NIXEDMEDIA™

For my second portfolio, “Portfolio 02: Practice,” I was tasked with learning about and creating works that address an issue that is close to my heart. The issue that I centered my works around was the African American experience, which I chose because discrimination towards African Americans has always had a strong presence in America and still maintains that presence in today’s society. This is most evident in the numerous, recent police shootings, which too often resulted in the unjust killings of African Americans with little-to-no consequences for the officer or officers involved. I believe that this is an important issue to focus on because, despite all of the efforts made during the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans are still not truly equal in this country. Working with this issue also allowed me the opportunity to continue adding to a series I began last semester, which also dealt with the African American experience. Throughout the process of making this portfolio, everything seemed to flow with connections between my theorizing and compositions and my focus issue coming very naturally.

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“Aural Mode Workshop” is my informal writing from an in-class workshop for the Aural Mode project. The notes are my responses to a set of five questions that dealt with any concerns I had about the composition, the reaction I anticipated from my audience, and anything I hoped to gain from the workshop. Ultimately, the goal of these questions was to help me self-examine aspects of my composition, such as how the final product turned out, and the effectiveness of choices I made. View Aural Mode Workshop.

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“Theorizing the Aural Mode: Listening: More Than Hearing?” is my response to Jennifer Stoever’s introduction to Sonic Color Line and Steph Ceraso’s “(Re)Educating the Senses,” which both discuss the immense role listening plays in shaping people’s experiences and perceptions. Reading “(Re)Educating the Senses” made me realize that, while it seems imply hearing with the ear, “listening” is actually a full-body experience that is enhanced when you acknowledge the other senses involved. As well, prior to reading Sonic Color Line, I never fully acknowledged that racial bias is based just as much on how a person sounds as how they look. When I started writing this piece, I was not entirely sure of how to approach. Initially, I was going to write about the texts separately, but I felt like that would have missed the point of reading both together. I eventually decided to talk about both texts simultaneously, making relevant connections between the respective content presented. This was kind of a difficult process because I still wanted to include references to external content that I have seen or experiences I have had. Ultimately, I incorporated fewer references in favor of comparing the two texts. View Theorizing the Aural Mode.

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“Still Dreaming” is the title of my Aural Mode composition, which was a spoken word poem accompanied by an instrumental. The poem is written from my perspective but addresses issues that affect all African Americans, such as police shootings, lack of equal representation, and having limited career options. The poem’s title, “Still Dreaming,” is a reference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” and signifies that the dream still has not completely come true. This seemed like a fitting idea for the aural mode because, as emphasized in another reading for this portfolio, Language and the Making of Place by Yi-Fu Tuan, words have tremendous power and spoken word is an art form that is driven by this power, emphasizing vocal elements such as intonation and inflection. Making this piece provided some interesting challenges, with the main obstacle of trying to arrange an instrumental around a vocal clip because I have only ever worked the other way around. Although it was frustrating at times, it felt amazing to have the final product turn out the way that I originally envisioned, and I will definitely try to find some use for this piece in the future. View Still Dreaming.

 

“Refining & Complicating” is my informal writing from an in-class free write. The prompt for the free write was “How do Karen Springsteen and Edward Tufte’s texts help us redefine and complicate our understanding of the visual mode?” In my response, I talk about the authors’ impacts separately but as I wrote, I realized that there was a connection between Tufte’s emphasis on the importance of a presenter’s appearance during a presentation and the way the Guerilla Girls used the gorilla masks to hide their identity and direct attention towards their art and message. I later incorporated this connection into my response to the visual mode readings. This informal writing also influenced the idea for my visual mode composition, which was originally going to be a static image. View Refining & Complicating.

 

“Theorizing the Visual Mode: The Importance of Presentation” is my response to Karen Springsteen’s “Visible Guerillas” and Edward Tufte’s three selections, “Envisioning Information,” “Visual Explanations,” and “Beautiful Evidence,” which ultimately address the impact presentation has on the way an audience receives and interprets a message. After reading Tufte’s “Visual Explanations,” in particular, I became more aware of the fact that the success of a presentation is just as dependent on the presenter’s presence as it is on the actual content it presents. As well, Springsteen’s “Visible Guerillas” made me realize a couple things: 1) the best way to present yourself can be to not present yourself at all and 2) social change does not have to be a completely serious matter, which are evidenced by the Guerilla Girls’ use of gorilla masks to conceal their true identities, and their more playful approach to addressing sexism in the art world. Writing this response was a little easier than the one for the aural mode because I decided to talk about the two readings separately, including any external references I had for each, and then having a paragraph where I talk about a connection that ties them together. Because this strategy worked so well, I continued to use it for the remainder of the creation of the portfolio. View Theorizing the Visual Mode.

 

“Little Rock Nine Time-Lapse” is the title of my Visual Mode composition, which was a time-lapse video of me drawing the Little Rock Nine and Daisy Bates, with an accompanying song. The video shows the full (sped-up) process of me completing the drawing, from tracing over the reference image I used, redrawing details to make them exact, to finalizing it by inverting the colors to match the style of the series I previously started. The title for this piece is more direct because the Little Rock Nine were a pivotal group in the process of integrating schools during the Civil Rights Movement, and I thought that highlighting them would be better than any other name I could have chosen. Making this time-lapse worked well for the visual mode because watching a drawing, or any other type of image, come together is fascinating and I think that showing the process as well as the final product was more enjoyable than just showing the image. This time-lapse was quite a new experience for me because I have never drawn nonstop for almost two hours before or recorded myself draw at all. I think that it is definitely something I want to try again, most likely for other drawings that I will add to the series. View Little Rock Nine Time-Lapse.