I have to say that I was delighted with the first projects. The assignment was to focus on “time” as a subject and follow these rules:
You have a container to fill.
The size of the container is one minute.
Anything outside one minute will be considered outside the container.
You must fill the container with three different types of time.
The range of responses to this prompt were wonderful. I asked that the students not introduce the projects, but simply present them. The hope was that we would not be prejudiced to look for certain things, but see in the projects perhaps thing unintended by the creator. It was interesting that after the initial hesitation to start there seemed to be avalanche of people wanting to present next – either out of the excitement of sharing or just to get it over with. Some were performative – using a student or students in the piece, some were sculptural, gestural, textual, filmic, etc. Some relied on an audience, some did not. Some were loud, some messy, some quiet and contemplative. In discussing the project briefly after the presentations a number of students said that they had wrestled with what to choose. They were struck by a number of options, but had little time to mull them over. This is kind of planned into the pieces – which is why I gave them only about 48 hours to work on the question.
I liked the roughness of them – some were more polished than others, but the quality that these were ideas just formed and corralled together for the purpose of the presentation focuses more on process than product. I suspect if students were given the time to revise these pieces they might see more in them or magnify certain aspects of them. Perhaps some ideas will carry over into later projects.
What struck me about the projects as a whole is the sort of idiosyncratic quality displayed, like there was a kind of private vocabulary at work in each piece with deeper meanings built in. I would be curious to discuss this more on Tuesday. The other part of why I didn’t want introductions is because of the need to explain this private symbolism. But even if as an audience we are not completely aware of all facets of each piece we still get something out of them. They can be moving or funny or terrifying while still on another level masking more complex ideas. While we can discuss this in class, with 30 students it may be difficult to get to all of these depths. My hope is that is the purpose served by the blogs. Here students can go into more detail on intent and outcome. But I do realize that some will be more detail oriented than others – so questions in class may be able to draw some of this out.
Like the Gen Art class I was really struck by the cleverness and inventiveness of the answers to a complex question. One of the things that I like about open-ended questions is that there is plenty of room for a multitude of ideas. Unlike an assignment where I may be looking for a specific answer or a range of answers presented in a specific format, these questions enable the students to draw ideas out of their own experiences. They all know about time, but they all experience it differently. I’m looking forward to the discussion on Tuesday.
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