Getting Involved

Sometimes school can get tedious. Little things can build up and then suddenly you find yourself a grumpy mess, complaining to anyone who will listen and wishing you had never come here. I think it probably happens to everyone.
It's definitely happened to me! I'm from a warm town in Texas, and coming to college here was a big step that has made it hard to adjust. What I've found though, is when I find someplace to belong, a group or person to depend on me, I enjoy my time here more easily. Being a VPA Ambassador has really helped my bad moods! When you volunteer to tell people why you came here, and tell them over and over again, it definitely helps you remember! Being a senior has been difficult thus far, and although I am ready to graduate, (so ready!) I can still be incredibly thankful for everything I've learned up here. I have accumulated a few groups of people who I also feel a responsibility towards, and that kind of thing forces me to feel like I belong. It's a good lesson I hope to remember from now on: If you don't feel like you belong, make it belong to you! It also kind of goes with the idea of decorating your room. I always set aside a couple days before classes start to make my room look exactly right, because if I don't feel like I own it, or if it seems at all temporary, I won't be able to relax or work there. It gets difficult sometimes, but it is possible to have a home here. And "going home" is exactly what I look forward to everyday!

Back from Neverland

I have been neglecting yall! I apologize.

So! I'm a senior! Woot! Being a senior is very exciting. And stressful. I love it.

Computer Art has TWO NEW faculty members this year, and they're here for good! The first is Annina Ruest - she's awesome. She graduated from MIT and specializes in the field of physical computing (my new love) and she has been a great help to my partner and I for our Fall senior project: *drumroll* Experimental Peripherals for the Music Rhythm Genre! We are making different games that will try to trick the user into playing a music rhythm game, a la Guitar Hero. So far we have a Duck Hunt and Yoshi version, a.k.a. Duck Hunt Hero and Yoshi Hero! Next comes Trombone Hero and Text Hero. Should be awesome.

Transmedia is a-changin'......Our old professors, Sean and Diana, are gone and now we have Andy and Annina. It looks good though, they both are very qualified and have high expectations of us - exactly the way it should be. Andy is more focused on animation and compositing, and next semester he's teaching a class on visual effects! It's teamed up with the film majors and it looks like some fantastic stuff will come out of there. The program is shifting to Maya and RenderMan too! That's good news because Lightwave is not the industry standard and many more studios use Maya. It looks like Computer Art is headed in an exciting direction. More updates soon!

Transmedia Overdrive

Recently the Transmedia juniors threw TROM, the Transmedia Prom. It was the second annual dance and they had it in the lighting studio downstairs in Shaffer. This is the kind of thing I love about Transmedia. Lately most of the computer art majors have been living in the basement, alternating between sleeping on the couches in the classroom and working in the lab. It's a funny thing, but I find myself staying in the lab too late even though I'm not getting any work done. But it isn't really a problem, because I love the people I'm around. We have fun with each other and help each other out with critiques and it's a great atmosphere, all the way until 7 AM. It helps that I live a long way from campus and that it still gets cold at night though. : ) At Trom I was around the rest of the Transmedites and some of them expressed regret at not spending more time in the lab. It's true! In college I've found you can be really great friends with anyone if you spend enough time together. So doing all your work at home is just not as much fun, and it kind of destroys what college is, at least for me. I am still getting a lot of work done, and this is revealing how little of a personal life I might be having, but besides that, the lab is an important feature of computer art, and if you're a computer artist don't neglect it!

So this is my last blog entry for awhile. My plans for the summer are still up in the air, but my plan all year has been to spend the summer in Austin, TX. I have been applying to internships sporadically and only through craigslist, which is a mistake but I'm falling behind anyway. That's a bad attitude, sorry. I've lost count of the places I've applied to, and only heard back from a few. Also, the friend from home who was planning on living with me decided she couldn't afford it and had been offered another job, so now I'm on my own. Imagining living on my own in a bigger city than I'm used to and without a car or a guaranteed plan is getting intimidating, but I still really want to do it. It's like a push to grow up which I feel I'm in need of. My parents are still going to be paying for a lot of my plans, and god bless them they refuse to influence my decision based on that. I've always taken my time at everything, not really last minute but always slowly, like getting my driver's license at 17 and applying for colleges in January and getting my first job at 20. I'm in no hurry to have responsibility, but now I realize that experience is a significant thing that one needs before they graduate college. I don't know what I'm expecting, but I do know I'm ready for some more responsibility/independence. Finding a paid internship to even apply to is proving very difficult and job hunting is the worst kind of fun there is, so it will be hard not to get discouraged through this "quest." I won't give up though. I've been telling people all year my lofty plans for the summer and I know I'll feel like I've gone back on my word even though no one's judging me because of it. I've given up on feeling regret, and so opportunities lost are not going to be my problem.

I just attended a couple Capstone presentations, because I'm in the honors program and will have to do mine next year. One of my old friends (from freshman year) is graduating early and I got to see her presentation. Capstone Projects are a requirement for all honors students, and they have from their sophomore year to start working on them. We can ask for funding, and some people use it to go abroad or get equipment for research or anything they can think of. It's an awesome opportunity and some people come up with fantastic ideas. My friend is a photographer and she sent disposable cameras to kids all over the world, and made a website cataloguing all of them. She's still working on it but the presentation was awesome. She's one of those people that has huge ambitions and has been able to really make thigns happen for herself. In the summer of freshman year she got an internship in London! She's almost intimidating but she really will have an impressive life, and it's cool to have ever known her. Here is the website: http://thecameraproject.com/ you should check it out! You can search for photos with tags - a good one is "oops."

Sorry this last post was so random, and I want to keep this up later on, but I had a lot to say and they were all kind of related to future ambitions, friends, and how I spend my time here, so I hope again that this was interesting!

