Final Reflection: Priscilla

Who I was before and after:

In order to contextualize this experience, part of the reality is that I am twenty-one years old, female, Korean-American, and have spent the last seventeen years of my life as a student at various institutions. I mention this because there was something inescapably personal about participating in this GISP.

Before undergoing this course, I predominantly identified as a RISD student for a combination of reasons. My first year in college was primarily spent at RISD so, naturally, I assimilated to RISD values, culture, and social groups. Disconnected from Brown, I developed a bias that made it difficult to transition into my second year. At Brown, not only did I feel detached and invisible, I became hyper-sensitive to academia and its criteria of judgment. Moreover, I had internalized a stigma around “intellectualizing” or “overthinking” art, which further gave me reason to distance myself from Brown. My initial alliance with RISD alongside my discomfort at Brown, gradually resulted in the dismissal of my Brown education. When confronted with the question of integration and interdisciplinarity, a question I felt was implicit in this program, I concluded that my studies in geology will remain subservient to my sculpture practice. This decision felt unsatisfactory, and by the end of my sophomore year I felt utterly lost, confused, and strangely incapable of trusting myself. I would like to note that I do not mean to criticize the structure of the program, but simply to describe my previous thoughts and experiences, all of which have been challenged throughout this course. In other words, much of what I felt was due to me, not the program.

By the end of this Wintersession, I got a taste of what it feels like to deconstruct perceived external pressures and not subscribe to the definitions of either institutions but instead to myself. When I was authentic with my feelings and process, who I became was someone more amorphous, someone irreducible to labels like “geologist” and/or “sculptor”. Actually, I am neither a “geologist” nor a “sculptor”, for that matter, but just a student only beginning to investigate these fields and herself. These insights were liberating and I no longer felt threatened by my education, but empowered. In general, I became more comfortable during times of ambiguity and states of imbalance, thus more confident and open to my future years in this program.

Week 3 Process: Priscilla

Following the analog of sedimentation, I realized that humans return to the Earth in death. I searched online (cnn, dailymail, newyorktimes, obituaries etc.) for a total of 100 people that have passed away in the past two days. I read about 84 victims of Ebola in Sierra Leone and Guinea, five victims of ISIS militants, six victims of weather-related car crashes, an Argentinian prosecutor, and four Rhode Island residents that have passed away peacefully from age. I spent approximately 5 minutes on each figure.

Also, this is a website I felt related to my project. Probably not in the physical manifestation of the concept, but certainly a helpful resource in my research process: http://www.worldometers.info/

Week 3 Response: Priscilla

This week’s readings dealt the professions of a chef, a playwright, a poet, and a scientist. Their experiences and insights with their own art forms taught me as a student studying art.
Bill Buford, a journalist in The New Yorker, wrote the column “The Secret of Excess” about Chef Mario Batali and his experience with him in the kitchen. The way Buford described cooks in the kitchen, “a roomful of adrenaline addicts”, reminded me of a previous reading on “flow.” There is an intuitive and physical quality about cooking—its fire, speed and pressure—that struck me at a visceral level. I learned that to fully engage with the instinctual relationship with cooking, your body needs to be worked and disciplined as a tool. And the way to achieve this, in cooking but perhaps as well as in visual art, is through the pedagogy of relentless repetition: “You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school,” Andy said, “Because they give you only six onions, and, no matter how hard you focus on those six onions, there are only six of them, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.”

Week 2 Process: Priscilla

This week, I scrapped, rewrote, and edited my project proposal and, instead of a playground, I am making sculpture about geology, something I was actively resisting for some time now. Ironically, this is the most liberated I’ve felt when approaching a project.

I am commenting on actual geologic time in tension with human perceptions of time. I am interested in how people cope with their “insignificance” in context with the universe. The self-centric world we experience is threatened by something as impersonal and intangible as geologic time. I sketched out human gestures in clay, each different from the next, reducing them into sediments. I was planning on squishing them, or subjecting them to some outside pressure.

In critique, however, I was asked if I was “God”. In other words, there is a more authentic analog in place. Geologic rules dictate that the sediments, through layering, subject themselves to their own weight and pressure. After I outline these constraints, I only need to follow them and, just let the process be.

Week 1 Process: Priscilla

I was in the process of designing a playground in which the primary function of its games, machines, structures, spaces, help me produce art in a physically engaging way. I created crude sketches of what an example “machine” would look like: for example, a constant stream of plaster that would harden in an irregular way, creating an interesting predetermined armature for future sculpting.

