Best of the week: Exit Through the Gift Shop

This week we finished the film "Exit Through the Gift Shop" it was a very interesting movie, I really enjoyed all the art that was shown because it was street art. I don’t really know much about street art and i wasn’t familiar with it but seeing it in the film opened my eyes to a different form of art. I thought everything they were doing was brilliant, especially Banksy. I liked that Banksy's identity was hidden and that the world didn’t know much about him. He was a very talented street artist and I believe his passion for art was remarkable.

            Another important character in the film was Thierry. He loved filming street artists and following them along their journeys of the night. I think it was incredible how Thierry was able to make his own art and become so successful. He had never done it before, and he decides to just up and do this kind of art but I feel like he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. In a way I see what he did as disrespectful and kind of frustrating for other artists who have a passion for what they do. It was a great film because it gives a good insight on street art through the story of Thierry and Banksy.

            The film made me understand street art, and most importantly how passionate some artists are. It’s a great experience seeing these artists at work, and now the next time I see art on the streets of Chicago I’ll feel more informed about what lies behind that art.

Metacognition: Mashup

I never knew what a mashup was until this assignment. I  thought that it would be hard to meet all the requirements as in finding quotes, in class reflections, the  use of other media or art, and passages from other works in the humanities curriculum just to define one simple word.

As I was looking over my annotations in Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, I kept my mind open and remembered to take pauses to let the more complex ideas come to me naturally instead of forcing it.

Having the natural flow of complex ideas really helped in narrowing down my selection of words. I ended up doing my mashup on the word love. I choose the word love because I wanted challenge myself by exploring a word I don't take time in my everyday life to think about. One of my goals was to explore this simple word, that is often over used, and find deeper meanings for it.

While creating my mashup and searching for outside sources I realized that love ended up being not so challenging. One thing I really noticed was that love is everywhere in the world and that there is many different kinds of love. Ranging from: the unconditional love a mother has with her child, to the love two people share, to the things we love in our everyday life.  

What I really liked about this assignment was how one word can be expressed through various types of media. I really enjoyed how this project differed from every other type of project, mashups are a good way of making a simple topic or subject into a bunch of complex ideas. I like how a mashup can be interpreted differently by every person, because it allows people to create their own explanations and ideas. Over all, I wouldn't change much about this project, I would have liked to do this over the course of the whole humanities curriculum.