The First Two Days of Class

My experience in this Interdisciplinary Arts class so far is fairly limited, as we've only had two classes. To be completely honest, a lot of the methodology is bizarre to me. I accept that creativity can be learned, of course, but I must admit that the idea of quantifying this process is foreign to me. I am curious for a bit of detail regarding how the data collected, meant to represent our creativity, is to be interpreted. Is every potential use for a drawing of an object or objects, or every interpretation of what an abstract drawing could be, of equal creative worth? Is creativity best evaluated by asking students to figuratively vomit their interpretations of images onto a page, and where does this situate the dadaist student who literally vomits on the page? How would one assess the difference between these two acts of creativity quantitatively? What of the student who uses their page as a pillow and dreams vividly, is that not a mind exercising creativity more fully than the student who fills out a dull test? What's the unit of measurement? I'm genuinely curious.

In the second class, we spent the day using lego as a tool to demonstrate what we feel the biggest problem facing the environment is. This was exciting to me, as I like playing with lego and haven't done so in a long time. I found myself using lego in a way I never had before, and I mean this in a couple senses. For one, I used the lego in a much less linear way than I used to, scattering pieces about semi-randomly as part of the construct. This, I think, is a contextual shift from using lego as a toy to using lego as a medium for art, if the two can really be divided. The other principle difference was the somewhat surprising turn towards using lego as a medium of communication, explaining what blocks, colours, and figures represented. This was, I must admit, difficult. At the time, I felt that civilization was the greatest threat to the environment, encompassing agriculture, urbanism, transportation, production of goods and waste, warfare, etc.; shorthand for the totality of the human reproduction of daily life. There's a shit-ton to unpack here, and I was not at all prepared to do that in front of the class. This is something that I'll keep thinking about. If one intends to use an orientation, how necessary is it to be able to defend it? There's a distinction that's important here, between orientation and position. Is a totality like civilization useful as a way of orienting oneself? Perhaps not in an engineering class. I don't know.

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J. Terrion