After critique, however, I addressed a deeper issue that motivated the playground proposal in the first place: the invalidation of my thinking process in favor of making. I spent some time figuring out what helps facilitate thinking:
• Ear plugs, hearing protection, etc.
• Roll (ideally large) of paper
• Sharpies, or thick markers
• Reading
• Asking difficult, pointed questions

Week 2 Response: Priscilla

In a speech given to the National Society for Women’s Service, Virginia Woolf spoke of dismantling predetermined definitions of a woman:

“I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense…Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer. The Angel was dead; what then remained?…In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is ‘herself’? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know.”

I found an unexpected likeness between this passage and my experience before and during this Wintersession course. My motivations behind the conception of this independent study stemmed from a rejection, or in Woolf’s words “in self-defense”, of what it means to be a Dual Degree (or a woman, for that matter, but that’s a different story). To reassert myself in the midst of expectations and stereotypes, I was going to use this class as an opportunity to search for “who I am” only to find, like Woolf, something amorphous and unidentifiable.

Week 1 Response: Priscilla

Surprisingly, I found seamless similarities among our week one readings. Maybe this is inevitable when you select works that are intimately tied to the human condition such as looking, writing, thinking, creativity, and the metaphysical.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow Khaneman describes two systems in the mind:

System 1: the automatic, inevitable reaction to stimuli (ex. turning your head towards the loud noise)
System 2: direction of attention/concentration, voluntary control (ex. looking for what made the loud noise)

I interpreted this as the difference between “thought” and “thinking.” To me, “a thought” is born out of associations and first impressions; they are automatic, immediate, and intuitive. As an aspiring artist, I have always idealized the intelligence of intuition. Automatic reactions feel justified and “truthful” as if dictated by an omniscient, central subconscious or our natural, primal brain. This was a dangerous conclusion considering some of these associations were conditioned from birth. These are biases that I feel are responsible for stereotypes, racism, appropriation in artwork, etc. Luckily, the secondary tier, “thinking”, keeps flaws in System 1-thoughts in check. There seems to be a capacity, however, to our concentration. If our allowance of attention is completely preoccupied, you might miss the moonwalking bear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4.
Khaneman points out that:

1. We can be blind to the obvious
2. We are also blind to our blindness

Horowtiz speaks of such blindness in On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observations. Whereas she was occupied getting from point A to point B, her son budgeted his attention differently. By looking instead of seeing, his walk instead becomes a journey. I wonder if this is what it means to look, notice, or, as Hofstadter calls it in Godel, Escher, Bach, to “step back.”
Hofstadter describes the following self-modifying game: Imagine a chess board with rules, with an overlying chess board of meta-rules, and a subsequent board of meta-meta-rules. Before I discuss how I feel some scientists and artists (not only visual) make it their business to transcend these layers, I feel it’s important to note that such transcendence is impossible without “thinking”; furthermore, that if your attention is fully preoccupied to a thought, albeit necessary, can lead to blindness. Bronowski in Creative Process explains how humans, in this sense, have an advantage over their animal faculties. If the ravenous lion had the practice of speech, it would be able release himself from thoughts of getting past the cage bars to the meat in front of him, turn around, and exit the door behind him, run to the front, and enjoy his meal. I believe this implies that external output, a record of thoughts and thinkings or to make, is not only to relieve internal pressure caused by nearing System 2’s capacity, but also to subject them to another level of observation.
Where this process differs between scientists and artists, including writers, dancers, musicians, etc. is their differing modes of thinking. Kellog in Psychology of Writing comments on “critical thinking” versus “creative thinking.”

1. Creative thinking: making judgements, explicit criteria, self-correcting, sensitive to context
2. Creative thinking: conducive to judgements, guided by context, self-transcending, sensitive to criteria

Although scientists and artists both exercise these thinking operations, I think their long-term goals are different. To paraphrase Kellog, what compels the scientist is the wonder of truth and what compels the artist is the wonder of meaningfulness. In a way, they both are still headed in the same direction.
To revisit Hofstadter, the top layer of the stacked chessboard is “invalide,” or inaccessible, because there is no layer above it that dictates how its rules are changed. In other words, these “software changes,” or the ability to think, can never access the inviolate “hardware” of our brain, neurons and neural connections. It would be safe to say, then, this is a limitation humanity shares whether some of us know it or not. Essentially, the “truth is too elusive for any human or human collective to fully attain.”
Hofstadter, however, did say “if you step far back enough, you can often see the clue that allows you to untangle things.” Whereas scientists “step back” in order to get asymptotically closer to the top layer truth, artists get lost in the process; they “step back” because it is their occupation to look.
This journey of the meta-, whether intentional or not, although will never cure us of our blindness, somehow the fruits of how humans consciously cope in the dark help us see through a slightly clearer and more beautiful lens.