Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Bleorg expresses its own sound: A spontaneous, often whimsical performative action that may result in a visual product. The practice began for me when I stopped being able to produce "artworks," questioning my own processes and feeling that extended projects were never enough to encompass my range of experiences and imagination. For a long period, I accumulated a frustrating number of inactive ideas.
My frustrating inability to express myself in a manner I found satisfying compelled me to create a largely undocumented body of circumstantially inspired, transitory activities. These ranged from installing art projects in extemporaneously appropriate public places, reorganizing elements around me, interacting with natural processes and people.
In his discourse of liminoid and liminal experiences, anthropologist Victor Turner refers to the boundary our society draws between work and leisure activities. As technological advances engender a faster-paced environment and more demands on time, I've observed that 'work' burdens increase. Contemporary studies define poverty in terms of well-being, intellectual development and health rather than income. As a student, I found myself living in abject personal poverty as I struggled to balance my time under the traditional work/leisure dichotomy.
I have found in my studies and travels that Korean culture provides an alternate mindset: Merging work and leisure by making everyday actions meaningful and interactive. I see the blogging domain as a movement towards personally (and, due to its public nature, collectively) acknowledging the value in everyday or so-called "mundane" routines/rituals. For example, two VT students, from the sparse resources of their dorm room, may show how eating cereal and milk could turn into a humorous celebration (http://filebox.vt.edu/users/mfeid/vtpage/milkmovie.htm).
From personal experience in the blogging world, I've noticed the drawback to blogging as its uncensored realms start to become a weapon of mass distraction. I realized there must be something wrong when I find myself chatting online to a friend sitting ten feet away. My idea for Bleorgs (and the other blogs) came from the desire to redirect and rekindle attention towards appreciating the imaginative potential in real world events, from minute details to human interaction by consciously documenting creative scenarios and their byproducts. I hope for my blog to be a forum for interaction rather than introversion. At the very least, even if my work remains in relative obscurity, my blog will provide me incentive to document my process.
This "art" method is, in part, helping me overcome my crippling personal inhibitions by incorporating expression into my daily experience. Knowing my works will last about as long as it takes for a natural occurrence to sweep it away eases the burden of failed expectations and dormant ideas that accumulate in every passing moment with the accusatory voracity of unpaid parking tickets.
What makes a painting, photograph, digital image, print etc. more "art" than a newspaper article that might be discarded and trampled in the street? Gathering information and the experience to write an article appears to me an art process, where information is as comparably ubiquitous as Coke and potato chips. I am curious as to the effects of projecting improvised, impermanent actions into an easily evanescent digital network.
My frustrating inability to express myself in a manner I found satisfying compelled me to create a largely undocumented body of circumstantially inspired, transitory activities. These ranged from installing art projects in extemporaneously appropriate public places, reorganizing elements around me, interacting with natural processes and people.
In his discourse of liminoid and liminal experiences, anthropologist Victor Turner refers to the boundary our society draws between work and leisure activities. As technological advances engender a faster-paced environment and more demands on time, I've observed that 'work' burdens increase. Contemporary studies define poverty in terms of well-being, intellectual development and health rather than income. As a student, I found myself living in abject personal poverty as I struggled to balance my time under the traditional work/leisure dichotomy.
I have found in my studies and travels that Korean culture provides an alternate mindset: Merging work and leisure by making everyday actions meaningful and interactive. I see the blogging domain as a movement towards personally (and, due to its public nature, collectively) acknowledging the value in everyday or so-called "mundane" routines/rituals. For example, two VT students, from the sparse resources of their dorm room, may show how eating cereal and milk could turn into a humorous celebration (http://filebox.vt.edu/users/mfeid/vtpage/milkmovie.htm).
From personal experience in the blogging world, I've noticed the drawback to blogging as its uncensored realms start to become a weapon of mass distraction. I realized there must be something wrong when I find myself chatting online to a friend sitting ten feet away. My idea for Bleorgs (and the other blogs) came from the desire to redirect and rekindle attention towards appreciating the imaginative potential in real world events, from minute details to human interaction by consciously documenting creative scenarios and their byproducts. I hope for my blog to be a forum for interaction rather than introversion. At the very least, even if my work remains in relative obscurity, my blog will provide me incentive to document my process.
This "art" method is, in part, helping me overcome my crippling personal inhibitions by incorporating expression into my daily experience. Knowing my works will last about as long as it takes for a natural occurrence to sweep it away eases the burden of failed expectations and dormant ideas that accumulate in every passing moment with the accusatory voracity of unpaid parking tickets.
What makes a painting, photograph, digital image, print etc. more "art" than a newspaper article that might be discarded and trampled in the street? Gathering information and the experience to write an article appears to me an art process, where information is as comparably ubiquitous as Coke and potato chips. I am curious as to the effects of projecting improvised, impermanent actions into an easily evanescent digital network.
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