Assignment 1: Self Portrait) Response #1 (image credit: Keri Smith)
ASSIGNMENT:
You are being asked to “connect the dots” in a way that establishes a self portrait. As preparation for your final written and visual project, this assignment is one part visual and one part textual:
Draw a "connect the dots" that can act as a self portrait for you. It need not be a literal self portrait but it should reveal something about you.
Photograph or scan the connect the dot into the computer so you can upload it to the blog (if you can't do this before class, let Jeffrey and I know so we can help you see how to do this before or during the blogging session).
Then, compose a one-two page essay that clarifies and examines HOW this is a self portrait.
What do you need to include? The first paragraph should approach a definition of self portrait--this should be your own interpretation of portraiture and may or may not glean from definitions elsewhere. At the end of the first paragraph, introduce your own portrait (a title might help). Then, proceed to DESCRIBE the portrait (materials used, process employed, visual appearance, personal resonance, etc.). Describe in details and employ sensory descriptions. Because DESCRIPTION SHOULD NATURALLY LEAD TO ANALYSIS, work to analyze the work for what it reveals about you, how you reflect on it, and what the work means.
You could consider other self portraits you admire and develop a lineage between your portrait and your idea of portraiture; you could discuss the difficulty of portraiture (or the value); you could reflect on portraiture in our contemporary, digital moment; and you could develop a conversation about knowing the self / discovering the self / inventing the self / etc.
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Assignment 2: (Character Portrait) Response #2
ASSIGNMENT:
Write three postcards in a character's (a character from your book) voice (persona writing).
1st Postcard: What does your character “see” in his/her immediate landscape? What is familiar and unfamiliar?
2nd Postcard: What/who does your character miss and how does he address what is missed?
3rd Postcard: What does your character wish for? What compels him/her to write a postcard to someone/something?
Visual Option: Actually create this writing in postcard format. Consider making a mask to read the postcards out loud “as” your character.
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Assignment 3: (Simulation) Response #3
ASSIGNMENT:Who are you as the audience in this book?
Instead of staying a passive reader who is “receiving” and not engaging with the text, assume a mental state and write within it. In this instance, choose a sense (taste, sight, touch, hearing, smell) and write about your book using only that sense and its limited sensory language. (1-2 pages). If you are using sound, consider giving a soundtrack to the text. What can we do with the other senses?
As always, you have the option to give this visualization or, in the case of other senses, some kind of instantiation.
RHETORICAL QUESTIONS: How does this limitation generate or limit writing?
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Response #4
When reading your text, have you come across any lines or quotations that you would include in an essay about the book?
Select a quotation from the text and put it in the center of a piece of paper—write out the quotation and surround it with a circle. Branch out from the circle with “five” legs and address these five questions in your mind map:
1. Is there any link to the ideas, themes, and overall message of the text as a whole?
2. What is the context of your quotation—who said it, when, where, and why?
3. Can you link it to the world at large?
4. Key word or words: what are the key words and what do they mean?
5. Instinct: why did you have an attraction to this quotation? What was special about this?
This should look like a spider diagram and should help in writing a 2-3 page essay where you introduce the text through the lens of this quotation.
What is the subtext? Does the context matter or change the meaning? Is this controversial? Was it controversial when it was written? Are there differences in point of view?
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(Theory Application) Response #5
“If reading is the process by which reality is consumed: writing is the very production of that reality.”
ASSIGNMENT:
Pick a theory like time, gravity, poverty, etc. and apply it to your text. How is this theory “made real” by the writing?
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(Visual Writing) Response #6
“There the self is reshuffled by the voices of shadows, family, tradition, history, chance. These are the witnesses we need to wrestle and interrogate, the better free ourselves from them. All those familiar (or unfamiliar) witnesses swirl about you, as you think or write; memory enlarged or diminished by whatever happened or could have happened. And just as those voices eventually become you as you write, you , in turn to make your story meaningful, become apart of those voices, a closing of the circle that is endurable only as you write.” --Irene Vilar
ASSIGNMENT:
PALIMPsEST
Select a section of your text that fills half a page of paper when typed out. Type it out and double space the text. In the “space between” the text write your own writing (will you relate to the text? will you make a cacophony with the text?) See example of Peter Petrasek writing in response to Kant.
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Wearables: Response #7
Since part of writing is communication and we have been experiencing the communication of our texts and each other, how can the “bodies” in our books express themselves?
Options for Brainstorm:
Look at the clothing in your text (expected or imagined clothing or discussed/illustrated clothing). What is the relationship between clothing and the “self” : or how this relationship is
exposed by our relationship to clothing – memory, practicality, sex?, communication –what do high-heels represent? an old sweater? the Sari? Talk about armors, insignia,labels. Clothing as protection etc. Clothes – why do we wear clothes? How does the“evolution” of clothes relate to social changes? What are the politics of dressing?
ASSIGNMENT: How would you enable your character(s) to express themselves through a wearable? Write about the wearable and try to draw, make, or visualize the wearable component.
Example WEARABLES:
Jenny Chowdhury's portable cell phone booth
Rebecca Horn
Natacha Lesueur
Giuseppe Penone
The Hug Shirt
Thorsten Brinkmann
Pricked: Extreme Embroidery
If the whole is equal to the sum of its parts than our "whole" cannot be reached until our parts are gathered and acknowledged. This blog will act as a collection, a gallery that records our “parts and particles” (our particulars) in an effort to connect the dots; to endlessly connect the dots.
