DREAM

“Everyday Practices depend on a vast ensemble which is difficult to delimit but which we may provisionally designate as an ensemble of procedures. The latter are schemas of operations and of technical manipulations.” - The Practice of Everyday Life, De Certeau (p. 43) 

       Within my project I wanted to explore one of the everyday practices that transcends what Certeau notes as the issue with generalizing a vast ensemble. I wanted an everyday routine that everyone takes part in no matter who they are, where they come from, what they do or what they believe. I wanted a fundamentally human procedure but also wanted to find, within that universality, some form of variance or abstraction to explore. Exploring sleep became my focal point because it is something everyone must do to live, yet how we sleep and what happens when we sleep can differ from person to person or even from day to day.

       Sleep is a fascinating thing to me. I think that it is while we sleep that the beauty and power of our minds manifests itself. Dreams are windows to our vulnerability and show just how powerful our minds are. While we sleep and dream we are shown the weakness of our senses that can be tricked into believing things and events that are not real or have never happened. While we dreams our senses are tricked and it is only until we wake up that we realize that we were asleep the entire time. I wanted to explore this universal act in my video and show the progress of someone falling asleep and eventually entering a dream state.

    

The Everyday Mundane (Work in progress)

For Project #1, I am planning on exploring the everyday ritual of falling asleep. The action itself is not special or specific to one person; it is a universal thing we all do. However, how we experience sleep or the process of falling asleep can vary greatly. I believe that it is in this variety that I will be able to find beauty or find ways to abstract the action to create a visually intense video piece. I will like to explore the emotional arcs that I have personally experienced throughout my life with the action of falling asleep. From experiencing fear as a child afraid of the dark to the constant murmurs in your mind as you wind down from a busy day, this piece will explore the complexity of sleep.

WAR V. YOUTH

WAR V. YOUTH - Video Still Frames

WAR V. YOUTH is a video project that revolves around McLuhan’s notion of the global village. When I was younger I had heard the saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and in the context in which McLuhan presents it, the world has become itself a global technological village. Due to modernization, we have reached new levels of communication that had only ever been part of science fiction. My take on the global village theory will be represented in this video where I explore the effects of news media on our modern day youth. I believe that the phenomenon that we are observing among our deteriorating youth is linked directly to what they are being shown by the media. We are slowly removing the youth and innocence from the child. The modern child has a vast understanding of things that one could argue is well beyond their years. My video tells the story of the removal of youth from a child and the ultimate empty vessels that we as a society are producing. 

Lao-Tze: The Value of the Non-Existent

     Researching in depth, one of the references of Marshal McLuhan's book, surprisingly changed my outlook on what I, once perceived - and still to a varying degree still perceive - to be a glorified "magazine". The more time I had spent reading McLuhan's book throughout the term, the more it seemed like a piece of abstract art rather than informative literature. However, as I researched Lao-Tze as referenced in, "The Medium is the Massage" I pieced together how McLuhan had used Lao-Tze's passage to prove a commentary of our media culture.

     The Passage that McLuhan used from the ancient writings of Lao-Tze's from Tao Te Ching outlined how we, as a modernized western world, have come to define ourselves by what we are not. Using both Lao-Tze’s ancient passage and McLuhan’s commentary it becomes clear that it is our isolation that has defined us, but it is the extremity of that isolation that has now pushed us into the realms of technological communication. I believe that these passages together are trying to prove that we have gone from one extreme to another. We have ultimately gone from the isolated, personal, individualistic ideologies of the West and have entered (as McLuhan calls it) a fused "oriental" way of life.

Collage of Iconic representations of both Lao-Tze and Marshall McLuhan. In the center they are morphed into one. 

Individual photo-credits to: 

Marshal McLuhanby JustinRandall 

WordPress – Marshal McLuhan

Taiji Online

"Something is Happening" - The Exhibition

     Preparing for the gallery exhibition was a fun experience that nicely seemed to book-end the process of creating these photographs. A couple of weeks ago when these pictures were just pieces of digital memory locked in cameras, they didn't seem like part of a social medium. However, this gallery opening took many people to put together and during that process, the social nature of photography came into view. I thought it was an interesting contrast to the constant use of online forums to display work to use the exhibition as our space to show others what we have worked on. From printing the photos, to framing them and hanging them on the wall, the experience as a whole was a great one. 

POST 9/11

     While keeping in mind the significance of silence I decided to create a soundscape that evoked the mood that I felt during 9/11. Although I was a very young child on that day, I, like everyone else, was affected by it and continue to be. In McLuhans words he explains that "Music shall fill the air" and on that day, what many people along with myself felt in the air was danger. There was a sense of the unknown, a fear of not knowing what was coming next. This soundscape is a representation of those uncertainties.

"The Lawrence Difference" - Photo Book

    In designing the layout for the photo book of "The Lawrence Difference" I decided to go with an intuitive approach. When taking the photos of the set I was very meticulous of the composition and coordination of every individual shot and so thought that it would be best to just let the shots come together on there own with no particular path set to guide them. Each photo was created to fit in with the overarching theme of diversity at Lawrence University while still using Robert Frank's style of taking the everyday mundane and using it to create a social commentary.

The Lawrence Difference - Photo Book Layout

"REVOLT: Challenge the System "

      Marshall McLuhan in, "The Medium is the Massage" states that "Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the work of the old." I think that this plays out in the printing of digital photos and the creation of this photo book. We are taking what would have other wise been a modern digital creation and creating a book of art which in itself is something usually seen in the past. My process in designing the book consisted of importing all my photos into snapfish and laying out the pictures that just felt to naturally come together. I chose not include any text or captions for the pictures because I believe that they speak for themselves. I decided to include a description in the back of the book of the overall theme in hopes of guiding individuals through the thought process I involved myself in while creating the images. 
       In the sense that I am trying to portray it as, "diversity' can take on many different meanings. To one person my photographs can be about race, to another gender, and to another even randomness might come through. It is this fluidity of meaning that I was reaching for in this project. I want any Lawrence student or faculty member to see these photographs and ultimately see a part of themselves in the work.