Author: Ben Nguyen

I really like her attitude of just ‘screw it, we ball’. A lot of her stuff kinda make sense, even if the end product sounds a bit off to me. But the important thing is that she always seems to be on the pipeline of if it’s cool, she will do it, which is great for someone working in the art industry. I’m excited to see what other out of pocket ways of producing music she thinks of in the future. Other than that, she seems really cool and down to earth, which is a bit in contrast to what I expect of people who do ‘wacky’ art stuff.

Above is our work from the first making exercise. Below is 5 alternative meanings:

• A teddy bear that has been torn and stitched up a lot of times, being placed next to a doll house and some decorations.
• The sentient house is projecting its ideal place, with a supreme human and a garden
• A retired football player, who is heavily injured, visits his childhood home
• A person having fun at a sports carnival in the countryside
• A titan on its way to wreak havoc on human civilization

From the second idea, below is 5 things I could make:

• A 4 page comic
• A short story
• A short film
• A fictional news article
• A stop motion video

Below is the comic that I have made

The emphasis on restructuring information is interesting. In a different class, I learned about remixing, which is also about rearranging existing information in one’s mind in order to utilize it in more work. The focus of the education system in vertical thinking is also quite interesting, as a similar problem was identified also in another class I took: there is not enough emphasis on connecting the information learned, which in this case would be similar to connecting some of the tunnels in the book’s analogy.

Otis’s improvisation was great. I didn’t know improviser could a role/thing someone do, and it’s cool that we got to hear about some of the thought process behind his improvisation. I love his advice of having small building blocks (soundbites in his case) ready whenever he wants to create something so he doesn’t have to start from scratch.

I really like how Kermit relates creativity to optimism. This idea that we are creative because we believe that it will lead to something positive is a very nice way to put day-to-day creative pursuits. For example, I wouldn’t try to figure out new ways to pack my luggage without believing that one of those new ways are going to be more effective (i.e., allow me to pack more stuff). It is also true in artsy stuff: I probably wouldn’t continue to work on a random drawing if I didn’t believe that the final result will be something cool to look at.