Making Connections

Sound art has a lot of classroom potential! Not only is it obscure enough to trigger students’ interest, but it also opens them up to experimental forms they might never have encountered, challenging traditional Western understandings of music. It also encourages slowing down and deep listening in our fast-paced, screen-centered lives. Students get to learn the basics of audio recording and editing software while incorporating their lived experiences, cultures, and environments through field recordings. Additionally, sound art could be more accessible to some students, as it can be independent or collaborative, offers an alternative sensory experience to visual and text-based media, provides an outlet for processing emotions, and supports identity exploration. Lastly, sound art connects with interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology.

Digital Collage similarly has a lot of classroom potential. Many youth are interested in learning to use programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate, or GIMP, and digital collage is a great way to learn the basics. Students can also bring their lived experiences and interests into the process by using their own photography, digital drawings, and materials they find online and offline, encouraging identity exploration. With digital collage, students do not have to print out materials and can easily undo mistakes once they get the hang of their chosen program. Being able to undo mistakes, remix, and make changes might encourage some students to take risks, further developing visual literacy. Lastly, digital collage can spark discussions about copyright, fair use, etc., important information to understand.

Video

Video as a media process feels very intimidating to me. I don't typically post on social media, and I don't enjoy being filmed, so my experience with it is very limited. It was also difficult to find a YouTube video I felt comfortable recreating, since most of the content I consume features someone who is fully visible on camera. I originally planned to make a short informational video about a few minerals in my rock collection, but couldn't find a good reference, so I turned to my friends for help! Here's what one of them sent me:

TikTok by @_ratatuje0.

View here: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThb6cQ9x/

This is the video I ended up picking for my inspiration. I cannot resist a silly rat video, and neither can my friends, so Ikea rat dancing to Electric Zoo from SpongeBob it is! Besides, I have a few of the same rat plushies, so it was perfect! My first idea for recreating the original video was to add another dancing rat each time the music repeated. However, after downloading the video, I realized how short it was. The music loops about every 3 seconds and repeats 3 times, creating about 10 seconds of rodent screen time. My video needed to be 30 seconds, so I realized I would need to loop the music 9-10 times. Knowing that, I made a list of what the rat plushies would do during each loop to create a little narrative. Then I leaned my camera on a box, tied fishing line to all my characters, and began filming. Afterwards, I edited my videos in CapCut and added effects to enhance the chaos of the party scene.

Electric Zoo After Dark

Audio source: YouTube video by SpongeBob SquarePants - Topic.

View here: Electric Zoo - YouTube

I would say this project aligned most closely with my second learning objective: expanding my artistic practice and media literacy. Would I call my video creation a fine artistic achievement? Ummm... no. But I tried something new, created something joyful, and learned a bit about CapCut, which is super popular for creating TikTok videos. Incorporating CapCut into art instruction could be a wonderful interest-based learning approach for many students. 

Reading Takeaways

Image credit: Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

Digital Storytelling in the Elementary Classroom. Youtube Video, 5 min. June 13, 2011, Oregon Writing Project at University of Oregon. Access Link

It was awesome to hear from the kids themselves how much they love digital storytelling, and it's clear how much they've learned from the process. Each child was excited, engaged, and seemed to enjoy sharing their new knowledge with the camera. It’s also just impressive that they learned audio and editing skills. I never had any projects like that in elementary or middle school, but I remember being curious about that kind of stuff due to shows like iCarly and the stop-motion videos I used to watch.

TEDx Talk. Emily Bailin, 2014, 17 min: The Power of Digital Storytelling

Emily Bailin’s Ted Talk was powerful, and that’s just the point. I can see the opportunity digital storytelling provides youth to express themselves, explore, share their own experiences and creations, and feel heard. Not only that, but stories are often captivating and effective ways to share information. As a teacher, applying digital storytelling in my lesson plans and the way I convey information might make learning more engaging for students.

Peppler, K. A. (2014). New creativity paradigms: arts learning in the digital age. Intro and Chapter 2.

This reading brought up some conflicting thoughts for me. I love interest-driven learning, but with recent research raising alarm bells about the effects of social media and screen time on youth’s cognitive development, I feel conflicted about how much we should use certain technologies in schools. If youth spend much of their free time on technology, should we increase screen time by introducing it in classrooms? I don’t have the answer, but I suspect it’s somewhere in the middle. It was very interesting to read about how new and developing technologies were viewed in the education sphere in the early 2000s and 2010s, when I was growing up.

[Video] Ableton. (2018, January 9). Katie Gately: How much can you feel?YouTube, 14 min. Access Link

Listening to Katie Gately talk about her music and creative process brought back many memories from my undergrad, when I experimented with soundscapes and acoustic ecology. I grew up learning classical music on the cello and singing in choir, and although I listened to many genres, this was the first time I heard music so experimental. It was exciting and freeing to learn about sound in such a new way. I really think incorporating sound exploration into teaching would be an amazing experience for kids, opening them up to the world of sound editing, potentially unfamiliar music, and simply the act of deeply listening to their surroundings. In Processes and Structures, Judy encourages us to experiment with and get to know both conventional and unconventional materials. Soundscapes feel like the sound version of that.

