Belated Beginning

Hey all! With Madison charging full speed ahead, I’ve been thinking about how I’ll be using this summer for myself as well. I admit, I wasn’t as strict with myself as I had hoped (as all my previous summers have been), but I hope that if I set up some kind of defined goal and structure, it’ll be easier to see what I need to do to get there. And perhaps also have some fun in the meantime.

Lately I’ve been struggling a lot with where I’m headed. I’ve realized that I’ve had a lot of interests: photography, animation, fashion, glass, programming, language…but I don’t feel like I really own any of them. I’ve realized that’s because I haven’t really given myself over to them; I’ve been kind of keeping them around, enjoying in the potential possibilities in all of them, but that’s not fulfilling and giving each the time they need.

Thus, for this summer, I’m just going to focus on one thing. I’m just going to do programming, specifically Processing, and learn all that I can to use it, to misuse it, to turn it and to twist it and to play with it. The structure is only week-long projects (to keep them short and sweet): conception by Sunday and publication by the following Saturday. It’ll be open-topic, and I’m going to try to post each weekly project here so there’s accountability in my progress. So far I’m hoping to sustain this structure for at least a month (while I’m in Providence), but things might change when I go home in August. Perhaps the projects will double, two a week, or it draws out longer, I don’t know. But for now, I think I’m going to give this one a run.

Final Process: Yidan

Experiments in the engagement of light through the use of photography and video.

Final Reflection: Yidan

I began with a very strong desire to express the mythical sense of connectedness, that there is a fluidity between the environment and those residing within it. Thus, much of my readings were a way of distilling and creating a basis for what I had felt. Throughout this entire process, I’ve been floating in a sea of intertwining themes of cycles, awakening, and connection.

One of the earliest readings I chanced upon was a thesis by a Textiles student by Amie Young Cheong, Redefining Space Through Light, Shadow, and Memory. In her thesis, Cheong explains that wabi-sabi, the notion of keeping only the poetry of something, is left intentionally undefined, for it is “something that you feel rather than understand” (Cheong 5). This attempt at grasping wabi-sabi became a subconscious mantra in my search for the poetry of light. However, the display of Steven Holl’s watercolor paintings used to visualize space, all while also expressing the atmosphere it contains, struck me in its power of emotion. This inclusion of not just what is seen, but also felt, reveals his sensitive attention to space, getting closer to the question of why in making. More and more throughout this GISP, I have come to realize that it is not what I like that defines me, it is the why. In thinking about Computer Science and Glass, I realized that I can’t just take a system from Computer Science and implement it in Glass to create the “third thing”; there is a grander concept to be explored, the thread of interest evident in my attraction to them that forms the bridge. This pointing to of the unseen subject is very much like myths, how they are contain “signifiers that point to that-which-is-to-be-signified” (Austin 13). I realize that it is only through the pursuit of my interests can I begin to understand the reason why I like them.

While my research of myths was not as in depth as I had wanted, there were discoveries that captured snapshots of my exploration’s impetus. In The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, mythology was described as “‘the song of the universe’. . . music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune” (Moyers xiv). When I first read that line, I felt it bodily. There has always been something that I find myself listening for, something that I remember knowing in dreams and stories but forget upon waking. There is a space, a state that my body knows but my mind does not. In both my myth readings and group readings, I am also suddenly inundated by the unknown, the inexplicable (of course, they have always been there, but I just never accepted their presence). Especially in Meaning and Being in Myth, it was said, “In dreams and myths, they all lead to the subject, yet the subject is nowhere to be seen” (Austin 19). The lack of presence of the subject, in a sense, creates a collection of meanings, a place, rather than a concrete, definitive point. In myths, the use of certain animals or actions act as symbols, symbols that translated the subconscious interpretation of the myth creator’s world. I can’t help but see semblances of this in Computer Science, with its creation of syntax for the representation of ideas and structures. This inception of underlying relationships, like myths, might stem from observations of real-life systems, but it is also grounded in some form of intuition and interpretation.

As for my dance with light, I was taken by a quote said by Filippo Cannata in Light and Emotions: “The light seems to allude to an underground presence, another possible world that manifests itself fracturing the soil.” Such an active description of light, one that is forcibly pushing through, spilling outwards from its encasement, captured my imagination. Before, I had felt that light had a power, a presence in its existence, but this quote solidified the image of light that has broken free from somewhere else. Light is active; it bursts, floods, flashes, and washes. Yet it is something that fills up space but doesn’t take up any. This exploration feels like I’ve only just grazed the surface, but I am excited for what I will find in the future.

