Michael's Personal Space

This week in class we had our personal space assignments. One of our classmates volunteered to be the documenter of our projects. He did a good job capturing our projects and making them public. His project was about interviewing people on the meaning of art. It had three part with three different people. What I found to be a little distracting was all the background noise. It didn’t make it seem so professional because people kept on interrupting the interview. If those scenes would have been cut off, then the interview would have looked more professional and serious. The good thing was that he got peoples different views on the meaning of art. It was interesting to see what their responses are because everyone has different views on art. If I would have been interviewed my response would be that art is everything that we do. it doesn’t have to be on paper or sculpture to be called art. It is something that comes within all of us and we express it by different means of media. Overall his project was awesome because of the time it took to make these interviews and his positioning of the camera. Good Job Michael.

URL's to the projects

For this entry in our blog, we have to provide URLs to our past projects we did in our class. The first of our projects is the pun. For my pun I printed out a picture of a bee and put it next to my knee. The purpose of this was to make the pun say beanie. Most of my classmates thought it was bee’s knee’s which could have been a possibility but it wasn’t what I had in mind. My next one is the nexus fake article where I wrote on their website that Los Angeles was a pollution free city. My act of kindness was about the time I paid for our family hotel room on our trip to Disneyland. The Altered activity in a public space featured me going to Jack in the Box and eating like I was in a fancy restaurant with plates and a cup and fork. My confession was that I love to sing in my car in order to escape the daily stresses of life. For my sequence and narrative project I documented my mom in her work day and in her resting day. It took place a Saturday and Sunday and it was done by photo. My alternate persona was that I pretended to be an injured person and I wore a cast for 48 hours. Finally my personal space project was that I made a 2-way walk way and it made the students walk in one direction and the others in the opposite direction. It affected their personal walking space.       http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/04/art-documentmy-work.html PUN
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/04/work-progress-confession.html  CONFESSION
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/04/random-act-of-kindness.html RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/04/dinner-plate-introduced-in-fast-food.html ALTERED ACTIVITY IN PUBLIC SPACE
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/04/los-angeles-no-traffic.html DAILY NEXUS ARTICLE
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/05/sequence-and-narrative-project.html SEQUENCE/NARRATIVE
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/05/alternate-indentity-injured-person.html ALTERNATE PERSONA
http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/06/weekly-documentation-personal-space.html PERSONAL SPACE

Weekly Documentation: Personal Space Project

For this weeks documentation, I would love to talk about my personal space project. The way I went with thinking about my topic was that I wanted to do something that involved the students of UCSB. I thought long and hard and finally realized my new idea. This was perfect because it defined personal space. I was to create a 2 way walkway in which the students and staff would be like cars and could only go in one direction. This affected their personal walking space by going into the designated area. I would do this by building some poles to separate the lanes. I went to the store with my dad and we both created them. I did my project in front of the Counseling Services center and it was a success. the students were getting involved and asked me what the whole purpose was. I told them and they would agree with my response. Some people would even stop to go into the right lane and one van had to go around. As you can see by the pictures, the van went around and the people were going in the right lanes. They also show my project in its entirety. I would love to deeply thank my Dad for his help and time to help me with my project. Thank You Dad.  I sure hope to continue making more wonderful art work in future classes.   

Art Show Week 10

For this weeks art show, I went to see the artist Tobias Putrih. Tobias Putrih is an artist that works with contemporary sculptures and he is very interested in the history of cinemas and history of utopias. He mostly deals with drawings and with those drawings, he makes small scale models. I think this is so cool because being able to put your thoughts and imagination onto a paper is one thing, but to actually bring them out in sculpture form is simply amazing. This is similar to architect because first he draws the model and then makes it in real life. They can be small things or they can be big rooms. He showed us pictures of his drawings and then showed the result, which was a room type project. It looked exactly like how it was on the paper. He also uses computer to figure out the shapes he will use in his art. He measures the width and length of the blocks he will use and sees how many he will need. I think this art show was really fun because it reflected what I wanted to be when I grow up, an architect. It is cool to see an artist is using this as art, which it is.

Overcoming the Concerns and Fears of the Class

In the beginning of the course we had to write an entry about our concerns and fears about the course. My first concern was that we didn’t have a paper to write. Now I am super happy we didn’t have one and that we had art projects instead because I have other papers to write. Another concern is that I would miss a daily entry but I didn’t. I might have gotten one or two in late but I never missed one because I had that thought in my head everyday of this quarter. I was also scared that my work would not be so original to get a good grade. I have learned that originality comes from within someone and I f you really focus, you can make a creative and original art work because that is what I did this quarter.  I also got a better understanding of what art is and how we can use it to create good art. Over this course I overcame all my concerns and fears and made successful art projects that surprised my classmates. I didn’t know I had this potential to create good art and know I know I can. I plan to keep on using my artistic values to make more art.                      

http://waltermendez.blogspot.com/2011/03/concernsfears-of-class.html  Concerns/Fears

Class to take with TA

For this entry we need to write about which class we would prefer taking if our TA would get hired. Out of the three options, I would be more interested in signing up for the Spectacle Praxes course. This course seems very interesting because it would talk about spectacles and how they relate to art. Spectacles can be very small to very huge. Also what I found interesting is that it will talk about spectacles worldwide and not just in our country. We will see how they perform their spectacles and who is involved with the presentation. I like how we would be involved in workshops to create a spectacle of our own. I like how we would do a major spectacle at the end of the year in which the whole UCSB community is invited to come. This gets me excited because it would be similar to the events we did in Art 7a with the flash mobs and personal space projects where we did spectacles that the whole community saw and participated in. I would love to be a part of this course because our fabulous TA Desiree would be teaching it. I hope she gets hired to teach at UCSB.

Personal Space Projects: DAY 2 Favorite one

Today in my section, we went to go look at personal space projects around the school. I didn’t go today because I had already gone on Tuesday. We met up in normal class and then went out to go see the projects. They were really interesting and fun. We saw fortune tellers and a protection from the apocalypse. When we got to the ucen, many of our classmates were there to show their projects. My favorite project was done my classmate, Maxwell, in which he was giving free massages to random people. He had a bed and a couch and started to give massages to random people who wanted to one. The funny thing about this is that he had a sign that said “want to be touched” above his big massages here sign. Our TA even got on the bed and received a massage by Maxwell. What really blew me away is that he had a bed there. We asked him how he got it there but he wouldn’t tell us. The cool thing is that it was a bed from the dorms. We were all just surprised and wondered how he got the bed there. Overall, the projects were amazing and I hope to join another art class to do more of these great projects because they are so much fun. J