I Hope This Gets To You

Came across this video and it made me think of the story Dr. Gilbert told us in class about the Facebook movie. This guy who is roommates with the band, 'The Daylights' decided to create this video for his girlfriend.

This is article from OK Magazine:

"After Walter C. Mays‘ girlfriend moved from L.A. across the country to go to Duke for graduate school, he wanted to show her that love knows no distance, filming a touching video to prove it. One catch — he’s not telling her about it, and is relying on the Internet getting it to her. Even Katy Perry has Tweeted about it!

Mays, who edits and directs commercials talked to The Village Voice about his secret love letter, “I Hope This Gets to You,” which he hopes will go viral. As of today, the video has over 22,000 hits, and was posted yesterday.

“It got me to thinking about how long distance isn’t really long distance anymore,” he told The Village Voice blog. “It seems like we’re far apart, but we’re living in a very different world these days, and we can feel close without having to be close every day. I wanted to show how we try to make the world a little smaller.”

-I thought it was such a sweet idea and also how technology can be used to show love too! <3 "I hope this gets to her!"

Projects of Class

I had a wonderful time experiencing what everyone created during class last week.  I especially enjoyed making the poems from text cut out of newspapers.  I told my group mates, that this was by far the best thing I've created in my time at NYU. Hahaha...just joking, kinda...

See, I've never experienced a class where we were free to think and create that it let me realize how much I'm stuck in a bubble at times.  I loved being able to witness others in their creative process which has encouraged and inspired me to pursue more on my own.  After class, I felt really uplifted and impacted by how our class is so special in growing and learning together over this past semester.  I will always remember the experience I've had here and all the wonderful people I have met; it has been a whirlwind, but oh so worth it! :)

Musical Creativty in Context Response

I believe Creativity and Listening can go hand in hand and that Listening can be a form of Creativity.  How does one ponder a thought, idea, concept, without first listening to the world around them in order to respond?

Music making is listening, reacting to what is being heard, played, interpreted, felt, etc.   If one is speaking of a pure music making performance; it could require a different form of listening as opposed to one who sits and listens to music being performed before them and not the one making the performance occur. However, both sides of the listener and performer actively participate in this Creating process.  Each individual partakes in this sort of movement that travels inside the ear, mind, emotions, heart etc.

I think once exposed to any type of musical art form, the listener is succumbed to pick out and grab what they want to hear, bringing forth selective processes that occur in the brain, experiencing both the past memory and present occurrence all at once.  That makes Listening an active participant process that moves forth into the Creating processes of those moments that happen all around us on a daily basis via performance or not.

Class Projects

Doing our projects in class was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed seeing what everyone came up with. All of the ideas were so different and all were enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the Super Will presentation, I've never done anything like that before. It was a lot of fun for me also to be visually creative using dadaism as well as art through music. We practice musically so often that the opportunity to create in the visual artistic medium was a nice break for me.
I also loved watching how the class responded to our own musical storytelling presentation. It was very cool that everyone in class was able to participate at once, either musically, verbally, or both. I loved hearing everyone tell real stories, and it felt like an intimate way to continue getting to know new things about our peers, with the chance to musicalize all the stories we heard.
As I said in class, I think it would be fun to share these projects with others, but if it doesn't work out this semester, I will be very content knowing that these were moments that this particularly special group of people had the opportunity to experience together, and I will reflect fondly on that when I share them with students and collaborators in the future :-)
-Jess Goldberg

The Creative Fire

I suggest you this audiobook by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
Here are some quotes

This Class

This class is absolutely by far the best yet, we are able to be ourselves and show a little of who we are to our classmates. I enjoy participating in activities and I especially enjoyed being the behind the scenes video person for last week's class project.

The best part is that we each received our very own poem book, I feel so honored and important LOL!!


ytw

My input from Music Matters on Creativity

In my opinion, listening alone can be a matter of creating. Speaking from my own experience, there are times when I’m just listening to music in passing because it’s playing in my surroundings. Then there are times when I really listen to a song to get ideas. When I hear a great chord progression, great words, or how each instrument is stacked I visualize and create in my mind of how I can draw from the existing song. I’m creating in my imagination just by listening to something that fits my own personality. Once the listening is done, the creativity is still emerging because the tune is still in my head and then it makes me want to write my own ideas on paper. I may have never created my original song of a particular type if I hadn’t had a creative experience in my mind while listening to an influential piece. Musical imagination is still creating in my opinion.

