I liked the visit to FFV a lot because I like light contrasts very much. Here was a photo I took in the dorms and it was my favorite:
So seeing their works sort of resonates with me and I like their concept, especially the garden project, where people can interact. It was like I was part of the magical world and it looked amazing.
For my final project, I decided to make a prototype of a game using simple geometry.
I was in the metro, and I thought about all the events we’ve been through, and I found that the metro was something that linked all of them together. Not only classes and studio visits but also sightseeing and many other things. So I decided to use the metro as the scene and make an escape-room-ish game. The train has 6 sections, one for each lateral thinking technique, and the last one for a conclusion. Once the player enters these sections, the player will see a room. There are various pieces of artwork on the walls of the room (from visiting artists) and some of my own makings as well, and the player will see prompts in the escape room. The player will need to find the clues in the room and solve a puzzle related to the section’s corresponding lateral thinking technique. When the puzzle is solved, the player will see that they are in a metro section and they can advance to the next section. Once at the last section, the player will be in a special section where it showes my understanding of lateral thinking, and the game ends. While in the game, the background music is one of Merche’s tracks recorded during her performances, because I like her music the most of the three artists.
First section: Alternatives
There are five paintings in the room and a password door. The number of digits of the password was unknown. Near the door was my making to the alternative project, and thevpassword should be 1234 because the faces of the drawing was unspecified so it is open to interpretation and alternatives. The paintings are from The DAM Projects, by Robert.
Second section: Why
For the second section, the player will see a table with many things on it(I only put what mattered on there for simplicity of a demo), including a cellphone. There will be a back ground noice of a woodpecker. The player can only leave the room when the noice is stopped. The player will have to find the phone and shut it off because the woodpecker works off of electromagnetic waves. But when the player can see the phone they can also scroll though it, just for distraction.
Third section: Reversal
The room is empty. There is no way out except a cliff behind the player. Whenever the player looks at the cliff the screen will show a line telling the player if they jump they will die. But the player will need to jump to exit the section because in the line it also gives the hint that the house wants the player to get out.
Fourth section: Analogy
Once the player enters this section, a line will appear on the screen saying that cooperation is key. Then there will be 3 blocks with different names written on them. The player will need to use the blocks to reach second floor to get out of the section. I chose cooperation because it was my topic for the analogy exercise, and also cooperation is the process of building up off of different people’s ideas.
Fourth section: Random stimulation
For this part I generated random words and I got chopsticks and cards. Then I thought about how I can use these elements to create something related to ramdomness. I then thought about using chips because they are commonly used with cards. A random amount of chips will be on the table, and the player will draw five cards and try to use chopsticks to make mathematical symbols to make the five cards calculate to be the number of chips. Then if the player finishes he will get a flower and then will need to go up to a dummy saying “dance with me”. The player will dance and the scene evolves.
Last section:
In the last section, the player will be in a small room. If the player goes directly to the front, he can push the wall and walk until the wall cannot be pushed anymore. That is to say if only use vertical thinking, it might get you nowhere. If go left and push the wall, the player will also get nowhere because it is not guaranteed ghat lateral thinking will work if only going in one other direction or only use one technique. Only when the player goes right and pushes it to the top AND also pushes frontward to the top that the player will find the exit. That is to say a combination of lateral thinking and vertical thinking will most likely get you where you want.
Viewing his works, is was just amazing to see how he managed to combine his love for nature and the environment with technology and art. The piece I like the most is woodpeckers piece. It “visualizes” something that surrounds every minute that we never notice but plays a crucial role in our lives. I like the idea very much, but i doubt the pe
ople in the neighborhoods this project was displayed in will enjoy it as much.
Before this visit, I alwasy thought abstract art is just random things put together by the artists in hoping someone would see tge order and meaning behind them. But with Robert’s visit, I finally see the concrete things behind an abstract work. In one of his works I belive I saw a man suffering with illness and his mother was beside him to take care of him, even though it turned out to be created from his head. Even though he was quiet and nervous, I liked hia works very much.
When I was on the plane here, I was very excited, but a little bit unsettled by this course. All my life I took myself as creative (and that’s even what I had as a main topic in my personal statement for my university application), and I didn’t know what to expect. Would it turn out that I wasn’t creating at all? However, I looked forward to it at the same time because I knew that it would help me towards my goal as a game designer.
On the first day, everything went smoothly, and nothing was unexpected, until the exercise of drawing in circles. I was a bit pressured and kept worrying about things like what if other people drew things that were so much more creative than me? What should I do exactly? What if the things I drew were so stupid that everyone laughed? With these worries, my head wasn’t functioning clearly and I just doodled random things on these circles. Eventually, everything turned out fine, and I was sort of relieved. It was after all these projects that I gradually realized that no one is going to judge my work, and that lead to a more relaxing creating mentality that helped me a lot when coming up the ideas of the makings.
During the experience, the things we learned and the things in the readings weren’t that unfamiliar. The more we go into the topic of creating and lateral thinking, the more it appears to me that it is things that I frequently use when coming up with ideas for these different projects. I used or came across most of them in my life already, but I never systematically thought this might be a complete topic for creative thinking. The course helped me categorize and sort out all these lateral thinking techniques that can be used for creative processes so that the next time when I want to create something, I will have a completely organized way of thinking about the topic and obtain creative outputs in a more efficient way.
Another part that I greatly enjoyed was the makings of all these makings (hmm…). These exercises helped me think of topics that I never thought about before. Every time a making was made, it was like I obtained a puzzle piece to an unknown puzzle waiting for me to solve. In the end, all these makings make sense together and that’s my topic for the final project. It will be about fighting oppression and incorporating some of my ideas about time, but I will not go deep into it here.
