This book started out as an exploration of perception, and surprisingly stayed on topic throughout the project. Personally I feel as though my projects tend to stray quite a bit from their original idea, but I guess things were different for this project. Which makes me wonder if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Is straying from the original idea making more progress or less? I liked, however, that I felt very organized while making this book. There was a lot of information to sift through, so staying organized really helped me see the bigger picture. I think.

I have learned a lot about process, doing this project; my process/how I organize information. Apparently I like to put things in grids, and see everything laid out, all at once. I am visual, so most all of my explorations made use of some sort of visual element. So, while I did ask people questions and make word connections, in the end the visual content I gathered from people seemed to be my most valuable.

The topic of my book perception turned out to be even more intricate and intriguing than I thought. I found that:
› people never did what I expected them to (when given a task)
› people are very conscious and concerned about being wrong/incorrect
› it is extremely difficult to control how people respond to questions/tasks (with the exception of yes or no questions and multiple choice…)

These things made my explorations frustrating at times because I had to create the explorations taking these things into account. I also had to find people who be open and receptive to these silly tasks. But though parts of it were challenging, I feel like the beauty of the explorations is found in the random and candid responses I received. I mean this is why people watch reality tv shows, and gossip… people are complex, and unpredictable, and very interesting. So as different as peoples personalities are, I feel like I have learned that peoples perceptions are even more incalculable.

Book Highlights

per·cep·tion

1.  the act or faculty of apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind 

2.  immediate/intuitive recognition or appreciation, as of moral, psychological, or aesthetic qualities; insight; intuition

3.  the result or product of perceiving, as distinguished from the act of perceiving; percept.

4.  a single unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present.

free association   

1. A spontaneous, logically unconstrained and undirected association of ideas, emotions, and feelings.

Link to Left Field Translation

Left Field Translation

Connections…

When asked a 22 year old the objects were: a blob, and egg, squares, squares with lines, a grill, kind of looks like a microphone, circles, and sperm.

I think i am surprised that my two subjects did not make more sense out of the nonsense…

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses (the word Gestalt in German literally means "shape" or "figure"), particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves. In psychology, gestaltism is often opposed to behaviourism.

Experience: The Mind of a 3 Year Old

For this experience i wanted to see a bit of how children think… so i drew some nonsense doodles on paper and asked a three year old what they were… I was surprised to find that he wasn't as imaginative as i would have though… he seemed to think about it pretty logically, and have some hesitation to answer my questions incorrectly. I assured him there were no wrong answers, but he didn't seem to think so…

Exploration No. 49 Connections

“Symphony, as i call this aptitude, is the ability to put together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody thought to pair.” - A Whole New Mind

It seems as though all forms of creation are their own symphony…

Book Proposal

In the broadest sense my book is about how everyone perceives things differently. Whether it it answering a question or performing a task, people just do things differently. So based on this idea that we are all different, no matter how much people fight it or conform to it, how does this influence our artwork? How is our artwork unique? How does art transform and evolve when individuals come together to create make it? In my book i plan to answer these questions through my experiments…