Class take away 4

To begin our class, we started going around the room to describe some of our 50 "What if" questions, and talk about how they can influence our final decision for the "Altared" assignment near the end of the semester. A lot of people had interesting ones, ranging from how they would destroy their books to how they would break down and rebuild them into something that they could love. For the questions I made, I wrote them all in one night, then did not look at them again until the morning when I woke up the next day. I noticed that a lot of my questions were about how much I... disliked the thing, rather than what I could do with it. I took it as a lot of pent up feelings towards it, not good feelings that is. While I did not make a question for it, I figured out that I need to change the cover completely in a way that will make me associate the thing with something else other than what it once was.

After our break, we began talking about rules and how they can be broken. Once broken, there is always a consequence of some kind. The main point of this discussion was to discuss how rules can be broken in a way that can be completely abstract or just different. Beth is a Photoshop expert, she decided that to provide a good example, she would break all the rules of Photoshop in order to provide an example. A lot of unofficial rules were made to help preserve image quality while editing in Photoshop, for instance, expanding an image can distort pixel quality and just make the image look as if it's a very low quality. Beth then proceeded to break every one of those unofficial rules that she could think of. At first, the image did look to be of rather bad quality; the pixels were stretched out, there was distortion in some odd ways, and it honestly just looked like a worse version than the original. But as Beth kept messing with it, a simple low quality image became an abstract piece that looked nothing like the original image. This tied into our assignment, which is to break rules that were made to be broken in creative experimentation (Provided that none of the rules broken are serious enough to warrant punishment by law). I'm a type of person to try and follow the rules as much as I can, so I'm not sure how this will go.

So far, we have not had a dull class in Seeing Sideways. I really hope it stays that way. Actually, to say that I hope it stays that way might imply that I don't want it to change, which is not technically what I mean. I do want the class to keep changing in very interesting ways, keeping everything the same each week would eventually become repetitious. Let me rephrase that statement; I hope the class keeps exploring new, inspiring, and fun perspectives each week.