Now I find myself in this dilemma…

because both visual elements are meaningful to this process and I’m not sure if it is possible to bring them together in any sort of coherent way. I wish there was a way to print onto the vinyl, with a transluscent image. I mean, maybe this work can only exist in a digital environment because that is the only way I can construct the layers that I wan to make. And maybe it then becomes bigger than a computer screen by projecting it onto a wall. Certainly the issue of building layers with physical materials is much, much more difficult than building them in Photoshop. But there is something about the manipulation of the materials that is central to this process. The problem solving associated with material properties is helping me engage with the texts. Probably because the problem solving is a stimulating mental activity, and now that stimulation has been linked to an active processing of representing the texts. I know what my next step is. I am going to print out these images from the New York streets and see what happens when they become the background to the hand written notes and spirals. It’s all rather mysterious.

I find myself with these two visual elements…

the nautilus spirals and the images from atop the Empire State Building. What I have now is one large sheet (30″ x 20″) with my mapping notes from the scholarly texts. I have another layer of notes to map, these would be the connections to the scholarly texts that I am making to my research. I really don’t see how I can also talk about Plainsong, the novel for this course, at the same time. Maybe. That would add another layer to the whole piece. Really, the literature that I have connected with is the Kafka story. I wonder if I can find it anywhere? I can pick it up tomorrow from Koerner Library. Okay, that is going to be my literary text for this activity. That is where the images from New York come in. And the sense of vertigo I hope they evoke. Or at least the sense of dislocation.

It strikes me now…

that what I am talking about is what teachers experience when they encounter ICT in their teaching practice. There is nothing in the sociocultural history of education that can bridge previous educational practice to an ICT infused society. What was once held as sacrosanct is rapidly being shown to be irrelevant. At the same time, new issues, and needs are arising daily, in how we, as a society, as citizens, as social beings, make sense of the social, cultural, pedagogic, political and philosophical presence of ICT in our lives and in education.

As I worked through the Greene text…

I remembered my experience of being perched on observation deck of the Empire State Building, grasping the railing as I looked down on the streets below. Like Karl Rossmann, I had never been to New York before. I was enthralled, appalled, and awed by the scope of human industry. I took pictures of the street below. As I read through Greene’s article, these photos came to mind, as potentially useful literal and metaphoric representations of the relationship between background schema and learning, and that vertiginous sense of disorientation that can happen in educational contexts, when we are learning something new, that is wholly unfamiliar.

What I am wrestling with right now…

is that my original design idea did not work. In the Greene article, she uses a story from Kafka, “Amerika” and the character Karl Rossmann, to discuss the sense of dislocation that occurs when one’s consciousness has been formed in one situation, and then that consciousness is re-located without a bridging mechanism, into another situation. I have the first layer so mapping done, from these texts, and I used the nautilus spiral as a drawing element in the process, as a way to pause from the readings and locate my own thinking, my own expanding notions of what I am capable of understanding. Until this moment I couldn’t explain why I used the nautilus spiral or the Fibonacci numbers as a way of grounding my own experience of the texts, but that is what I chose to use, and that is what helped me orient myself to new perspectives. In a sense, the spirals, numbers, counting and drawing served as my own bridging mechanism to help me re-build my own situatedness, my own acquisition of ideas and language.

The confluence of studio and scholarship…

I am working on writing a one page interpretation of a collection of texts. This has to be 200 words maximum. The texts I am working with are from Maxine Greene (1971), Gerald Edelman (2004), Varela (1991) and Suzanne de Castell (1996). My task is to link these texts to my research into the formation of resistance in teachers in relation to ICT. When I put it this way, that’s a lot to pack into three paragraphs. My method for constructing the one pager is to work in my studio, mapping the texts onto clear sheets of vinyl acetate and then extracting my interpretation from the mapping process and from the object. I have set myself a dual task, but the elements are related and informed by each other, so I am trusting that I will find my way through this. I want to make a visually stimulating object, as well as a coherent, articulate page of writing. I am finding the use of visual methods and materials stimulating, that I am integrating the texts at a deeper level. I am also intellectually and emotionally engaged in the process, I have this enthusiasm, verging on compulsive obsession, to work through the texts and produce these two pieces.

self portraits continue…

I shot these self portraits as I was trying to figure out *how* to shoot a self portrait with my Nikon D70. As I was working with them, to use them in the knot drawings, I posterized the colour. Later, I saw how interesting crops of the images worked, as glimpses, how movement is implied by the unconventional composition of the portrait. As I was thinking about these images, I want to try another juxtaposition, of portrait and knot, as a layered construction. I have no idea how this would work.

Apr 22 2008

The oranges mixed out from the centre to create a radiating darkening. The crayons are coming through, the portrait sits to the right of the knot. The knot was a real puzzle, because I approached it as lines traveling in relation to each other, rather than shapes. The writing was done as an interleaving to the colour process. It seems I have a lot to write about, as I work through the piece. The thinking that goes on! The feeling that comes with focusing so intently on puzzle solving is very satisfying.

Apr 21 08

I am most happy with today’s effort. I started with a self portrait, drawn with white pencil crayon on the cream paper. I really couldn’t see it until the wash went down, and then the drawing popped to the surface. I was mixing the ink and changing the colour as I moved through the piece, writing journal notes with each pen or ink mix. I have this lovely Italian glass pen that I am using to write with the ink washes. The ink barely registers. The writing itself is a stream of consciousness, whatever is on my mind at the time. Once again, the crayon surfaces at the end of the project, waxy and bright. I’m playing with the fibinacci number sequence as a way to determine what goes where, when. I’m also playing with my intuition, allowing my ‘gut’ feeling, or impulse to guide where the next mark goes, what pen I pick up, how I mix the ink. I am very satisfied with this page. What does ’satisfied’ mean? Well, I feel good when I look at it. That’s the best I can hope for.

Apr 20 08

These sketches are preliminary to taking this work to a larger format, a sheet of 22″ x 30″ watercolour paper. Just as the original sketch ideas were done on 5″ x 8.5″ graph paper, these sketches are on 11″ square paper. The paper is a smooth manila, just happened to have a stack of it pre-cut and decided to give it a try. This piece was an experiment with combining ink, titanium white acrylic paint, and crayons. I tried to bring in a self portrait with oil pastels, but it didn’t work. Luckily I was able to rub it out. I loved the way the wax crayon resists the ink wash. I also love the feeling of the ink soaking into the paper as I draw, or wash the surface.