Mix Tape Reflection

So I did made my mix tape for my mom because I remembered her telling me that I should make one for her some time ago. I've made mix cds before but I had never thought about organization before. They didn't have any common theme either. I would just throw a bunch of songs that I liked onto a cd so I could listen to them in my car. I knew my mom likes certain artists so I didn't follow the one-song-per-artist "criteria." So my criterion for song selection were that they had to be certain artists that she likes, and that they were oldies and ballads which are the type of songs that she likes to listen to. I tried to make the cd flow with more sentimental-like songs followed by more upbeat songs to give it a sort of rhythm so that the songs didn't all sound the same. I didn't do my liner notes for individual songs but for the whole cd because a lot my songs were pretty similar. I think they help to kind of get the listener in a certain mood to listen to the songs, which gives it more meaning. The assignment really demonstrated that creativity can come in any form. It allowed us to show our creativity in yet another form.

mix tapes

In discussion this week we talked about making mix tapes. The rules the class came up with were interesting but not all of them applied to my case. For instance, I didn’t want to use each artist just once because I decided to make the mix cd for my mom, who likes specific artists. She usually listens to the radio in her car so I'm sure she'll like it. Especially since she won't have to deal with advertisements in between songs. The assignment wasn't a hard one for me after I decided to make the cd for my mom because I know her taste pretty well. I'm still unsure of how to order the songs however.

Cut-up assignment

The cut-up assignment was fun but in the end, none of my sentences really made sense. I can see how new combinations of words can be made from Burrough’s method of cutting different texts and putting them together but I see no way for them to make much sense when just randomly putting texts together. Here are some of the “sentences” that were made by my random cut-ups. “That’s not anic bacteria to blue whales rtable analyzers U.S. Army’s forlkswagens. Biologists have out a half-dozen. Tion is any indiomily trees since the mid.” “One approacle story; careful anatomi-dyas of lab work existing portablucial means of comparing the field-the ing them into de fact.” As you can see, they really don’t make any sense. I guess if you use your imagination, you might be able to change some of the words for them to make more sense. In this sense, I can see how this kind of assignment may inspire some creativity. I don't see it being very useful for anything though.

Graders' Preferences

Wednesday's discussion about how different classes have different expectations and constraints on writing assignments got me thinking about whether I change my writing style to satisfy the professor or TA to get a better grade. I remember last year I took a Bacteriology lab course (304, some of you guys might have taken it too) and we had to turn in two reports over the course of the semester. I wanted to get a good grade and I must've referred to the grading rubric more than a dozen times to make the report exactly how the instructors wanted it. There were a few different instructors for the class and one of the instructors who was also the class coordinator answered everyone's questions about the report on learn at uw. I remember doing exactly as he told us to do and got some points docked off because I had a different instructor and he graded it a bit differently. That's one example of how depending on the grader, the same paper may receive different grades. I think biases/preferences are inevitable in the world we live in (not just with grades) so whether we like it or not, we'll have to conform to the standards or rules of the person with the power (in this case the grader) if we want a good grade. As a side note, I thought that it was nice to have a specific rubric for grading because that made it easier to know what the instructors were looking for in the report as opposed to a writing assignment with so few constraints that you're not even sure what the graders want.

Book vs Music

After reading rhythm science I felt like I didn't understand too much of what he said. He seemed to take a bunch of topics and sort of mix them together. I thought listening to the CD would make things clearer but it really didn't. Although the style of his music is not what you might hear everyday, I didn't feel that it was all that different from many other kinds of underground music I've heard and I didn't get much "meaning" out of it. In other words, I didn't think it was anything special. A review I found about the book on a BBC website said that "an oft-levelled criticism aimed at Spooky's output is that his rhetoric has too often outweighed the substance of his musical output"(http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/release/jx8c/). I agree with this criticism. His book, although difficult to understand, seemed to have more meaning and content than his music.

Sampling Project Reflection

I had never used photoshop before doing this assignment so I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make it do what I wanted. So for my first assignment I tried to make a point that laws against copyright infringement are unreasonable by showing two people selling lemonade for 5 cents a cup and one person accusing the other that he should pay a fine of $100,000 for copyright infringement. I wasn't able to find lemonade stands for the second assignment so I decided to attempt to draw them. Looking at everyone's collages in class, I realized that I didn't really "show" people my point, but rather made one of the characters say my point. Overall, I think I sort of missed the point of the assignment, so I decided to redo my assignment. This time I got some help from the college library staff so that I could edit the pictures better. Here they are:

In both, I tried to make a point that corporations are benefiting at the expense of artists and their creativity by fining them if they break any copyright laws. As you can see, in the first image the artist is being crushed by the copyright sign and the businessman is using the sign to reach the money on the tree. The second image is demonstrating the same point with a small difference: the artist is using a pulley to push the official up to reach the money. I personally thought the first one was easier to do because I could use any image on the web. It was a little harder to find the images for the second image but wasn't too bad thanks to the creative commons website. Overall, I think I did a better job for my second set of collages than my first. Between the two collages of the second set, I liked my first collage better because I had more images to choose from but they are very similar and make the point just as effectively in my opinion so in my case the restrictions didn't really stifle any creativity. However, I can see how in other cases, that could be the case because the images that someone wants may not be on the creative commons website because they have a much more limited number of images.

This experience changed my view on authorship and copyright somewhat because before I wasn't really aware of how many legal barriers artists had. I think as long as artists have the patience to go through all the legal barriers, it wouldn't have a negative impact on creativity, but looking at the population as a whole, I think it will have a negative impact because I doubt many people will be willing to go through the extra work of getting permissions for every image they want to use.

Remix of Bridgette's Collage