Waiting Until We Meet Again

I can see you clearly
Hope you you can see me too
Hope you are proud of me, because
I desire to be like you

Thank you!

I just wanted to thank everybody for their input on the Art through Music project. You all came up with some really great ideas to make the lesson better. I will definitely take your ideas to use the next time I do this lesson. If you thought of anything else please post it on the blog! I can't wait to see what the other groups came up with on Tuesday!

Thanks!

Kristen

Project

I have enjoyed collaborating with my group to come up with a creative project for the class to participate in. I am very excited to present our project and hope to get a lot of feedback. I am interested in hearing ideas to make the lesson better and ways of adapting this lesson to fit different subject areas that could make it a cross-curricular activity. I have used this idea in my classroom several times, and the kids really love it. It helps me to get to know their creative process, so I hope it does the same for our class. Thanks to Jessica and Jon for being so great to work with and for having wonderful ideas that have enhanced the project!

Project

I have really enjoyed working on this experiential project with Sarah, Margie, and Cynthia. I'm excited for Tuesday when it all comes together. Though I had to be out of town last class, I've kept in touch with my group members in order to find out and contribute to how the process was changing and growing. We are lucky in this group that we have known each other for a few semesters, are friendly with one another, and typically keep in touch outside of class fairly consistently.
As Margie noted, the idea for this project came from an acting exercise I did with Nan Smithner in my "Creative Play" class in the educational theatre department. The group really liked the idea of free conversational improvisation, and so we have worked to musicalize it and make it an engaging experience for the class. I don't want to say too much here because I don't want to give away all the fun, but we are very much looking forward to sharing this work with the class, and seeing where it goes!
-jess

Sound Poems

The idea of our project came from a spark: The avant-guard movement called DADA and its will to destroy every previous concept of art and beauty. Its anarchic push, its will to redefine art (therefore creativity?) fascinated us.
We were very much inspired by the poems written by Tzara and the collage idea that lies behind their composition. We ended up with discovering the so-called sound poems and we are still trying to include them in our project.

We'll start with poetry, we will include music, we will be Dada!


The overview on wikipedia explains the purpose of this movement:

"Dada was an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. For many participants, the movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity—in art and more broadly in society—that corresponded to the war.

Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. For example, George Grosz later recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest "against this world of mutual destruction.

According to its proponents, Dada was not art, it was "anti-art". Everything for which art stood, Dada represented the opposite. Where art was concerned with traditional aesthetics, Dada ignored aesthetics. If art was to appeal to sensibilities, Dada was intended to offend. Through their rejection of traditional culture and aesthetics, the Dadaists hoped to destroy traditional culture and aesthetics.

As Hugo Ball expressed it, "For us, art is not an end in itself ... but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in."

The Balance, Creativity vs. Structure

I found our conversation in class very interesting. I had some thoughts as I was leaving the other night and would like to share them.

The balance between creativity and structure is one that I encounter (and I assume all teachers encounter) on a daily basis.

As I stated in class before, and I state to my friends often in less constructive contexts, I am deeply unsatisfied by Gymboree Corporation's approach to education in general. As I work there I am finding more reasons to loathe being a teacher for such a misguided corporation. I could rant about their short comings constantly (and I do in my personal blog).

From a creative standpoint, I marvel at how the corporation manages to both harbor and squalsh creativity at the same time. It is a truely facinating phenomenon. On one hand, they do provide opportunities for children to complete activities that are creative within it's lesson plan structure. At the same time, it limits its educators to doing exactly what they say. In more strict Gymborees (not mine) teachers are not allowed to deviate from the lesson plan for any reason. If the online description says your quacking like a duck, you quack like a duck or you are fired. One could argue that in limiting the teachers, we are by extension limiting the education of these children to something that is corporately driven. It is the educational equivilent to eating at McDonalds. The food is satisfying and everyone likes it, but it isn't food that is high in nutrients or organic materials. I can see the benefit of freeplay that is directed, but I struggle with this idea that every class of children world wide in a specified age group will successfully learn from the same lesson plan for a given topic. Teachers who are familiar with their particular groups of kids should be given the opportunity to think out their process for teaching and make it something that reflects their own knowledge of the material.

Now I know that in reality the entire planet doesn't work in a Gymboree, but the fact that this corporation exists and is sucessful is a direct reflection on the direction that education is going. Standardized tests to define ability and national standards are arguably the beginning.

My Video

Hello Again!