Happy Summer and Good Luck

Crazy Times

It's the end of April! That means too many shows to count let alone attend! Tomorrow night is the opening of the Responsive Environments show, for which my group has been cleaning and assembling all morning and will be far into the night. Syracuse has their "Third Thursdays" which is a big sweep of art openings and Connective Corridor events on the third Thursday of every month. What's unfortunate is that during my class's show, my professors have their own show, the grad students have their MFA show opening, and all the galleries have cool openings. And since I'm never downtown (car-less) it will be hard to not go to these while I am downtown for our show. All of us have plans to sneak out though. : )

I would say the best thing I've learned from being a junior and going to shows with faculty and grads is that I'm not as young and inexperienced as I've always assumed. I have important things to add to the conversation, dad gummit! (Dad Gummit is something my mom says all the time. I don't know how to spell it but rest assured it's only Texas slang for dang it.) Anyway, feeling equal has proven much more useful than feeling inferior. I know a lot of people don't ever have this issue, but for a shy and quiet girl, being brave enough to overcome an inferiority complex is kind of a big deal. But believe me, if you're shy, there's no reason to be! Just walk up and talk to them. For me, I deal with artists, and it's been a revelation to me that these guys are in the same boat I am, just a little further down the river. They still struggle with concepts and connections and getting technical things down. I'm about to be a senior, then a grad student myself maybe, and even though a lot can happen in two years, it's not that long of a time. Especially when you consider the grad students you're talking to yourself. Now I am not advocating disrespectfulness, which I think is a thin line people cross often when joking around or arguing a point. But then everyone deserves respect!

Yall please excuse my didacticism. I know I sound a little preachy sometimes. ; )

The Fruit Awards!

Last week the junior film majors put on a fake awards show in Funk 'n Waffles. If you don't know what that is, you'll find out soon enough. I hadn't seen any of the juniors' works since Fall sophomore year, so I was excited. There are always a few people who make interesting stuff, but I was happy to be surprised by a few. Justin G did a documentary on a live bait vendor who owns the worm vending machines you find outside sometimes in Syracuse. Justin is always funny so it was cool to watch. Scott P always does narrative it seems, and he's a really good story-teller. I'm no critic so this is just an update. : )

The coolest thing is they set up the show themselves. They have the film faculty's help but it's mostly just a group of juniors who want to make stuff for a reason (a show). It gets redundant if everything you make just goes into the Portfolio file on your desktop, you want to show it off! Afterwards we went out to get dinner with everyone and we started talking about involving more than just film majors. The computer art organization, ECARO, tries to get shows or cross-major critiques going, but it's hard and barely anyone comes to the meetings. It would be great to have us all combine again like we were freshman year and put something together, an event or contest or anything, just to show what we can do. Things like that are great motivation for students, because otherwise it's just too easy to leave things unfinished.

The Fruit Awards was great, though. They had fruit tied in gold, silver and bronze ribbons and handed them out. Phil was the "winner" and he made a video with a speech, which really was like the video of Hansel in Zoolander. "The winner is PHIL.......PHIL........PHIL is the winner..." with the camera zooming in and out and a dumb smile glued onto his face. It's also great just to see the senses of humor in Transmedia. It's such a crazy field we have to be able to laugh at everything and ourselves.

African Drumming

Last Thursday, I got to play drums for the Shen Wei Dance Company! Shen Wei was doing a three-week residency here to work on a piece with his dance group. My drumming group, the West African Drumming Ensemble, was asked to play for their classes! The West African Drumming Ensemble only consists of the teacher, Biboti Ouikahilo, my friend Cameron and me. Let's talk about that for a while. Two of the ensemble members are abroad this semester, but since the group's start, in Spring 2007, there have only been maybe 4 consistent members. It is a pity and Biboti is getting discouraged. But it is because the faculty in charge of the Ensemble have not made us an official extra-curricular group with the school.

One of the major things I've begun to learn from being at school is that if I want something done, I have to do it myself. I think so many of us tend to push off responsibilty to people with authority or people who are nice. It's taken me a couple years, and a power outage on one of the coldest days of the year, to realize that I need to stop pushing responsibility on other people. I need to stop expecting people to take care of things, especially when it's not in their direct interest. I don't know who exactly is supposed to authorize our West African Drumming Ensemble, but I know I can try to get it done myself. Hahaha, I'm an adult now! I don't have to wait for the grown-ups to take care of things.

And African Drumming is fantastic! If you're at all interested in music, this is the coolest thing to do. Biboti has tons of stories from growing up in the Ivory Coast and he loves to answer questions. He loves teaching, dancing, and playing drums. We don't use music in the traditional Western sense, we remember rhythms with our hands and bodies, and eventually we can match them to their names and automatically play them whenever Biboti plays the introduction on his Dundun drum. We play djembes, shakers, and other kinds of drums the names of which I have no idea how to spell. Sometimes he brings in his xylophone, too. And we perform a couple times each year, in full African costume.

But playing for Shen Wei's dance class was something completely different. Shen Wei counts! haha, Biboti, Prof. Bill Cole and I were there to play, and we don't count. Biboti didn't know exactly what to do, but we found one rhythm that we could play quiet enough (the room was not designed for loud african drumming!) and we could change the tempo to match the dancers' combinations. It was mostly just fascinating to watch the dancers. They get to move however they please, but also follow the very specific motions Shen Wei is teaching them. It was intimidating to be the music for the choreographer of the Beijing Opening Ceremonies! We didn't play much, and Bill Cole had to leave early with his didgeridoo, but it was an awesome moment of culture for me, and I hope the Drumming Ensemble gets asked to do more things like that in the future!