Modern Medium

On this episode of the Modern Medium Podcast, we are exploring barriers: might artists inadvertently create these barriers to their art? And how does this affect its experience?

Barriers

Barriers can be anything: a blind person who can’t see the art, or someone with a learning disability who might not understand the art in the way that it was intended. But they can still experience art in other ways that you might not expect, and so in this way, art can be accessible to anybody. It’s just a matter of creating that space.

On communicating 

Art is not always going to be clearly communicated across all platforms. It might offend. It might cause stress or tension. And that’s part of the learning process as both artist and viewer: each of our experiences are different, and so the ways in which we access art will naturally be different too. As artists, we can’t control how people will react, so a big thing is keeping your art true to yourself. 

Being true to yourself 

Trying to communicate what’s inside of you is in itself a barrier: it’s going to reach some people and not others. There might be backlash. As an artist, it’s a balancing act of staying true to yourself and the art that you practice, but keeping in mind that not everybody will be able to access it. By virtue of understanding that, artists can grow and change their art — but it’s important not to censor it.

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On this episode of the Modern Medium Podcast, we’re exploring our senses: while it’s common for art to have visual and aural components, we don’t normally think about art in terms of smell, taste, or touch. But art is supposed to imitate life, and within life, we experience these all at once. How then can we make art a sensory experience? 

It’s easy to be visual, as a lot of art already is. Visiting art galleries or museums is typically a visual experience, seeing the paintings or sculptures and experiencing them from a distance. 

But one thing that’s interesting about those spaces is that they’re usually silent. Why is there no sound? Why are we hearing people just shuffling around? Paris shares about a project she did, where she recorded audio snippets of her morning rituals, experiencing that routine through sound. We don’t normally think of audio outside of music, but you can easily tell a story through the things you hear on the street. 

When you touch something, you’re going to understand it in a different way. If it feels different from what you’re picturing, that can change the piece’s tone, energy, or the way you view it. Art that incorporates touch has the power to change the story.

It’s important to consider all five senses when you’re creating anything. And it’s important to consider not only what senses you’re activating, but how the that might be different for different people, because we all come with our different preconceived notions and experiences. 

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On this episode of the Modern Medium Podcast, we’re talking about a medium not often thought about in the art field: time. How can we incorporate this into art, and what might that look like? 

Time-based art 

Time-based art can contain anything. It can be oral or visual — whatever you can incorporate into a specific amount of time. Movies, for example, are time-based, as you experience it for an hour and a half or two hours. 

The influence of time

The thing that Paris likes most about time is how it can be ritualistic. You can get time anywhere: over the course of a day or a year, or as in an art exhibition where two people live their daily lives for nine months physically attached to each other.

On top of that, time brings to mind how things are going to change: some things are not necessarily always going to end the way they began. It’s easy to fall into our own ritual; we don’t believe time is going to change us, but 40 or 50 years later, we’re asking ourselves how we got here because this isn’t where we began.

Some examples of time-based art

In photography, artists have done the thing where they take a photo of themselves 365 days a year and you end up with a wall of prints of how you’ve changed within that time. 

Paris’s personal project is on feelings and emotions. Every day this term, she’s been writing a definitive statement about the way that she is; an “I am _____” statement. It’s her way of coming back to herself and becoming more grounded and fully understanding where she’s at. At the end of the term, she will stitch each statement together, creating a compiled sense of who she was and is. 

In terms of graphic design, what we think of on our computer and phone screens as permanent really aren’t. That in itself is a sort of time-based art. We don’t know how long we’ll have these things because they’re not tangible. 

Our social media platforms are ways to share our own time-based art, because you’re getting this very selective, very narrow snapshot of what someone is experiencing at that specific time. 

Thinking about time

Pick a sense, and spend 24 hours being fully aware of it. For example, what are the sounds that you experience when you go to class? As you go home? Or commute to work? Just begin to acknowledge the way you’re moving through time, because it’s easy not to think about. 

Documentation is also critical: it’s easy to experience and acknowledge these things, but how are you going to see how they’ve changed over time if you don’t document it? 

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Welcome to the Modern Medium Podcast! We talk about the tools, strategies, tactics, and possibilities in modern medium design. In our first episode, we’re exploring ideas: how they form, how they change, and how we might incorporate those ideas into graphic design. 

The creative process and coming up with ideas

When you’re stuck in a creative rut, it’s difficult to know where to begin with an idea. Even when you do have an idea, it’s easy to get caught up in what you think something is supposed to be or what it’s supposed to look like. So it’s an important part of the process to learn how to let go.

Ideas can come from anywhere. You can think of anything as a base point and go from there with it. Think about what you knew before, think about what you know now, and think about how things have changed. This doesn’t have to go anywhere tangible; you can use this as a brainstorming exercise or mind map and take off from it.

The Willamette River

The Willamette River was brought up in class and it was interesting for Paris to think about the things she knew about the river, the things she didn’t know, its past, and its future. She shares her train of thought from there: how the river has served generations, the way it bisects each side of the city, what it has meant to the people living in Oregon, and how things are going to change.

It’s interesting to think about the lifetime of the river, how that can form ideas, and how those ideas will change. It’s not simply continual movement of water, but how you react to it. Paris shares the story of going down to the river, hoping to be inspired by nature, but being blocked by a barrier when she arrived. The idea that sparked was how trashed it’s been — and the group put up an art exhibition on trash the following week.

There’s so much going on around the river every day and we can have no idea what’s happening, and to Paris, she thinks of it as a continual cycle of change. 

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