My video was made by creating a random picture in "paint" and taking a series of snap shots of my progress. I slideshowed all of the pictures and timed them to fit the work of music I wanted to use "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini" by Rachmaninov.

I think that the video describes my creative process in it's entirety. I never know exactly how it is going ot turn out, but I figure out where it is going as a move along. Usually I get too far along in the process, decide I hate the whole thing and start again freshly. After what seems like a million retries, I get it to exactly where I want it to be.

The file saved on my comp as a WIMP file, so I spent a lot of my free time trying to convert it. I failed miserably, so when I figure it out I will post it for all of you to see.

Group Project

Hello All,

My group is planning a fabulous experience for all of you. The collaboration has been easy going, and has developed in it's style and formulation over the last several weeks. Jess(ica Goldberg)brought in an idea from an improvisational activity she had done in another context, and all of us built on that idea from our various perspectives. Sara's theatrical experience helped us to plan the activity in a way that would incorporate everyone at the same time, and also translate the idea from an acting exercise to a musical activity. Cindy's ability to organize details kept us on target with how we would execute the legistics of our idea, down to every possible contingency. My creative process was able to work extremely well with all three of my group members, and I look forward to see our idea implemented in the classroom. I think it is cool how our various personalities added to the idea and have allowed it to grow and change.

Our experience will be defined solely by the creative nature of our class. There is no way to predict a precise outcome. I love that we will be creating and improvising together without much outside assistance. I feel like it is the creative process in it's most organic form.

Group Project

Working on this group project has been really fun. Everything just sort of came together organically. As Nicole mentioned, our idea started as a joke about William's wardrobe video. It sort of snowballed from there pretty quickly into our live-action video game idea, "Super Will: A Creative Adventure". Since we knew pretty quickly what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it, we just needed to work out the technology issues. Since we are using Skype as our medium, it comes with its own challenges which we have had to navigate through. All in all, I think it will be a great experience and I'm looking forward to being part of the final product. Since it is truly a creative journey, there is no way of knowing what the end product will be and I think is one of the most important and exciting thing about these sort of projects.

Fantastic video: day&night

Please, have a look to this video by Pixar:

http://www.gamaniak.com/video-5484-day-and-night-pixar.html

it's amazing...

hugs for everyone!!

g r o u p * p r o j e c t

I really like the idea that our group has, which is to incorporate poetry, graphic design and music based on one of the creative movements in the history. The idea came from Laura's interest on the subject. All the members in our group have been putting together many ideas into the project. We all agreed that we want to make our presentation be engaged by everyone and also we want to lead our classmates to use their creative artistic sense. We alloted time for each of our rolls in this project and we have brought more ideas into it. I am happy that I can participate and investigate with the members in this group. We are excited to share our ideas and also see the ideas of the other groups.

Our Group Project

I have really be enjoying working with my group on our musical experience. We came up with our basic idea fairly early on, but to be honest I think we first talked about it as a joke. Then as we discussed the possibilities, we realized that we actually could do what were were talking about. It was a very collaborative process, and I'm not sure how we landed on the final idea. Once we had a more fleshed out plan for what we would do, I started writing down the things we came up with that would need to be typed up and set up in the classroom on presentation day. Jess and I are going to be the classroom facilitators, which I'm excited about. We will help direct the action and facilitate the participation of the rest of the class. I'm enjoying working out the kinks in our process. We had to figure out some technology issues, but it seems like it's going to work out. I think a rather lo-fi look and feel make sense for our presentation and the technology we're using. I really like putting things together using trial and error, and I feel like even if we have some glitches with the computer programs or internet connection, it will work with the kind of experience we want to create.

My video

I had fun creating my video! And since you all know what my creative process looks like now, you know exactly what I went through as I made it. it made sense for me to do a flow chart inspired video because my process is very much like that. Once I get started, i have to complete a large part in order before I let myself stop. I prefer to work in large sections rather than completing things bit by bit. I admit that I am a procrastinator, but I generally work pretty efficiently once I get started. i was pleased with the way the video played in class. I meant for it to be humorous because I enjoyed the playfulness I felt while I made the video. It was fun to create a video under the very conditions I was trying to represent. Watching other people's videos in class made me think about what they must have gone through when making their own videos. It seemed like many of them also found the humor in the experience.

