Some Ideas

Decisions, decisions. I have a feeling that actually being in Berlin will twist these ideas around and swing them back at me. Still, focus is an imperative, and the generation of ideas is a long process shaped by sleeping on things. So here we are.

The Immigration topic most captured my interest. I want to see how Berlin as a whole functions not despite but through its diversity. I am also arrested by the idea of a collective identity: so it would be very interesting to see how all these influences form the confluence. Much identity is found through the future of the city, namely the youth. Perhaps comparing views of different Berlin youth, from Turkish to Eastern Jewish to German Jewish to German (and having many generations living in Berlin). Also the relation to class and financial differences and how that affects Berlin immigrants or youth, as opposed to it here. An focused interest: health care (in immigrant populations or otherwise).

The roots of differences, confusion, or division might be specific to Berlin, and there might be significant parallels between Berlin and other areas such as Seattle. The trick will be to see the similarities but also identify how Berlin is unique in its issues, in the attitudes of its peoples, and in the peoples' methods of handling the issues.

The short version is: my top three are immigration, youth culture, and health care.

Seattle Monuments and Memorials: Pike Place Market

A monument or memorial is a tangible, permanently located entity that represents a dimension of history that we choose to remember.

Seattle does not have many traditional monuments, and I choose to consider Pike Place Market. It is a living monument, still active and used practically yet representative of Seattle's history. Pike Place, which fulfills the quality of permanent location, is filled with Seattle business, Seattle art, Seattle street music, Seattle coffee and food. Our identity as a city reveals itself in this place: the identity of who were are in relation to others within Seattle, and who we are in relation to the rest of the world. While Pike Place does this for current-day Seattle, it has been integral to our identity for many years. It was there when farmers in the Pacific Northwest got together and protested against corporations, it endured through immigration and Japanese internment, it gave the Seattle community a place to say "here we are, in all our forms and flavors". Today, when Seattle has expanded and encompasses a greater international and national role, we hold regard for the first Starbucks, the flying fish, the locally grown produce.

Ghosts of Pike Place include the Japanese-American-owned stalls in Pike Place, which constituted two thirds of the market. After Pearl Harbor, these stalls were confiscated or stolen. I appreciate the continuation of the market as a functional monument. It balances between being a strictly historical memorial site and a forgotten example of community.

Rethinking Thinking

The following are preliminary thoughts and ideas that I will later revisit and fully shape.

The artist, according to this essay, is someone who feels.
This is true, yet do not all humans feel? Or is there a specific depth of feeling that must be attained before one becomes an artist, just as there is a specific level of scholarship required before one is termed a doctor in whichever field? The essay has a very romantic view of thinking, which boils down to "basic perceptual feelings and sensations". I agree that true art has emotion and passion. Even in my creative experiences, art either happens or it doesn't. If it does, it is driven by unguided forces and never forced. I understand the discussion of instinct.

However, an artist is one who can express, not necessarily one who can think. Max Bill says that the object of art is "the expression of the human spirit". The Root-Bernstein "tools for thinking" are "emotional feelings, visual images, bodily sensations, reproducible patterns, and analogies". The artist, as they do mention, is the one who can translate these tools into novel forms of expression. Transmit, translate, the connection from one individual to the next: this is the role of the artist.

Howard Gardner terms different kinds of thinkers based upon their forms of expression. For example, artists are visual thinkers, scientists are logico-mathematical thinkers, and politicians are interpersonal thinkers. If it is true that our feelings are the base of rational thinking, then I think there is only one thinker: the individual. Gardner's thinkers do not have different brands of thought, but are people who express their thinking in different ways.

Live performance is scary because you feel exposed, bare, and laid open. Your emotions are subject to scrutiny. If we consider the role of emotion in art, then we realize that in fact every form of art is innately the same as live performance. Art transmits that emotion, and the artist embraces the fear of exposure for the sake of conveying a message to an audience. If all thinking is based in emotion, artists become the risk takers of society.
What about graffiti artists, who want to express emotion but then run away into anonymity? What if art is repressed, and no emotional risk is allowed?

Midsummer Night’s Dream: Ballet

This past Friday I was in for a treat of human creation.

It’s been a really long time since I went to the ballet. My last memory significantly shaped my view of art, and its influence is still with me. On Friday, then, I was nervous. What if I didn’t enjoy it? What if I had to pretend to like it? What if I fell asleep and my snoring was not in sync with the rhythm?

