Kevin Creating Every Day

To review, my I290 Viz Narrative final project will attempt to tell the collective story of my current and ongoing side project, {Create every day.}  The premise is simple, create something every day (while being very flexible on the something.)  The philosophy and significance of the project comes from a desire to demonstrate how with discipline we can recognize that we are never too busy to pause and engage in a personal, creative activity each day.  Through my final project, I hope to “tell the story” of not just my creations but also the evolution of my creative self/approach over the course of the semester’s 90 or so days.

For today’s prescribed assignment, I took a crack at displaying my first 25 creations in a digital medium and making careful choices (some may seem simple, but I think they can have a powerful effect) for the format/medium based on topics we’ve discussed in class.  You can view the current gallery at http://kiwimonk.com/ss2/ .  I feel like I have the luxury (?) of continually developing my new content each day and the challenge of framing past content into the same story as creations that will be made towards the project deadline.  I won’t be able to fully decide on the types of images I take and then create all of my content according to specification, rather my work will show a natural progression of my ideas (and maybe even skills gained in class!)

The Steiner article brought up two concepts that registered with me.  First, was the notion of double ordering, how in a narrative there is a combination of the sequence of plot events and the times of the presentation of those events.  I feel I face two challenges with relating this to my project, the narrative of each creation (some do use multiple pictures in an order to show how I did something, which I wasn’t able to incorporate into the current medium–a flaw) and the overall narrative of the entire project.  With regards to this concept, I think it’s incredibly important to force a viewer to move through the creations linearly from 1 to n (hence the current format).  Steiner also discusses the repetition of characters and how they can create a narrative from unspecific events.  This lends itself to how I compose/document my creations.  I’ve started to include some repetition of certain tools (such as cardboard cutouts of myself) to characterize how these ideas are coming from a single person, me.  Also, I think there might be something with the consistency of environments (such as a back drop) or where pictures are taken that could be used to reinforce my story.

MacDougall comments on the physical presence of the maker in the piece (he’s talking about film).  But in my work, I have up until now I have (mostly) avoided including my face in the creations (though my hands are included from time to time).  My goal is to infuse my presence into the work without a campy direct illustration of me.  Macdougall distinguishes between how images can allow for this immediate connection with the creator unlike text and also mentions knowledge by acquaintance vs. knowledge by description, which has some applications to whether or not to include captions with my work.  So far, I am opting to exclude direct captions to focus on an interaction with the product over a forced (though potentially witty) account of what is present.

Finally, in Sturken’s piece, the topic of Representation comes up early and the distinction between reflecting meaning and producing meaning through images.  The example of still life with food is given and how the illustrations of food are constructed in a way to represent more of the “world of the food.”  This has me thinking about what aspects I might want to better represent during each one of my compositions.  For instance, one of my creations was a hollowed out book.  Thinking back, I may have been able to better represent some other qualities such as the stickiness of the glue, the jagged imperfections of each individually cut page, and the long late night required to make it happen.

My project is a continual work in progress (literally), and taking forward some of these concepts (and further relating to other readings) will be a valuable exercise to help stir some thoughts that will aid me tonight and future nights while I’m creating.