The artist visits are also a great part of the course. It is very enjoyable getting to know what other people are doing as artists and to understand their concepts and ideas when they are creating projects. It also sorts of answered my questions about how artists make a living because there is the stereotype that artists are all broke. It was also a good experience that when I found out some other artists go through the same creating process as I do, I felt a sense of belonging as someone engaged in creative design. I wouldn’t call myself an artist yet, as I believe there is still a long way to go. But I believe eventually I will get there.
One last thing is I am amazed by what an amazing city Berlin is. I have been here three or four years before, and it didn’t amaze me like this time. It was when you actually go into the arts realm and start noticing the art around you that you begin to realize how artistic this city is. I went to many places that I couldn’t even count, and I still feel I didn’t actually get to know this place well. The history is embedded in the walls of the buildings, and each graffiti piece tells a story of its own. It was such a great experience, and I can’t believe it will come to an end soon. I also like the food here. I am such a fan of meat (especially pork), and the local cuisines along with the coffee and their chill atmosphere are just relieving. The weather was usually great, and it was nothing like Abu Dhabi. I really liked this place and I hope I will get to visit here sometime in the future.
Even though I suspect that I have adhd, I have some personal experiences of entering the flow state. It only happened when I was doing game development. It was like with a blink of my eyes and the whole afternoon was gone. It was very pleasing and productive, and I really want to get into that state again. But every time I want to focus like that I always find something I could play with, and it’s very hard for me to concentrate. Or maybe it was because the things I have been working on are too difficult. However, the state is unquestionably a state I will strive to achieve when working.
The visit to field gave me insight on what artists cooperate with large companies and where creative ideas of corporations come from. I also like the fact that they are uaing generative ai to make art pieces. I believe technology is a trend and it is not wise to stand against it. The fact they are using their artistic creativity together with ai to generate things previous generations could never think about is just fascinating.
This reading reminds me of a news I saw recently. An art major student in a university made a capstone that was literally cardboard stacked up together. People started judging it on the internet and the student couldn’t handle the pressure so started explaining the work. I think that is unnecessary and it breaks the art piece. I believe that a big part or an artwork’s value is it’s openness to interpretations. Different people may interpret it differently. Judging it and saying it is not art is also an interpretation, which is part of the artistic value it has. But if the creator comes in person and describes it, all the interpretations collapse into THE interpretation and it reduces it’s artistic value.
After seeing these words I immediately thought about a recent social issue in China. Since we were young, as males we were educated to be nice to women and to be a gentleman, and I have no problem with that. However, in society, this somehow leads to the consensus that men are responsible for paying for everything when it comes to relationships. Another issue is that when couples get married, a majority of places still have the tradition of the man’s family giving the woman’s family a large amount of money. With this background, many women in China use relationships to gain money. This has been a social issue for quite a while now, but recently a guy’s death brought this issue to the surface.
There is this boy who boosts other people’s accounts for a living. It was a tough job and he was one of the best in this industry. However, the salary was still not high and he had worked 14 hours straight for many years. He had a “girlfriend” who he had been dating online and they met in person a few times. That girl claimed she wanted to open up a shop, and the boy was very supportive and gave her money to do that. He believed that it was his responsibility to do so, and for many reasons, he transferred over 100,000 dollars (700,000 Chinese Yuan) to the girl and lived on a 1.5-dollar delivery of every meal. But when the boy decided to marry the girl, this girl was reluctant and then wanted to break up with the boy. The boy tried hard to make it work but the girl refused very firmly. The coy couldn’t take it so he jumped off a bridge and died. The girl showed no sadness or regret and a few days after that, she started posting Tiktok vids trying to bait other men into this.
This seems like it has nothing to do with these two words, but this event was so influential the government and the police had to come to investigate. The male society wanted this to be set as a scam, but the result of the investigation was that the girl was not guilty of any sort. There was an official police investigation post on this and it was full of biased words, trying to divert the people’s attention and lead the people’s fury toward the boy’s side, where his parents and sister wanted the whole society to know about this and leading cyber violence. But it also proved that everything the boy’s sister said was true. Also, many official news websites posted videos saying that the boy’s family wrongly accused the girl, but when the public found out about the inappropriate use of words, they deleted the video and changed the title. Everything that was official was leaning towards the girl. But there were some other cases before that were found by the people, one example was a girl and a boy broke up and the girl couldn’t take it and committed suicide. The boy did nothing wrong and there were no strange transactions or such, but the court judged that the boy’s family should give the girl’s family 200,000 Chinese Yuan because of “ethical issues”. Also, the majority of recently certified judges were women. Not being sexist but I don’t believe there is no correlation. This led me to wonder, is there truly justice even in the court of law? There was direct evidence showing the girl lying to get money and it wasn’t a scam? Where would the total loss of credibility lead to?
The picture is a balance tiped to one side, and on that side is a judge’s hammer. On the other side is the crowd protesting. If that is the only thing on the drawing it would be fine, because public opinion cannot replace law when it comes to judgement of cases. However this hammer has been manipulated. Then is this justice?
I belive that talent is a very important part when it comes to fighting for the top achievements. I believe talents come in different ways, and it’s different for every realm. For example, for sports, the talents may be genetics, may be body parameters(such as height, leg ratio, etc.) These talents determine that people with them will have a higher starting point, and if they work hard enough, their upper limit wil also be higher. But if for other realms that mostly requires brain functions, there are the talents that they might learn things much faster. With the same amount of time they can learn more and able to comprehend the knowledge better. These talents exist, and there are plenty evidence that supports this. I believe that we need to see those talents, face them, and admit we might not be as good as someone in case of talent. Then it is up to you to decide whether go down this path.