As for the effectiveness and replicability of this course, I see the sense of community as a vital component. I feel that the success of the course depended on us being able to feel comfortable around each other, where we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to be open to failure, without feeling like we are “losing” to others. While this instance is unique in that we were all very close friends coming in, for future iterations of this GISP, it is crucial for all participants  to come together for writing a proposal for what they intend to do. The laborious process, while painful, was beneficial to hashing out common goals, giving us the agency over our own desired outcomes. Additionally, while this could have been an independent study experience, it was so much more fruitful through what I’ve learned from others and from their critiques. What surprised me most at the beginning was that though we were all from different majors and concentrations, many of the interests and struggles were similar. I saw myself in Julie during her first crit, when Daniel commented on how she was attempting to do things “right” in her two respective fields, and anything else that didn’t fit was pushed aside. When Joyce was asked to question her idea of Furniture, it made me think about my own in Glass and Computer Science. When Ariana talked about her love of space and exploring our conceptions of it, I felt kinship in our desires and interests. I could go on, but these past weeks have been mindblowingly full of energy, compassion, and growth all through our interactions with each other.

Something I would have changed would’ve been the amount of readings for our discussions. I feel like many times we were juggling too many pages or pieces of reading, and thus the discussions are not able to really go in depth with the ideas presented in a reading. Furthermore, many times, nearing the end, some of us were not able to complete the readings due to Brown starting and our attempts at the final project.

Overall, this has been a pivotal experience, and I am so happy to have been part of this GISP.

Week 3 Response: Yidan

This week, unfortunately, I have been battling extremes of emotions, from absolute certainty to complete confusion. However, the readings chosen were of some comfort, and I gained brief bits of confidence and clarity in their words.

In “The Secret of Excess,” a New Yorker article about an Italian chef, Mario Batali, nothing beats real life experience, the repetition of doing. Bill Buford, the author of the article, describes his backbreaking and relentless training in the cramped quarters of Mario Batali’s kitchen. Unlike being able to focus on a select number of onions or lamb tongues, Bill had to learn through cutting up hundreds of them, an experience that one doesn’t exactly get at cooking school. I saw parallels to our experiences here, in that perhaps our intensity and focus on creating a “perfect” piece, one that encapsulated all our emotions and thoughts, was paralyzing us from messing around with materials, from just learning from what our ingredients had to say. Of course, all this is easier said than done. The process I am going through is aptly described by the in-training Bill, “I was testing the meat not for doneness but undoneness.” Like Bill, I felt like I’m attempting to relearn the way I work, or even the way I consolidate information and emotions. I can’t even seem to trust myself anymore, for fear of making from the mind instead of the gut (or heart), whatever that means. The meat I have been working with is still a confusing mass of undoneness and charred edges.

       100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl was one of my favorite readings. Each essay was poignant and insightful, like a ripple revealing the scales of fish underneath. Her essay on perfection in playwriting really struck me, for she says, “Perfection stills the heart,” and because of this, there are more plays developed than done. I think my desire to do things “right,” or “uniquely” has made me timid, but sometimes it does feel like if I just do whatever, there is no aim. I realize that I still need parameters for play, something that I can set my mind towards, something that is flexible enough to accommodate improvisation but still have the structure to ground me. I know that this GISP is heavily focused on our process, where the act of throwing is more important than the bullseye, but currently I feel like that there is no bullseye, and the throwing of the dart is just into a dark abyss, where I’ve forgotten why I was throwing something like a dart in the first place. I am just hoping that just in doing small things that feel somewhat right, my phrases will write themselves (as said by Sarah Ruhl), and thus these phrases will lead me to an end.

I also really enjoyed Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. There is a sense, a love for stillness and solitude that arises from reading these series of letters. The cry for a caressing of the inner self and the acceptance that not all that can be said is what was meant to be said really touched me. Through these past weeks, it’s been more and more clear that uncertainty is something that is held in high esteem, and I guess it’s something I’ve been struggling very hard with, sometimes even unconsciously. Though the attention paid to the inner self draws me, what does it mean to pull from the inner being? What even is that inner thing that is referenced? Is it something that only shows itself when it is ready? Or is it something you have to be able to train yourself to know? Or is it something that rises forth when you least expect it? I’ve been trying very hard to listen to myself, but maybe the listening should be less and the feeling more.

