Seminar 1

So I haven't been that great about keeping up with my progress from my Seminar class this semester at Watkins. The class is first of three along the way to senior thesis. It is comprised of rapid 2 week projects that are geared toward developing a critical practice, writing and research, and short deadlines. The work is usually not fully realized but each project is a possible jumping off point for future projects. Unlike seminar 2 which is more self-directed as far as the content of each project, seminar 1 is all about assignments given by our teacher Terry Thacker.

The first project was "In my sin/sinn" and we were required to deal with the sacred and profane through selection and use of cultural signifiers which we then interpreted as metaphors for greater aspects of our culture - specific to the here and now. We read parts of Roland Barthes Mythologies and Kracauer's Mass Ornament as research for the project. We also looked at Gerhard Richter's Atlas and gathered images for our own collaborative "atlas" of cultural signifiers. Such images included; hot chicken sandwiches, digital maps, cell phone snap shots of prefab architecture, and hillbillies. They were arranged by connections within the images and ended up looking similar to a page of google images.

I will follow this up with specifics about the project I completed and some writings about my idea soon.