Showing posts with label fall09. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fall09. Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Topic Musings, Part II
This is going to need a lot more research to gain focus/clarity/complexity, but this is the idea I'm entertaining right now:
This is by no means an original enterprise (hopefully I'll find an angle that is) but how about I combine the science thing with the proust thing (and, zomg, the food thing too - madeleine study! but let's not get carried away just yet...)? Something along the lines of investigating the neuroscience/psychology behind proust's madeleine and involuntary memory. again, this has been done before. but we'll see what further exploration produces. one source says that only smell and taste are directly connected to the hippocampus (center for long-term memory) while the other senses (sight, touch, hearing) first go through the thalamus, which processes incoming stimuli and is associated with consciousness (or something) and are therefore less reliable when it comes to accurate recall. but then, my own proustian madeleines are strongest with music so what's that about? we shall see.
we shall see...
/UPDATE/
I just had a thought. Tomorrow morning I have to go to central park to watch my friend run 18 miles, after which I will be uncharacteristically north of midtown. So I could theoretically visit my ol' college campus for the first time since 2007 (gah!) and both take advantage of the library's resources and trigger my own P.M. (kinda. okay it's not really the same thing at all but it's still confronting a memory after a long time - just let me pretend it's relevant or I'll be too afraid to go). I duno, worst comes to worst I can find the million filled stamp cards I have but never turned in for free coffee.
This is by no means an original enterprise (hopefully I'll find an angle that is) but how about I combine the science thing with the proust thing (and, zomg, the food thing too - madeleine study! but let's not get carried away just yet...)? Something along the lines of investigating the neuroscience/psychology behind proust's madeleine and involuntary memory. again, this has been done before. but we'll see what further exploration produces. one source says that only smell and taste are directly connected to the hippocampus (center for long-term memory) while the other senses (sight, touch, hearing) first go through the thalamus, which processes incoming stimuli and is associated with consciousness (or something) and are therefore less reliable when it comes to accurate recall. but then, my own proustian madeleines are strongest with music so what's that about? we shall see.
we shall see...
/UPDATE/
I just had a thought. Tomorrow morning I have to go to central park to watch my friend run 18 miles, after which I will be uncharacteristically north of midtown. So I could theoretically visit my ol' college campus for the first time since 2007 (gah!) and both take advantage of the library's resources and trigger my own P.M. (kinda. okay it's not really the same thing at all but it's still confronting a memory after a long time - just let me pretend it's relevant or I'll be too afraid to go). I duno, worst comes to worst I can find the million filled stamp cards I have but never turned in for free coffee.
Rambling (Topic Brainstorming)
OK! I'm back for another semester with Gen, and we are choosing a topic to govern the next few projects. This week kind of got away from me and I realize it's way too late to still be nailing down a subject, but here I am, so let's just plow through.
One of my first thoughts for a topic was food-related. Food is probably one of the top 3 most purely pleasurable things in my life. I'm going through this rebellion phase with it, though. I grew up literally one block from Alice Waters, so she's pretty much been doctrine for me my whole life. And now in the midst of this whole food activism movement with sustainability and slow food and the locavore thing and buzzword buzzword buzzword, I'm feeling a bit conflicted. I realize that this kind of rebellion comes from impulses of reclaiming ownership and identity. I fully support all the ideas of Alice's food revolution and they have been a part of my identity since before I was old enough to have real opinions on these things. So it seems almost petulant to say but now that it's become co-opted away from me by this Movement i think i feel the need to reclaim my own sense of identity by separating and distinguishing myself just a little. The Movement has taken on this superior, dogmatic, self-righteous, elitist tone that really irritates me right now and I find myself retreating to the hedonistic, indulgent side of food that centers on the pleasures of it rather than the politics. But ANYWAY. In a way it's too personal and too topical at the same time so I don't think I want to work with it now.
I had also thought about doing something with the sense/memory trigger phenomenon, since the power and intensity of it has always fascinated me, but Proust already wrote that thing about the madeleine and if I were to do something with it it would probably come out as more of a fine art project than design.
So idea number 3. I love biology. Wouldn't want to be a biologist. But I love biology. What better way to engage in interesting fields you would never actually participate in than through graphic design? And biology produces a lot of information that requires visual organization/representation. And I really dig charts. This all sounds pretty good. So now I'm going to go think about this some more and figure out something specific.
(When did it become this late in the afternoon??)
One of my first thoughts for a topic was food-related. Food is probably one of the top 3 most purely pleasurable things in my life. I'm going through this rebellion phase with it, though. I grew up literally one block from Alice Waters, so she's pretty much been doctrine for me my whole life. And now in the midst of this whole food activism movement with sustainability and slow food and the locavore thing and buzzword buzzword buzzword, I'm feeling a bit conflicted. I realize that this kind of rebellion comes from impulses of reclaiming ownership and identity. I fully support all the ideas of Alice's food revolution and they have been a part of my identity since before I was old enough to have real opinions on these things. So it seems almost petulant to say but now that it's become co-opted away from me by this Movement i think i feel the need to reclaim my own sense of identity by separating and distinguishing myself just a little. The Movement has taken on this superior, dogmatic, self-righteous, elitist tone that really irritates me right now and I find myself retreating to the hedonistic, indulgent side of food that centers on the pleasures of it rather than the politics. But ANYWAY. In a way it's too personal and too topical at the same time so I don't think I want to work with it now.
I had also thought about doing something with the sense/memory trigger phenomenon, since the power and intensity of it has always fascinated me, but Proust already wrote that thing about the madeleine and if I were to do something with it it would probably come out as more of a fine art project than design.
So idea number 3. I love biology. Wouldn't want to be a biologist. But I love biology. What better way to engage in interesting fields you would never actually participate in than through graphic design? And biology produces a lot of information that requires visual organization/representation. And I really dig charts. This all sounds pretty good. So now I'm going to go think about this some more and figure out something specific.
(When did it become this late in the afternoon??)
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