Since I haven’t read the Shakespeare play, I thought I would look through the program notes so that I would have a good idea of the plot. After all, how would I be able to comprehend a story without words? I read the synopsis twice, however, but was still confused as to the exact love triangles and pentagons and other complicated relationships that form in the play.

The performance began with two notes, pitched at A. It was the calling of the audience’s attention, the singular harmony of different instruments and octaves striving for the purity of one sound. Unity is in those first notes: for the orchestra itself, and for the audience and the performers.

On to the ballet itself. Combine the mood of the music with the swift or stealthy or graceful moves of the dancers, and reveal magic. The first act completely blew me away. Introduce the characters, the setting through dances that depict personality. The story was captivating. Whereas I was confused reading the program notes, here the relationships involved made sense here through costumes and acting. Love was depicted, as was repulsion, as was vanity, as was confusion. What interested me was the way that the dancers portrayed a specific emotion not through facial expression or words, but instead with their whole bodies. Performances were much nuanced, such as the queen waking up from her nap: every motion was natural, graceful, passionate. This dancer had lost herself completely to her character, and the audience happily fell into this deception. The donkey was amazing. He was wearing a mask, but with his body was able to perfectly depict his confusion. I don’t know how he did this but it worked so well! I really liked the choreography of the “threesome”, in which the leaning and positioning of each individual with respect to the other demonstrated their emotions toward each other.

The ballet was universal because it was so innately human: art, emotion, and passion. Indeed, the passion of the dancers for their dance came through to me, and I felt an intense joy in the live performance. William Blake wrote, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was one production that transferred love in such a way that the experience of two hours became a lasting impression on me.

Research 101

Research 101 gave me a good review of the basics of research. Here are some things from it that I found especially relevant to my study in Berlin.

“Questions require answers.” So I will try to avoid ambiguous or open-ended questions or just comb the world in search of answers.

“Questions give you a way of evaluating the evidence.” If I want to make sense of my evidence, which will be the city of Berlin, I should create specific questions that will then guide me through the answers.

“A clear open-ended question calls for real research and thinking.” What does this mean? Well, it means that either I can shape my mind and Berlin into real research, or I can redefine real research.

The website truthfully does indeed help with some rudiments such as searching and finding sources.

People, Positions, and Interpretations: Reactions to Composition Exercise 4/3/08

My eyes widened a little when Shanga said “two minutes”. We had about thirty seconds each to position our five fellows into an arrangement that would depict an important event in our life. Where to begin? The first thing I had to do was bridge the gap between that event, emotionally charged and life-changingly large in scope, with the present, full of strangers and dulled by routine. The second reconciliation was between the transformation caused by the event and the stillness of the pose. Okay, enough thinking, now move, place, snap into instinct – and time’s up!

Reactions to this exercise varied through the groups. There was much use of time progression, which involved having actors be snapshots through time. This was a notable and effective way of resolving the issue of change (innate in the depicted event) versus stasis (the depiction). Progression was easily seen when the actors posed along the line traveled by the Western eye, from left to right. Down to up or up to down depended on the brand of emotional change involved: a falling would end towards the ground whereas an uplifting would grow upwards. Two dimensions added a lot to visual impact, but even more striking was three dimensional use of stage space. What does it mean to be in the past or future, to be under the surface or superficial, to be in front or in back or in between?

During the exercise, representations of the individual revealed themselves. Emotions, complex as they are, could not really be shown through the expression of one actor. In my group, many people displayed multi-dimensional emotions by having each actor represent a part of the individual’s soul. The combination of happy, scared, blank, withdrawn, and confident embodied the total feeling needed to be expressed. Other creators had one actor play themselves, while other actors were positioned around the one. This common theme struck me as the interplay between individual and society. Society depends on its relationship to the individual, and this idea was manifested in our instinctive positioning.

The most important connection was between the audience and the creator. The audience can see a certain image as something interesting or can create a mental model of the creator’s intent. What is the story here? Emotion comes across more easily, found through a general positive or negative tone. However, the context is unknown, and the presentation is dependent on the audience’s imagination. As part of the audience, my basic instinct was to start digging for metaphors. Soon, that alternated between seeing the image as something that can stand on its own, without a context. Art has many applications and even more inspirations, but sometimes it is just a photograph, just some colored lines, just some people assembled into something bigger than each alone.