Tag Archives: art

Kseniya Simonova – Sand Artist

Hat tip to Huffington Post (*).

Here, ((Kseniya Simonova)) recounts Germany conquering Ukraine in the second world war. She brings calm, then conflict. A couple on a bench become a woman’s face; a peaceful walkway becomes a conflagration; a weeping widow morphs into an obelisk for an unknown soldier. Simonova looks like some vengeful Old Testament deity as she destroys then recreates her scenes – with deft strokes, sprinkles and sweeps she keeps the narrative going. She moves the judges to tears as she subtitles the final scene “you are always near”.

*Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine’s version of “America’s Got Talent.”

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WHERE’S WALTER?

Walter Logeman and yours truly go back a bit. 12 years. The first person I added to my virtual karass. We initiated some experiments and adventures.

I’ve never met his body. I wish I could go visit him in New Zealand.

His new blog In This Moment. Then there is his Psybernet.

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VIRGIN MEETING

Virgin Meeting

Photoshop montage compiled from unoriginal sources. This is part of a quinttych, entitled Digging Up and Down. It’s unassuming in its spot on the living room wall, given that to be viewed the viewer has to almost put their nose on the glass!

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Filed under visual experiments, my art

MAPPING MUSICAL EXPERIENCE

Given any rich experience, what happens when we commit our sensibility to graphically mapping the experience in real time? Deborah Blair’s paper is fascinating. Her model has much wider applications. And, this toolmaker came up with many such possibilities.

By all means check out the PDF and especially the examples of her students’ maps of musical experience. The paper itself is part of the superb archive provided by International Journal of Education & the Arts at its web site.

Musical maps allow us to participate in a unique world that would otherwise be closed to us—the world of our students’ listening experiences. The sharing of the maps provides the opportunity for peers to enter into another’s musical experience and for the creators of the maps to allow others to enter into their own experience. Like readers who recreate an experience for themselves while reading narrative, or listeners who recreate music when listening, observers of another’s musical map are recreating the music and the person’s listening experience through the sharing of that map, extending the scope of musical discourse through listening. The experience is mediated by each students’ own personal lens, but the level of shared understanding from also creating a map for the same music offers valuable common ground for the development of musical ideas.

In this study, students eagerly shared their completed maps with their classmates by physically tracing their distinctively created graphic representation while listening to the music. Thus presented, the map provides a frame for reliving the experience, for further exploration, for the sharing of ideas. It may not represent everything someone experienced when listening to the music, but it is a frame, featuring salient points or things to which the listener especially attended.

Students represent what is important to them, those things which are meaningful during their musical encounter. This does not mean that other features were not heard or tacitly known. What is known tacitly is sometimes brought into focus when watching another student’s map and noticing something new––something known but not personally articulated. The map frames the living and telling of the story as the map is created, providing reference points for nonverbal and verbal discussion of musical ideas. The map frames the reliving and retelling of the story as the map is shared, providing reference points for the reliving of one’s own musical listening experience and uniquely allowing
others to enter into their own listening experience.

Musical Maps as Narrative Inquiry | PDF
Deborah V. Blair
Oakland University
Rochester, Michigan
International Journal of Education & the Arts, 8(15).

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DANCE TO LEARN

Kate Kuper, a friend of mine for over 35 years, finally has a beautiful web site up featuring her innovative labor of love, using movement, music, and dance to teach subjects such as history and science. KATEKUPER.COM

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HEH HEH

“We can never see things with the x-ray vision of Superman or the deductive brilliance of Dick Tracy, but we can sure as hell remember what it was like being stomped on by authorities, whether parents, cops or some terrifying ogress of a nun, as little Robert was in his Catholic school nearly half a century ago – and we can share the bloody inventions of revenge set forth in his drawings.

“That’s why Crumb is a genuinely democratic satirist, in the fierce over-the-top way of a James Gillray – hyperbole and aggression relieved by brief intermissions of tenderness. He gets into the domain of shared dreams and does so in a language that doesn’t pretend to be “radically new”. Why on earth should he pretend? If he did, people wouldn’t know what he was drawing about. As he pointed out in an interview 30 years ago: “People have no idea of the sources for my work. I didn’t invent anything; it’s all there in the culture; it’s not a big mystery. I just combine my personal experience with classic cartoon stereotypes.” Rather than fitting him into some notion of an avant-garde, it is better to see Crumb as a dedicated anti-modernist.”

Robert Hughes, The Guardian UK

crumb museum

crumb family web site

rcrumb
handbook & blog

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