Turning a corner, catching my reflection

For quite a while I've aspired to Eliel Saarinen's maxim: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." With several larger-than-course projects now organizing my teaching practice, I think I am finally realizing this aspiration. I'm deeply involved in program-design in my area. I'm internationalizing my practice. I'm writing two articles, one on the topic of creative planning and another on the topic of education in Facebook. So I am finally working within a next larger context. I have turned a corner.

I have also for some time thought about a point made by Stuart Brand in the documentary film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future. His point is that if a person gets to a juncture in their professional life where they look around and notice that no one is doing exactly what they are doing, then they are doing pretty well! With regard to my own pursuit of an integrated approach to liberal arts, fine arts, and everyday life, I think I am reaching such a point of convergence. I am beginning to see my own reflection in Brand's mirror of professional progress.

A portable, billboard-style blackboard I made --mobile tech!

Appropriately enough for a media studies professor, a key last step in this convergence was the rediscovery of a particular medium --chalkboard drawing of all things. I have my eldest son Will to thank for this. He was at the library and spotted a book called The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures and checked it out and brought it home for me. This book makes a wonderful and solid case for the idea that in order to solve problems one needs to be able to splay things out on a single layer (use chalkboard, whiteboards, lay materials out on a floor or table, etc.) in order to 'get the big picture,' and then distill this into a fairly simple picture.

The aha moment for me in this was the realization I had been frustrated with computers on many, many occasions due to their being what I have now begun to refer to as a 'layer' rather than 'splayer' medium. Rather than seeing one's thoughts on a single surface --as in chalkboard drawing-- computers constantly drive us to work in layers. Books do the same thing for that matter. Both are layer technologies. We literally never see the big picture, and this actually impedes certain modes of thought --in particular, brainstorming and similar modes. For other things computers are of course preferable and wonderful. I'm just more aware now of the need to combine and recombine layer and splayer mediums. My most-prized item in the media studio I teach in is now my portable blackboard, which I made by pulling an unused blackboard out of a closet and making a billboard-style rolling support framework for it by repurposing a wooden desk I had previously made and was not using, and adding clamp lights. I'm tellin' ya, it's a love.

Okay, so the last point in my convergence story is that whilst working at my new chalkboard I noticed that chalk on board (a liberal arts tradition) closely resembled charcoal on paper (a fine arts tradition). So now I am reactivating the fine arts side of my professional practice via charcoal drawings, and also exploring various hybrid forms involving combinations of chalkboard-drawing+charcoal-drawing+new-media. William Kentridge is among those who pioneered such things, so one of my first experiments was to do a Kentridge-style time-lapse movie of a drawing in-the-making. See video to the left.

This all adds up to being a fun and interesting time for me. I'm also (finally) creating a personal website, so I am doing what is for me the arduous work of mining through various and sundry stashes of various and sundry artifacts --fine arts related, liberal arts related, teaching related, etc.-- and putting them in some semblance of order. More on this in a different post.