Group work

My group has been great in communicating and clarifying ideas. I noticed in this beginning process that we all have our own rhythm individually when put together, just snowballs into more ideas. I think we all feed off each other's process, so it's been a wonderful exprience so far.  I recorded the information that was discussed, along with Sara. :)

I think we have a great 'experience' to share with the rest of the class, so I look forward to producing a creative environment as well as participate in everyone else's presentations.

My creative process

I never really thought about my creative process before this class. I have always gone through life following the rules and "thinking inside the box." The assignments given so far have challenged me to use my creativity. I have learned a lot about myself through these assignments and look forward to presenting the next project to the class.

I really enjoy learning from everyone in the class as well. We all come from different backgrounds and I find that these projects help us to understand each other on a more personal level. I hope that we continue doing projects that make us test the boundaries of our creativity, and which we can learn from each other.

have a wonderful and creative weekend~

I am at the Newark International Airport and waiting for my flight to Vancouver, BC.
I need my winter stuff there. I am cold~ hahah..

Just wanna say:
"Have a wonderful, amazing, and creative weekend."

will miss all of you

I feel so excited about our project

I feel so excited about our project.

I believe that it is a great activity that we can observe how differently individual perceives music in different contexts and translates his/her perception in text or visual image. I am "not" going to explain much here on the blog. It's a secret. :) sh~~

I am so excited about the project...
Thanks to my colleagues Kristen and Jessica.
You are awesome!!!

Have a great week and see you all next Tuesday~



Jon Lee
www.jonleemusique.com

PS: congratulation~ Sara~ :)

video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EQpWNpPafE

This is my video about creative process.

Enjoy.

Amanda

Schools Kill Our Creativity

I strongly agree with that schools kill our creativity.
Schools are places that frame their children and/or us in a certain context
and stop us thinking out of the context or box. Of course, there are many advantages that some people may argue with; however, I question if those benefits gained from school are somewhat related to developing and exploring our human creativity.

What I have noticed from my experience as both a student and teacher is that schools are places that demand (or obligate) their students to think, talk, and act "uniformly." In other words, our schools are existing for social control and order.

I believe that our human creativity is unlimited. It is indeed unlimited!
Our extremely structured society such as schools and work places stop us thinking in multiple and creative ways. We teachers or educational leaders often say that we are to nurture our students' creativity and potential. Unfortunately, however, it is just a lip-service; in practice, we do not actually care about our students' creative growth or development so much. Do you? Have you? Please tell me how you have done it in our school system. I wanna hear it!

What and how can we do? especially in our super formalized and/or structured school setting. Thanks so much, Dr. Gilbert. This class has led me, at least, to start thinking of and considering how we can nurture our students' creativity including "myself."


____________________________
creativity |ˌkrē-āˈtivitē|noun
the use of the imagination or original ideas, esp. in the production of an artistic work.

Do you agree with the definition?
I do somewhat, but not entirely. Have a great day~
____________________________


Jon Lee
www.jonleemusique.com

My Inspiration explained...

I have enjoyed the class and the creative process itself. I don't think I ever took this much time consciously experiencing my self awareness as a person, an artist, a musician, a teacher...

During the video process, I chose the next closest passion to music which is art and photography.  I went through my old photographs and decided to string them along with other various photos that struck my attention.  I noticed that I placed all the photographs in a sequential order starting from my initial beginning spark which is my heart.  From there grows out all the diverse inspirations that captivate me which include nature, traveling to Europe, piano/music, and now New York.  The song choice came into play as I tried to transition photos according to the break or climax phrases in the piece. 

I really enjoyed figuring out how long to extend the photographs and in which direction they were presented all according to the timing of the piece.  This experience grew my interests more into filim scoring which I would love to dabble in one day, but I felt very accomplished to go through the process of pretending to be one for a moment :)

creativity through music ..

Hello everyone! This class has turned out to be pretty intersting for me. I guess it is helping my creative side to come out of hiding. Well, the reason why I chose to make the short movie is to show where my ceaivity comes from. Music has been part of my life since I was a child, especially piano. In the first segments I wanted to show the influence piano has on my life. I wanted to show a famous Korean musician that I admire and also a clip of one of my recitals. In the latter segments I wanted to show the influence that music in general has in my life includig Korean cultural music and the different types of western music. All the different types of music have shaped me into the person I have become. I wanted to express or rather show the class what inspired me to be creative. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that music was definetely a big part of my inspiration.

My video - a "Healing Environment"

AKA, my apartment that I renovated/redecorated a couple years ago. Based on before-and-after images that I took!

Motivational Video

Motivational Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmTxr7OsPj0