Appearances

I am well on my way to recharg­ing my bat­ter­ies after a week at the fam­ily ski cabin. No, I did not go ski­ing.  The weather was warm, even rainy at the begin­ning of the week, and the moun­tain has haz­ardously crowded later in the week.  Besides, I was busy brush­ing my dread­locks out. That’s right! After five years of hav­ing dreads, I have taken them out. While in many of my favorite set­tings, I fit right in and enjoyed it, other set­tings left me feel­ing uncom­fort­ably uncon­ven­tional. As I gain more con­fi­dence in myself, my views, and my goals, I have come to see that wear­ing cer­tain asser­tions as fash­ion state­ments just wasn’t help­ing. One of my gay male friends puts it as, “find­ing your shim­mery nail pol­ish.” When he worked in cor­po­rate set­tings, he would con­form to the unspoke dress code except for his clear, shim­mery nail pol­ish. Those who needed to see it did. For every­one else, the hint fell below the radar. So, for the sake of being more stealth and hope­fully more effec­tive, I’ve shed the dreads.

Decom­press­ing from school work has given me the space to pat myself on the back a lit­tle. This past semes­ter, I took on video edit­ing, sound design, and flash all for the first time. While I in no way mas­tered these things, I am arguably pro­fi­cient in them now. Not bad for three months of work.

In addi­tion, I am mak­ing progress with iden­ti­fy­ing my strengths, weak­nesses, and pro­cliv­i­ties. As I men­tioned in my last entry, it has become appar­ent that my visual design skills are pretty weak. I undoubt­edly do bet­ter with cap­tured media (sound, pho­tog­ra­phy, video). Given a blank slate with infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, I am lost for what to do visu­ally, even though my con­cepts tend to be strong. See­ing this weak­ness helps me under­stand my inter­est in doc­u­men­tary. With sound, pho­tog­ra­phy, and video, there are blank slate equiv­a­lents that I have repeat­edly shunned. I got through two semes­ters of stu­dio light­ing for pho­tog­ra­phy classes last year with­out ever using the stu­dio or plug­ging in a pro­fes­sional light.

Oh, snap! I just fig­ured out that I avoid visual plan­ning! That means I’ve got to put myself in sit­u­a­tions requir­ing visual plan­ning to get over what­ever fear or stub­born­ness I’ve set­tled into. One fan­tas­tic oppor­tu­nity for this was the final project for my video class. We had to pro­duce a 5 minute sci­ence fic­tion piece using real actors. Scary, right? Once I actu­ally got a script writ­ten and my actors together, I man­aged the sit­u­a­tion sur­pris­ingly well and had fun.  BUT! but, I didn’t fol­low through with visu­ally design­ing the aes­thet­ics of the short. I can’t really get away with this any­more, even with doc­u­men­tary work. It’s a joke to think that I am not actively gov­ern­ing the aes­thetic impact of the work, as much as I might like to focus on other things.

Even if I bust my ass get­ting the visu­als in line, I will still most enjoy the inter­per­sonal and con­cep­tual parts of media work. This is what I want to work in pro­fes­sion­ally. The Design and Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment is a promis­cu­ous amal­ga­ma­tion of artis­tic, design, and tech­ni­cal prac­tices. I am begin­ning to under­stand how an artis­tic process dif­fers from a prag­matic one, and how they inform each other. The brand of irra­tional­ity and spon­tane­ity that hap­pens in art school feels wholly for­eign to me, so much so that you might have heard me on many occa­sions express blan­ket dis­sat­is­fac­tion with art. I remem­bered that really I love art when I walk by a flow­ing paper cutout wheat­pasted on the street, or go to a party at some erratic and exu­ber­ant ware­house space in Brook­lyn, or read some snaky, snarling poem the last owner of my used book left in pen­cil on the fly­pa­per. I am learn­ing to appre­ci­ate dif­fer­ent artis­tic process as I watch is at school, even if it doesn’t feel native, and even if I can’t explain why it all feels so different.

What I fall back on is my prag­matic self. I like gath­er­ing the infor­ma­tion, fig­ur­ing out what the prob­lems are, and mak­ing a con­tri­bu­tion toward fix­ing those prob­lems. I do media work as a fun way to engage with diverse sit­u­a­tions and remain close to the ground. Now that I under­stand that, I can look for a bal­ance by strength­en­ing the visual lan­guage. I read How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer by Deb­bie Mill­man last week, which con­sists of inter­views with promi­nent graphic design­ers. Many of the design­ers showed con­tempt for the impact of their own work out­side of the field of design. Who cares how com­pelling a book cover is if the book is crap? I think this same con­tempt is what has me being sloppy with mak­ing things aes­thet­i­cally effec­tive, from my hair to my pho­tographs and web­sites. But, appear­ances mat­ter. Lots of peo­ple have made amaz­ing things hap­pen with appear­ances pro­vided they’ve got the con­cep­tual strength to build on.