Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Symposium Friday

Our symposium is over and we are reflecting this week on everything that took place. We had a great turnout of graduate students from other schools; MICA, Cranbrook, Bowling Green, CalArts and Art Center. It was great to get to know them and find out a little about other graduate programs.

Flickr set

Friday night we began the Symposium by exploring the "Continuum of Control", where we positioned Designer Control at one end of the spectrum and User Control at the other end. Each graduate student picked at point on the spectrum to represent. I was way over on the User Control side with Punk Zines.
















We had examples ranging from the ultra-modernist Massimo Vinelli to Starbucks customizable gift cards to user generated content in fan films, like Troops.

John Bielenberg from Project M gave a really interesting talk about Project M, Rural Studio, and "thinking wrong."

We finished off the night with a collaborative light-writing exercise conducted by myself, Alberto, and Gretchen. We each approached this project from three perspectives. I was interested in a collaborative experience using analog and digital tools. I'm fascinated with how these different tools interact with each other and how users interact with them. I will have a video to post soon.

2 comments:

Alannah said...

You know I went to the Rural Studio this past summer w/ the African students, right? It was so cool.

Marty Maxwell Lane said...

That's awesome! I guess I didn't realize that you went there. We will have to discuss over xmas...