Final – All Night Part 2

For an earlier project in this class, I filmed myself staying awake all night long. I knew it would be challenging to stay awake all night, but I hadn’t expected additionally challenges like the discomfort of being watched. I was satisfied with that assignment, but felt like there was room to expand on the idea to better showcase the effects of sleep deprivation over a given period of time.

With this iteration of the idea, I added in hourly check-ins to assess what I’m doing and how I’m feeling. At 11:15PM and every hour after, I asked myself 1) how I was feeling; 2) What I was doing, and 3) what I want.

Overall, even though I stayed up later this time than the last, this felt less challenging than my first attempt. I think that the break every hour to asses my conditions helped split the night into increments. I also think it helped to be as busy as I am, since this time I was racing against deadlines versus last time when I had a couple of low-stress assignments and the rest of the time was spent just trying to be awake.

Map of my Influences

I find that most of my influences are things, experiences and places

• Nature

• Plants

• Rave culture

• Public services

• Ambient/new-age music

• the Mojave Desert

• Y2K era design

• Postmodern design

• Midcentury design

• Techno

• the Central Coast

• Susumu Yokota

• Ben UFO

• Brutalism architecture

• Socialist modernist architecture

Assignment 4: Social Practice or Intervention

Living in a major city like San Francisco comes with heightened challenges regarding income, housing and personal space. Compared to rural areas and even most other cities, living in San Francisco is very expensive and yields a smaller living space relative to cost. Not everyone here owns a car due to the recurring costs of ownership or simply because their lifestyles don’t require personally owning one. Those who do own cars however, own not just a mode of transportation but also an extension of their personal space. Within the rules of parking, you are able to leave your car whenever you feel like or wherever there is space. Parking spots are anybody’s, until you’ve parked your car there and then it’s all yours until you move. Cars are small enclosed spaces of relative privacy and security. Given the constraints of city living, I propose that people start treating parked cars more as an extension of their homes for an additional few square feet of living area.

With this proposal I would use a series of projectors mounted from my apartment building. These projectors would shine down at the street, illuminating open parking spaces. With this illumination, messages would be displayed advertising the opportunity to turn a given space into your own place. An ad campaign would encourage car owners to treat their cars more as an extension of their personal space, a place you can simply store things or a place you can spend time. Car seats could be modified to reorient backwards, turning the cabin into a seating area for five to hang out, work, relax or eat.

Xfinity – Life + Art, Art + Life

For this project I began with an old, non-working computer monitor. I found this monitor on the sidewalk like I find many things abandoned by my neighbors. I encounter “free piles” every day which consist of trash and occasionally some nice or useful things. Other people pass by the same piles and either ignore them or frisk them for scores. Outdated E-waste is particularly characteristic of these piles as technology which is no longer useful is often denied even at thrift store donation centers.

With this project my goal was ultimately to make pedestrians on my street take a second look at this disposed-of monitor with an introduced element of confusion. I wanted to do something subtle that would render the object further useless, but in a way that doesn’t draw extra attention and doesn’t lead to any resolution. The fate of the object has not changed but it has forced some who have walked by it to give some small consideration to it.

I achieved this by stenciling the Xfinity logo onto the display with spray paint. I chose the Xfinity logo because it is widely recognized, related in some way to how the object is traditionally used, and features no counters in its letterforms which would complicate the stencil.

After painting the logo onto the display, I left it outside my apartment where I could observe how the public interacts with it from my window. It was left in the same place I found it, where it sat for three days without any interest taken in it. Fewer people walked past than I expected, but of those people there was a much higher degree of interaction than there was before the logo had appeared. Why would someone tag the Xfnity logo on it, or maybe they wondered why Xfinity themselves added it? But for why?

Endurance

This piece titled “All Nighter” is a show of endurance not only in relation to the day-to-day duties I hold has a student and employee, but also in regard to my physical wellbeing and the challenges associated with staying awake amid an overwhelming workload.

On the theme of “Endurance,” I filmed myself working for seven hours between 9:30PM and 4:30AM. I had an immense amount of work and homework to catch up on, so I used the time to try and endure the work to completion.

As time went by, it became increasingly difficult to stay focused. I expected the work I was doing to be a trial of endurance, but had not accounted for the additional elements of stress provided by being filmed the whole time. Everything I did was documented. I knew every second that my self and my actions would be presented later on. It felt like being watched, as if your boss was observing your actions over your shoulder for an entire shift.

EXERCISE 1: Early Conceptual Art ideas

For this exercise, I recreated a piece I made according to Lewitt’s 24th Sentence on Conceptual Art: “Perception is Subjective.”

I created the original piece, a halftone-processed pill capsule with broken rings in front of it, about two years ago. Since this is the first Art class I’ve taken, I didn’t have many previous pieces to work with. I am a Design major, so my portfolio consists mostly of functional designs and few standalone creative pieces.

Although I thought I had completed it on time, I had not actually finished the assignment as I misinterpreted Lewitt’s words. I mistook “Perception” for “Perspective” – Perspective being an individual’s point of view versus Perception being the way the individual interprets and process what it is that they’re viewing. So, my approach was to shift the piece’s perspective to show the capsule from straight on rather than from the side, so that the broken rings appear to the side rather than as an overlay. 

After realizing my mistake, I sat with the conflict for some time. As I had never created a piece of conceptual art before, I had no idea where to go. I discussed with friends and roommates to figure out how a piece of pre-existing art with no assigned meaning could grow into something conceptual. Then it occurred to me than I was perceiving the piece from my own perspective. I wasn’t just looking at it, I was perceiving it. Because I’m viewing it from my own perspective with my pre-existing knowledge about the piece, Lewitt’s words are true. Perception is subjective, and anyone else who looks at it from their own perspective can perceive it in different ways from me. 

Although it may not be a work of complex, thought-provoking conceptual art, it did help me understand conceptual art better.