I’ll do another post soon on new themes / ideas. Plus info on show’s i’ve seen.
For now, I’d just like to update. It’s been a really challenging quarter. Largely in the sense of defining my own work schedule intelligently (which I’ve been failing at) and balancing reading theory and producing work (also failing at).
My major grievance this quarter is that I’ve been doing too much reading and not enough making. In my seminar with N.K. Hayles, who is brilliant, the weekly reading list is usually astronomical (by my slow-reader standards). The class is full of english/literature phD candidates. They’re all really intelligent and make great contributions in class. But I’ll be damned if I don’t feel like the only one there not drinking the kool-ade. Some theory I just don’t buy. And trying to wrap my mind around the rest is leaving me mentally exhausted on a daily basis: completely the wrong state of mind to do some serious art making. I’m glad i’m being exposed to all these new writers, but it’s just so challenging for me.
Now I understand there should be a nice healthy balance between studying and making; I support that claim 100% I’m just feeling that the scales are tipping way towards the theory end this quarter. And what I said about my brain shutting down every evening is really leaving me bummed out.
Last weekend, I had a little mini-crisis when I realized 4 or 5 weeks have gone by and I haven’t produced anything but screen tests and drawings. But since then, i’ve turned my state of mind around and started re-considering my methodology. “Playing around” with physics engines and game engines haven’t yielded any creative results, (as per my current interest in games and machines). My plan was to start producing some non-functional abstract games based on a couple of themes…but the software development has had such a high learning curve that all my ideas have died in the initial phase. I’m thinking now i’d like to do a larger installation and break away from screen-based things; unless i’m going to do all-out video. I’m just not a programmer… I can learn what I need when necessary but I can’t be creative with code when I’ve got no initial concept. So that’s that. Time to start over.
TAing for Rebeca Mendez has been a treat. I’m learning loads about typography and motion graphics just by working with the students and her and being involved in critiques. I’ve cultivated a high respect for design. Occasionally she can’t make it and i’ve had to teach several classes completely on my own. This was frightening at first but i’m definitely more used to it now. I love curating screenings for the students and showing them influential work that they’ve never seen before. I can feel my CMU education oozing through!
That’s all for now. Please check in later for more updates and photos. The attitude turn around has been pretty successful so far and I can foresee starting on some new project very soon. I even started going back to the gym and trying to get excercise…
Check my del.icio.us for links and interest, as well as my flickr for new photos. I also started making some video playlists on youtube. I think i’m youtube.com/mkontopo or something…
- Trip to Carlson (Christian Moeller’s Fabricators, in the Valley. They also fabricate the work of other famous artists there, like Jeff Koons.)
- Trip to Vasa’s Studio
- Trip to Bermant Foundation (They are major donors to our department and have one of the largest private collections of classic Kinetic art. We got to play hands-on with lots of famous pieces, including Duchamp Rotoreliefs and my favorite, Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux Jr.)
- Karaoke
- Final Critique with whole Faculty (Aparently this was the first time the grads got a full faculty critique in a gallery for the first major project. Our show opens in January. The experience was really fantastic.)
- Public Presentations of Old Work (went really well. practicing in front on one another the night before was essential)
- Murakami Retrospective at Moca (I went to the opening. It was a total circus, but the show is amazing.)
- Lots of Korean BBQ
- Moving my studio to the second floor, by the shop
- Discovering APEX and AllElectronics
- Flexcar (Funky Freedom…but within the time limits of your rental…boo)
- I bought a Macbook Pro!!! (I SWITCHED)
- Thanksgiving at Xarene and Grant’s house.
Week one of graduate school is officially complete. I wouldn’t say that I’ve been working my fingers to the bone yet, but It has certainly been a mentally engaging week, full of group and individual meetings, small presentations and introductions. And while I do feel much more comfortable around the facilities, I am still not settled in to a work-conducive environment yet. That will hopefully be remedied this weekend when I move all my crap into the studio.
So I thought, for whoever is reading this blog anyway, I would give a brief rundown of the presentation I gave to my Dynamic Media class (which is basically my studio course). Christian Moeller, our professor asked us to chose a theme and give a brief presentation on it. Then we had a day to come up with 12 ideas for a project that could be done relatively quickly. We met with him individually so that he could rifle through them speedily and subject us to his curt, German sense of judgment: 
NO.. NO… YES… CRAP…. BEAUTIFUL… BORING…. YES……. WHAT ELSE? It felt a bit like having a blood exam, but in the end I was surprised to hear him refer to my ideas as “entertaining”.
