salvage this capstone. I honestly with I’d reached out to her sooner. We’ve found a way to salvage my research and redirect/reword it to fit the current situation. I’ll be writing about rooms in my house that I’ve changed emotions for. It plays into my research on the Differential Susceptibility Hypothesis (our susceptibility of change due to environmental factors) and change itself. I want these pieces to encapsulate a clear before and after, and how that may have negatively or positively affected me.
Second Look Presentation: 4/17/20
Going into the second look presentations I felt more grounded in what I wanted to write about and the literary mediums I was going to write about. However I still feel like I’m lacking focus. Heather’s feedback on my central question really had me think about how I can clarify and specify the focus and the audience of my capstone. I’ve decided to rephrase my central question as: What’s new? It proposes that something has changed, but it allows me the flexibility to offer different answers with each prose. I intend to add some context to this question on my Wix page (perhaps in the process section?).
For my show and tell I’d like to share a screenshot of the brainstorming process of my pieces right now, alongside a few little rough excerpts. I’ve also thought of doing a mini photo shoot to provide visuals for each of these pieces if I have time.
