For the beginning of the semester, I have been deliberately taking it slow. I have a tendency to dive into things and burn out early, dropping them to move on to something else. This causes problems in the context of classes because I might be ready to move on but I can’t because we still have a month, or I might feel like I’ve just gotten started and already someone is asking me to make a final something-or-other. My pacing is off. As I am starting in a new department at Parsons, I see this as an opportunity to try something different, change up the pacing. This is easier in the Design and Technology department because I don’t really know what I am getting into, so I don’t have a strong agenda to size everything up to. In photography, I felt like a skitzoid because I was so insistently off beat from the reigning rhythm. While frustrating, this did get me some terribly value allies that I hang onto with thinly veiled enthusiasm. I continue on into DT with a level of spectatorship, waiting to see what will happen.
One last bit of official business I have with the photography department is redoing work for the Design 4 class, which I got a C in. First C since high school Latin! I was terribly overworked last semester. This was the class I skimped on, which I felt justified in doing because the teachers were equally overworked, and, by my estimation, only marginally committed to the class. The problem is that when lab technicians are asked to teach classes, they aren’t paid any extra. They are just given that many less hours of lab work. They take the work because they want to teach in the future, it seems, and this is a tempting way to get there. This is messy, and I am still irate that I had to take a required class that the department was unwilling to allot sufficient resources to.
Part of the final project consisted of a stop motion piece. I have only just managed to get this to work. We were shown a simple technique, which my friend Joshua Blank and I push to the limits. We crashed every program we tried to use to put together our 3,000 frame adventure. Thankfully, someone showed me a few basic steps in After Effects to get it together. This is the result, as of last weekend:
Cute right? It needs work. This is only the first half. I had a lot of trouble editing in After Effects, but I feel encouraged. We’re getting there.
This is one of a number of projects that I am juggling outside of regular class work. The next big thing is a workshop I will be giving next Friday at the Empire State Coalition’s conference for homeless and runaway youth service providers. I was asked to give a workshop on media relations. It is an exciting opportunity to influence the way these important organizations think of and use media. In my short time working with a drop-in center in NYC, I was flabbergasted by the organizer’s technophobic approach to media. This is a disservice on two fronts. First, a fear driven mentality leads counselors and organizers to overlook excellent opportunities to teach homeless youth about media literacy and affective ways to express themselves. Second, a sense of being wounded and defeated by mainstream media discourages organizations from promoting the issues they are confronting and the work they are doing in an assertive, coherent fashion. I’ll be expounding some basic methods and tools in the three hour workshop. It has been instructive going to events by The Heart Gallery, that are very media savvy and well organized. Then again, it is an organization run my media people, not social workers. The social workers are overworked, emotionally taxed, and poorly paid. It can seem abstract to fit media relations and literacy into their programs. I remember when an article in the New York Times was published about a shelter in Queens this past May. The article was deplorable, as was the conduct of the priest that ran the shelter. The ripples it sent through the networks of people working with queer homeless youth in New York City felt like old repetitions. Once again, they were dealing with upsetting, disrespectful representations of their clients. I felt sad to see hardworking committed people throwing their hands up at this slight. It will be interesting to see how people take the workshop, what has most traction for them, and what can feasibly be implemented.
The other project I am working on is the postcard correspondence between Santa Anita La Union in Guatemala and Sanjukta Vikas in Darjeeling, India. Find more info about this on the website I build during bootcamp.
I just got the postcards all scanned today. There are 82. DLR Prerna, the organization I’m working with in India, says they can have them translated into Nepali in two weeks or so, but I need to translate them into English first. Time is ticking if I want to get there with the postcards printed up for distribution in January. I have been stumbling over technical aspects of the project up until this point. It is refreshing to feel those problems become less foreboding as I get my act together to have this happen in a timely fashion. If you want to help translate from Spanish to English, please let me know!
Also on the horizon with this project is collaborations with The Fair Trade Resource Network. What format this will take is yet to be fully determined, but I’ll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, I’ve started at my internship at The Open Society Institute for the second semester. The Documentary Photography Project funds some amazing projects and I feel privileged to work with them. They have just processed a round of grants and the selection of the exhibition, so there is a lot of clean up work to do. This is not so glamorous, but so it goes with undergraduate internships. Got to put in the time.
Oh, am Matt seemed daunted by my request for a duck-hunt gun/wii hack, see previous post. Fair enough, I’ve planted the seed. Maybe I’ll ask for an indefinite loan of the video camera he never uses instead.
2 Comments
September 26, 2007 at 7:31 am
ida, good luck with everything. I hope that being so busy you will keep posting anyway. cheers! bmb
October 3, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Thanks for the encouragement bmb! Got some new stuff up.