However, I found comfort in the words, “Then, when they come, you won’t ask whether these things are good or not. They come with a voice of your own, a piece of your life. A work of art is good if it rose out of necessity.” Perhaps I need to push myself to the brink, when I have to make to get everything out. Also, “the natural growth of your inner life will ultimately guide you toward other insights” gave more concrete words of comfort than other phrases of encouragement. I quite liked the idea of seeing everything as a gestation and birthing, letting each impression and feeling come to completion, waiting for when clarity will be born. However, in that waiting process, I don’t think it should be passive waiting. There needs to be nutrients and nourishment for such feelings and impressions, and thus there has to be engagement on the parts of the makers.

And so, from these readings and my current understandings, I will attempt to engage as deeply and curiously as I can, in whatever form or fashion, until understanding and clarity can be born.

Week 2 Process: Yidan

After last week’s crit, I started off with putting into practice some of the ideas I had with Arduino and glass. Here is a video of that exploration. However, I felt a little unsatisfied with how I was approaching the mediums with an image in mind, so I tried stepping back and grasping the feeling through charcoal sketches and a little mind-map of sorts. I also tried going out and taking photos of instances of light that conveyed a sense of what I was interested in capturing, primarily a focus on the idea of gaps, liminal space, and the transition between one thing to another.

Week 2 Response: Yidan

This week has been a very tumultuous ride, but the readings have been fairly encouraging in approaching the doubt and confusion that’s inherent in the creative process.

The TED Talk Your Brain on Improv talked of the changes that happen in the brain when we are thinking creatively: the frontal lobe that controls our self-monitoring and reflection is turned off, whereas our region for autobiographical expression is turned on, which makes sense. However, as it was brought up during our reading discussion, this study was looking at a very specific type of creativity, which was improvisation in music and rap. These kind of thinking and approaches are fast-paced compared with the pace we see in our GISP, which is filled with much twists and turns, slow deliberations following fast ones and vice versa, and a constant flickering of reflection and expression (among many other regions I’m sure). However, this attempt in pinpointing something relatively unknown, the form of creativity, is intriguing given our next reading, “Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable.”

Instead of irritably “reaching after fact and reason,” as said by John Keats in this New Yorker article, Woolf celebrates darkness, the unknown. Much of this article shares quotes by writers of the acceptance of the unknown, in addition to discussing notions of optimism, “confidence in what will happen,” despair, “confident memory of the future,” and hope, “knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans.” I think thus that hope is what drives the source of inquiry in artistic practice, that we are not in a place or time that coincides with our plans and thus we grope forward into the darkness in search of something that might or might not exist. As such because we are not blinded by our memory of the future, we are then open to more possibilities, which enriches the exploratory process in putting things that might not appear to have any relationship together. It is like a sea of constantly shifting meanings, where our conceptions and beliefs are swirling around and around, sometimes sinking, and sometimes rising. I wonder if this need for certainty comes from an evolutionary need, where, to ensure survival, we had to make very concrete choices or predictions. Thus, the creative process is very much an internal struggle, within our past selves and the selves waiting to be born.

Looking at the past week, I think that though I’ve tried to be open to uncertainty, I was still colored by the end product that I’ve envisioned in the beginning of the process. Rather than wrangling with its visual form, as I have been attempting, I realized that I needed instead to wrangle with its symbolic form. Instead of fixating on what the piece will look like or what the audience will feel, I now turn to questions of what meanings will arise from my piece, either through the choice of material, process, or visual metaphor.

Our reading of Chapter 5 from Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention was very insightful into the ways that produce “flow,” or a kind of “automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness,” and possible reasons for my lack of it. For myself, I envision flow as a time when I have internalized enough of my motivations and understanding that I can start trusting my instincts, when I am able to arrange and play with factors in my control to reveal unexpected combinations. In the reading, one of the properties for producing flow was the balance between the challenge and skill. For the past few days, I have felt very overwhelmed, either by my lack of knowledge of technical craft in glass and Arduino, or in my understanding of mythic structure. It feels like I am constantly trying to keep up to something that gets faster and faster beyond my line of sight. Because I had only a feeling to go on at the on-start (thus unclear goals), I was having a hard time vocalizing or explaining what exactly was it I wanted to make. Although, during this past week, I think I’ve narrowed the parameters for my project, but there are still some unknowns.

