Craft Art: Making Bracelets

For Christmas, I am making thread bracelets for my friends. Although this means that I am having to find the time to make 40+ bracelets, it is a lot of fun for me to make them, and it gives me a break while studying for exams and finishing up final projects in various classes. These bracelets are made by tying knots in strings of embroidery thread. I love these bracelets because they are a form of art that you can wear! Plus, they are very cheap to make.

Picture Source: http://friendshipbracelets.wordpress.com/page/5/

Website Project Results

Click here to see my group's final website!

The website is an "Art Guide to Atlanta" aimed at Georgia Tech students. I worked on the "Theatre" and "Museums" pages. We presented our website in class this morning. I was much less nervous during this presentation than for the presentation for my visual essay, but I feel like I was less prepared for the website presentation, and I did not write out my speech and have exactly what I was going to say ready for the presentation like I did for the visual essay presentation.

A lot of work went into this website. A lot of group meetings, a lot of nights leaving the library at midnight. However, overall, this was a very fun project to work on, and the group I was working with was a great group. I am very proud of how our website turned out. I think it was significantly more rewarding to design and code it ourselves using Expression Web, rather than using a template. 

Definition of Art: Second Edition

My definition of art has definitely changed since the beginning of the year when one of our first blog post assignments was to write a post explaining our definition of art. I think the biggest influence on this change has been the unit we talked about in English about public art, and the visual essay assignment about public art. Before when I thought about art, I thought about the more obvious forms of art such as paintings and sculptures. However, through the work I have done in my English class this semester, I know realize that art can encompass so many more things, especially in the genre of public art. For example, I hadn't ever thought as much about landscaping as being public art, and that became a large focus of my visual essay. I've been interested in photography for several years, so I have been seeing things such as landscaping as art once it has been captured in a photograph, but I had never thought much about how landscaping can be considered art on its own, even without being in a photograph. This class has expanded my appreciation for art and its various forms, and it has opened my eyes to new forms of art that I had not thought about before.

Improv

I previously wrote a post about little known theatres in Atlanta. One of the theatres I mentioned is Dad's Garage. I would like to talk in more depth about this particular theatre because they portray another kind of performing art under the theatre genre. Dad's Garage is an improv theatre. This means that the vast majority of the show that they do are completely improved. Improv shows are fun to watch because you can never know exactly what is going to happen. Because not even the actors know! Improv performers make the show up as they go along. If you have never attended an improv show, I highly recommend that you do so, because it is a lot of fun.

Georgia Tech has it's own improv troupe called Let's Try This! or LTT for short. LTT is a division within DramaTech, and you can find out more about when their shows are through the DramaTech website, or by visiting LTT's website.

Picture Source: http://atlanta.metromix.com/bars-and-clubs/roundup/atlanta-comedy-clubs/1285421/content

Website = public art

Before this project, I never realized hoe much work went into making your own website (your own website that actually looks good anyway...). Websites are a form of public art. They require a lot of time and effort to design and make. The process can be made simpler by using a template, but if you are making your design from scratch like my group for our Art Guide project, it can be a long and tedious process. I think that making a website that way though is more rewarding than using a template, because you can say that made it yourself, and you can say it is your art.

Little Known Theatres in Atlanta

For my Art Guide to Atlanta website project for English, I am doing a theatre section fro my group's website. There are a surprisingly large number of theatres in Atlanta, and many of them are relatively unknown to most people, especially people at Georgia Tech. All students know the Fox Theatre and The Shakespeare Tavern, and most know the Alliance Theatre. But what about Horizon Theatre? Dad's Garage? Kudzu Playhouse? 7 Stages? These names are mostly unknown to Tech students. Horizon Theatre and Dad's Garage are both included in my section in my group's website, along with The Shakespeare Tavern, Alliance Theatre, and DramaTech, Georgia Tech's student-run theatre.

School Uniforms

My high school had school uniforms. School uniforms inhibit public art. Fashion can be considered a form of public art and artistic expression. Uniforms inhibit this because students are no longer able to freely express their artistic styles through their clothing. For example, at my high school, not only did we have uniforms, but we also had rules about the kinds of accessories we were allowed to wear. I think that suppressing students' artistic expression through fashion in this way takes a large amount of public art out of everyday life. On a daily basis, the vast majority of public art that you will see is through fashion and what people are wearing.