Athlete Junkies

Seems like any more you have to do drugs to stay competitive. Not the same kinds of drugs your parents did in the sixties. There is a new breed of drug addict and I think the message they are sending to our youth is almost just as bad. I'm talking about athletic and fitness competitors. There are two schools of thought on this. The first is: What is the Harm? You do what needs to be done to stay at the top of your field. Performance enhancing drugs, steroids, they are just training tools. The second school of thought is, well, the first school of thought is a bunch of crap. We tell our children to look to the athletes and fitness competitors as the superstars. We tell them to follow in the athletes footsteps with the hope that keeping our kids involved in sports will keep them off of drugs. Yet today it looks like no matter which way you go your going to wind up doing drugs. You either a regular junkie or a sports junkie. The current athlete is setting unreachable standards. Look at bodybuilders, fitness competitor, even actors preparing for a movie (Brad Pitt in Troy) who use steroids. Awesome specimens of human flesh that no matter how hard you ever work you will never be able to look like that unless you use drugs. I wonder where is the line? People, especially need to be aware, in order to set obtainable and reasonable expectations for themselves. Should there be a disclaimer on every ad, this person used performance enhancing drugs in preparation for this event? How do we make our kids aware that images are photo shopped? An asterisk, is that the answer?*

AAR Ring #1

Things I did well:
I feel like I really starting to learn how to control my soldering. The tubing was small and thin. It heated fast, the flux would bubble and push apart pieces that I needed to stick together, moving my solder ball. Overall I feel that it turned out well. The solder placement was controled and not all over the place and the delicate pieces were firmly put together.

Things I could have done better:
That being said, I would like to learn how to control my soldering even more. I would have like to be able to turn some of the pieces so the were not all flat and on one plane. It gets tricky though because the tubing did heat so fast it would reflow areas of solder I did not want to flow if I was not very careful.

What if's:
What if I had used an even smaller torch tip? What if I had yellow ochre'd each section after I completed it? (I had tried that in the end, it seemed to work but also left alot of dirt on my piece) What if I had two third hands that I could use to hold pieces together and still have a free hand to solder with.

Market, I mean Merry Christmas!

I almost want to stop celebrating Christmas. I know. It's shocking. It's not Christmas I dislike, it's what Christmas has become. Christmas is about spirit. It's about loved ones and cozy fires and good times. It is not about shopping, retailers, or their profit margins. I think what Christmas has become is a symptom of the current American problem with spending. Retailers count the days leading up to every black Friday shopping blitz and it can make or break their profit margins. Do you really think that is what S. Claus intended? I don't think spreading cheer had anything to do with making sure some CEO has a golden parachute. A couple of years ago our family dedcided to change things up a little. Everybody brings a wrapped gift with no one person in mind and the spending limit is twenty dollars. The first person picks a gift from the pile and opens it (we draw numbers to see who goes first.) The second person goes, they can either take the first persons gift or open a new one. The game goes on like that gifts taken, new gifts opened, til the last person goes. Its a great time. Somebody always gets stuck with the worst gift ever. Like the year my twelve year old cousin Jake got the fondue pot and we all laugh about it. The games create laughter and stories for years. No one worries about who spent how much money on who or if they have enough money to shop for everyone this year. That is what Christmas is all about. Memories of family fun and sharing. So screw the retailers and how much money they made this year and how that affects the market. My wish for everyone this year is to celebrate Christmas in and with the spirit it was meant to have, no matter which way it takes for you to find that. If you can do that, no matter how much money you have, you can always have Christmas.

Is CAD safe, my thoughts while cleaning the bathroom.

I am taking a CAD class this semester and I love it. As artists we are always pushing the envelope for the new and innovative. I think CAD is a great medium in this era that everyone should know how to use. While I will always prefer the tactile CAD forces you to think in a different way. One of the great parts about CAD is the rapid prototyping and the ability to print in 3D. We just learned about it today so I know if I tried to throw around all the acronyms for the different printing systems I would butcher it, so I am not even going to try. CAD designs can be printed/created in metal, nylon, and other plastics based materials and they are so cool!! But the social designer in me says wait a minute, what is the environmental impact of heading in this direction. I know its a little late now considering all that we already do in plastics. Yet I am still wondering that in this great technology is there a better way? For the first time ever man has the ability to manipulate the environment to create things that do not naturally occur on this earth, what effect is that going to have? I got to thinking about trees. Trees start from a seed and grow through a biological process into what we know as a tree. When the trees lifespan is over the hard wood can be broken down and used by the earth in all sorts of ways. If we have the ability to create plastics, why can we not create a material that imitates the characteristics of wood? Wouldn't be cool to be able to print my CAD design in a material that I knew wouldn't harm the earth if it got tossed into a dumpster. My hope would be that nobody would toss my design into a dumpster, but hey, things happen. Obviously I am new to CAD and printing so I have no idea what could even work. Yet I stand strong in my idea. We have all this wonderful technology why does the thought of sustainability take a back seat to innovation. In this world I think they should go hand in hand.

Glassblowing

Just some pictures of a couple of pieces I have created so far this semester

Slumps and Bumps

The New York Times today reports the technology industry is beggining to slump. This is just yet another sign of the economic trouble our country is in. I wonder as technology slumps how this will effect design. Everything ebbs and flows, there will be another boom in technology. Who is going to create the next big boom? What have we learned from the last wave and what are we going to need to sustain in the future? Is technology slumpping because we have move too far ahead of what our culture needs to survive? Our current state of economic affairs brings alot of questions to my mind. I wonder how we as artisit will use this?

After Action Review Jewelry project 2

Sustains, things I did well:

Complete the project on time and with all the required bits and pieces, internal framing, hinge, clasp. It was my first ever working pendant of the sort and it works. I was really proud of myself. I did not get solder everywhere and was impressed with myself on that. Otherwise I would have lost a lot of texture having to sand it out. I got a nice texture on the bronze from rolling it through the mill with sand. I like how I adjusted my design after initial reactions to still get my message across without looking commerically funded. I liked how the shininess of the metal and the shape combined gave a feeling of reverence (church triptych) because that is kind of what the place I was thinking of when I made this makes me feel. Not like church, but reverent.

Improves:

Learn not to scribe to deeply. The hinge was a mite looser on the pin than I thought it would be. I think that happened a little bit along the way. Even though I had a work pin in I think all the opening and closing might have opened the holes just enough to make the difference. The loop on which the pendant was to hang from I should have used a thicker gauge wire, but I did not have one available. In hindsight I could have twisted two pieces of the thinner gauges together for more stability.

What ifs:

What if the piece was slightly smaller? If I had a do over I feel I would go in that direction with some more technical precision (scribing) in my work. Megan's suggestion of the sanding stick I liked because the metal did get slightly sunken in the middle. I might also consider a texture on the left hand side. I would not cut into it though because I think you would loose the sense of moving through the piece from front to back as in a door or window.