Bridge to Next Semester

My central goal in coming to The New School is to learn to work with others on cultural expressions that serve social good. The particular means by which this is accomplished - be it through photography, film, music, etc. - is not a determinant, though audio is a dimension with which I am particularly familiar. I mean to use the medium that best achieves my goals, or more likely the medium that best exploits the resources available to me. If I find myself lacking in technique I can find the needed talent without much trouble. And so the most practical skill I am taking away from this course is the ability to explain myself to creatives on the terms of their tools as I now have some degree of familiarity with those tools. On the less practical side, art is a blast and I enjoy my curious wanderings through the aesthetic realms in my hunt for more curious wanderings. But while exploration is productive, the professional need to communicate must keep such efforts grounded. The line between these two needs is the challenge of creative production.

While I initially aimed to simply learn the tools and simply have fun with the output, I have come to understand that the audience should always be kept in mind even when one is only beginning to grasp the technology. It is never to early to consider how your work will be considered. As the technology has become more familiar I have fallen for the camera, though I must spend a great deal more time with it before I can pull truly expressive work from it. While my pre-production improves with practice, I find I can rely on my post-production skills to fill in the gaps, as my prior work with music editing has strengthened that end of the process. The next time I gather images and sounds it will be to produce short works that are as reliant on visual as audio as concept, aligning the three in the service of a social theme.

Currently I am most interested in collaboration. I have not worked with visual artists before and I look forward to it next semester. I could learn much from a partner as they could learn from me. I will try to reach out to other creatives regularly in an effort to build relationships from which work can foster.

It is a shame that I must limit my response to your final question to the premise of only $150 million, as that is no where near enough to purchase Google. So instead I would use that money to fund an online academy for youths, featuring workshops in technology and social influence. The students could take the courses for free from any where in the world, and would earn credit through collaborative projects with students in other localities, matching images, audio, etc to produce socially minded media as a form of international communication. With $150 I would do a single project with a global selection of youths that would end in a showcase of the resulting work. Just a simple example of the possibilities of what I think culture should be.