My presentation hovered around several ideas that are of interest to me at the moment: the spectacle of technological breakdown and dysfunction, purposeful/clever misuse of technology, instances where beauty is revealed through error… I’m interested in the exposure of the mechanism and the exploitation of it’s shortcomings. This relates to some of my earlier research on the work of the structural filmmakers and the artists they influenced.
My ideas were all over the place, but the most interesting and feasible ones, and also the one’s Christian gravitated towards, were a series of lo-fi mechanical sculptures that would mimic or reflect on neurotic human behavior. The titles were things like, “machine that tries to draw a perfect circle”, etc. I’m attracted to this idea of building imperfect machines because A) I’m bad at building machines and B) I’m interested in the process of discovering the most natural/imperfect way to make a machine do something. I also think it could be more challenging, say in the example above, to figure out how to make it not draw a perfect circle (making a robot draw perfect shapes is probably very simple.
These ideas aren’t revolutionary, but I think they’re interesting and also, they’ll put me on the path to working on something here and potentially lead to different/more unique projects. Being creative is a process and it has to begin somewhere, even if if that somewhere is heavily influenced by existing work/ideas.
Graduate orientation was yesterday…FINALLY. I must say, after two months of hyper-vacation, I feel about as artistic as a hot bowl of soup. I’m pretty exciting to start class tomorrow, and yet, I do feel predictably anxious. I’m not really worried about forming relationships or being a good student… I suppose i’m just feeling anxious about discovering what i’m all about; or perhaps about filling the role of how I used to view graduate students as an undergrad: all knowing and wise…constantly motivated. The shroud is falling!
Excited about: Experimenting, taking risks, 24-hour access to everything, our department’s private research library, cheap student software deals, having studio space again (albeit, limited), making friends and playing nice.
Not excited about: Bros on Strathmore inviting me to frat parties because they think i’m a freshman, saying goodbye to healthy eating and sleeping schedule, having to cunningly balance school with non-school relationships, Internet Explorer butchering my CSS, my bike is broken and the shop is so far away.
This update will cover several unrelated things because, as you can see, i’m already beginning to slip in terms of update-consistency.
Most recently, I took a mini-road trip to San Fransisco. The opportunity presented itself in the form of a ride. I got dropped of in San Jose, where my friend Nate lives, and we ventured there Saturday morning, stopping for a small tour of the Stanford campus on the way. In the end, I only spent about 24 hours in San Fran, but it was still really fun and I got to hang out with two of my best friends from college and their friends/significant others. I mostly hung around the Mission area and played catchup while getting exposed to a bit of local flavor.
The Mission district — an area of town that is quickly getting more popular — contains a ton of really interesting antique stores and specialty shops. It’s also full of beautiful murals. Most importantly though, it contains Philz Coffee, which made my weekend. Plus Dolores park is there, and there are enough beautiful hipsters around to feed a small country. I’ve got to say, it was a real breath of fresh air to visit a city where people actually walk around. Don’t take pedestrians for granted: They have a way of making a neighborhood feel loved that is often missing in LA.
On the way home, my friend and I found the most remote In-N-Out Burger in the world. It felt a bit like perching on the edge of the earth and eating your last meal. And that meal is a double-double, animal style (no spread).
In other news:
+ I bought a Nintendo DS. I’ve never owned a video game system in my entire life until now. Why did I make the jump? Most likely because a) I’m so impressed with Nintendo’s embrace of gesture based interfaces as the new direction of gameplay and b) It’s cheaper than a Wii. Plus, you can get wireless on it, and if you buy this guy you can load mp3’s, videos, home-made applications, (etc) onto your DS. I think that’s pretty rad.
+ I got a work study position in my department as a Masters Student Assistant to the Head of our dep’t, who is now Casey Reas. I’ll start when school begins, later next week.
+ LA Greekfest? Slightly unimpressive. There wasn’t too much to do for a couple of 20something males. And while the food was, in fact, delicious, something about having to pay to get in, only to pay again for food tasted a bit sour. It was great to hear to some Greek being spoken, however. And, I scored some Greek coffee, which I was out of and looking for!
That’s all for now kids. For interesting website links, check my del.icio.us and for more San Fran photos, check my flickr (on the left menu).
Filed under: ucla
I received my Teaching Assistant assignment today. I’ll be a TA under Chandler McWilliams, a pretty accomplished designer and programmer. The course is called Creative Internet. It’s a 100 level undergrad course that (judging by the course description) teaches them a variety of tools for the purpose of using the internet as a creative medium in art-making. It also seems to cover the history of the internet and theory about it’s contemporary cultural impact. It’s not an area that i’m totally familiar with so it will definitely be a learning experience for me too!