In “The Case of the Colorblind Painter,” an artist of over five decades suddenly loses his ability to see color after a small car accident. However, his desire to express through making was never lost. What is this drive that pushes us beyond our limits, even when we are seemingly at the end of our rope? The descriptions of his first few weeks, with adjectives of “perverted,” “alien,” and “empty” filling the scene, speak of the unimaginable discomfort and disgust experienced by Mr. I, the artist. After he had painted an apocalyptic sunrise through his new worldview, however, there was a reconstruction of his sensibility and identity. It is finally through this transformation that he was able to cope with the reality of his situation, and in turn, escape the limbo world for his newly ordered one. What used to be so horrific and nightmarish was able to become something fascinating and beautiful. Though the process of an artist is not as extreme as coping with achromatopia, this reconstructive phase is informative. What this shows is that though we might take our views to be absolute or fixed, much of our perception and way we approach the world is intrinsically tied to our mental projection of the world, preventing us to sometimes accept what is reality (which is debatable as well, I recognize). This causes me to raise questions of what I’ve projected onto the Glass and Computer Science departments at RISD and Brown. Could my discomfort in Computer Science stem from an inherently biased idea of what Computer Science is and can do? What about my perceptions of Glass? These are the questions I have begun struggling with, questions I still not yet have answers to.

Week 1 Process: Yidan

I played around with light this week, getting familiar with what types of shadows and reflections I can get. What really surprised me were the mirrorized surfaces; the shadow has a bluish tint and the reflection captures the surface’s undulations! Since most of my experiments were with light and movement, check out my channel for more experiment videos!

Week 1 Response: Yidan

       Resonance. How do we find it, how do we create it, and how do we maintain it? These were the questions I struggled with in conceptualizing my project. However, in Everything Sings by Dennis Wood, I caught just the tiniest whisper of something that might have contained the answer. Before, if someone were to mention a map to me, I would’ve thought it only as a functional object. There was no narrative, no poetry in its body. It was just a tool that people used in orienting themselves for their next destination. However, I started taking these associations out of the traditional cartographic context (the necessity for orientation, for detailing locations, for delineating space), I saw that there is actually a rich field of meaning that can be created through maps. When Dennis Wood described his process for creating his map of lamp lights, I finally began to understand this. The traditional notions we have for objects and conventions are really just in our heads. Similarly, in a TED Talk I saw recently by Jay Silver, when we step back and reevaluate common objects for their basic properties, it is then that we can begin to construct our own ways of interacting with and understanding the world.

       But of course, this is all easier said than done. While On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz, did help me reconnect with my inner child somewhat, it is harder to often do consciously. A lot of System 2 has to come into play, introduced in the reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which needs conscious, concentrated effort to call into action. However, due to our conditioned responses from the fast thinking System 1, it is easy to see that often times we don’t even realize we are missing an opportunity for reevaluation. That is what I fear. What if my intuitive trust in my own System 1 overrides the chance for my System 2 to kick in? Thus, the question then turns to the structure of the process, or even the environment, that can foster active looking and re-looking, for if we are realistic, this kind of heavy-lifting in thinking, this forced second-guessing, can’t be on all the time. However, that is still something I’m trying to figure out myself. Is the structure something I put aside time for allowing System 2 to come in and wrestle with? How about working in an environment with like-minded individuals? These are just a few of the questions I’ll be testing out in the GISP, figuring out the best combination of System 1 and System 2, or working beside others or completely alone.

       In the reading Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, the concept of a strange loop was perfect for how I am feeling at this stage of the GISP. Because I am trying to approach and understand something very new (like many of the GISPers), my level of rules to handle certain processes is changed: to use Arduino, a new material, but also maintain characteristics of a “living being” for my concept, the way I approach the material glass is altered. This continues again, with the higher level (with the alteration, my previous notions of “living” is questioned), feeding a cycle of revisions and confusions until I feel like I’m running nowhere. This tangling is unavoidable, as this is part of the painful (but also somewhat delightful) process. I hope that in this mess, something will untangle soon.

       As for my personal readings, I only focused on The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell for this week. He weaves a powerful account of the meaning of myths, how they arise from the realization that suffering stems from mortality. Thus, myths are “clues to spiritual potentialities of human life,” how they activate the energy of the “stuff” that line our interior system of belief. I thus realized how rites of passages are such monumental landmarks in the lives of people with such cultures, and it is through the creation of these systems of meaning that such events can even lead to changes in thought or behavior. That is what the culture of myths can create, leading to a sense of community. Although, what really excited me was the saying that mythology was the song of the universe, “music we dance to even when we cannot name the tune.” This captured exactly my feelings and motivations for my project: an inexplicable yearning to sing something I didn’t know the words to, to create resonance. The way to do so, I believe, will have to count on the specificity of my song. Much like what Dennis Wood had said in Everything Sings, a neighborhood, the transformer, takes what is public, common, and everyday, and turns it into something personal, something real for those living inside it. As an artist, the concept is very much the same. Everything sings. I just have to figure out how to listen.