Scanography

At Home Experimentation

Materials: Plastic stencils, black paper, color-changing lamp

Since I was sick again this week, I decided to do a little practice at home to get the hang of my scanner, as I had never used it before. For these scans, I layered 4 plastic stencils on the scanner bed and moved a color-changing lamp across the scanner's side and top in different ways. For some of the scans, I introduced a black piece of paper, hoping it would help the lamp's colors pop with different settings. That didn't really work out with my scanner, but I still got some interesting results that remind me of sheet music!

Series 1

Materials: Ikea rat plushie, packing tape, my hand

For my homework, I gave up on my lamp and stencils and decided to take a new route with materials that felt more personally meaningful. I have been thinking a lot about my childhood as I study to become an educator. As a kid, I had undiagnosed ADHD and would get very anxious at school. I felt different than the other kids and was bullied for my interests, especially my love of rodents. When I moved in 3rd grade, I decided to suppress parts of my identity in order to fit in, even changing the name I went by for several years. Hence, for series 1, I focused on themes of restriction, anxiety, and control. Through a repetitive constrained gesture, Series 1 explores the emotional pressure of conforming and the tension it creates within students who feel they must hide to be accepted.

Series 2

Materials: cut plastic binder inserts, Ikea rat plushie, my hand

Series 2 is a direct response to Series 1, focusing on self-acceptance, flexibility, and love. The combination of kind gestures between a hand and a stuffed toy, and the soft, colorful layers enveloping them, reflects the importance of empathy, trust, and supportive relationships in both personal growth and educational settings. This process also aligned with my personal learning objectives by expanding my new media toolkit and reinforcing my interest in connecting digital and familiar physical materials. By introducing students to new media, educators can expand opportunities for emotional expression and identity exploration, helping foster a more inclusive and supportive classroom environment.

Bonus!

Dancing rat GIF!

Sound Composition

Gigi · Mundane Motions

When I first read our course syllabus and saw we would have a week on Sound, I was like, “No way!” In undergrad, I took two courses focused on sound and music technology: “Soundscapes” and “Acoustic Ecology”. In these courses, we created very similar sound compositions using both found and created sounds which is why you'll see other uploads on my SoundCloud.

Because of my previous experience, I thought this week would be a piece of cake. I was wrong. 5 years ago, when I made all my soundscapes, I used GarageBand and Logic Pro. Now that I have a PC, using those programs would be impossible. Instead, I decided to try Audacity. Not only is it free, but it works on both Mac AND Windows, making it a more accessible resource for schools! I watched a few tutorials and asked my brother for help, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out Audacity without a dedicated music tech expert helping me step by step. To avoid students encountering similar issues, I would dedicate a class session to learning the program before having them work on their compositions in the next session, so they could easily receive in-person assistance.

I also ran into trouble with how I approached making my recordings. I recorded audio on my phone (no issues there), but rather than making lots of individual recordings of purposeful sounds, I chose to take 3 long recordings of my morning routine and my 12-minute outdoor excursion. My reasoning for this was that longer recordings would better capture the atmosphere of the spaces I inhabited, but picking through them in Audacity was time-consuming and inefficient. After 2 hours of cutting down my recordings and labeling individual sounds, I gave up and decided to pivot. I looked at the length of my first track after editing, 1:27, and then spliced every remaining track at that same exact time. All the excess audio that went past 1:27, I pasted into new tracks until I had 14 tracks of the same length. After compressing all the audio, I added fades at the beginning and end, then called it a day. Though the layering of the sounds in my composition ended up more random than individually thought out, I feel they somehow work with the prompt, creating a more natural soundscape of my environment.

Fantastical Landscape Digital Collage

Artwork by Gigi Bashaw. Balloon image: Siora Photography on Unsplash.

My digital college began as an experiment but slowly became a way for me to revisit and reimagine a childhood experience through a fantastical landscape. I chose to use Photoshop for this assignment because I had experience with it in high school and hoped I’d be able to adapt quickly. Luckily, my mom had an Adobe account I could use, but I still needed to look up a beginner digital collage tutorial before I tried making anything of my own (here’s the one I used: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8QuSjhmvV8&t=67s). After learning the basics, I gathered over 100 landscape photos from my Photos app, all taken over the years. I uploaded many of them to Photoshop and experimented with different layers to see which images interacted well visually.

As per the advice in the YouTube tutorial I watched, I gathered more photos from my phone, selected and masked them all, and moved them around to see what I liked. Ultimately, I stuck with a photograph of three people, my stepdad, stepbrother, and me, when I was five, running into the distance, which became the heart of the collage. I was still unsure what else to place in the foreground, so I went through a few iterations. One of them you can see here:

I ended up searching for an image of a blue balloon on Unsplash because in the original photograph from my childhood, my mom, who took the photos that day, was holding a blue balloon that kept making it into the frame. I drew the ribbon on the balloons using a brush tool and then saved my work. Unfortunately, after saving, I realized I didn’t like the placement of all the balloons, but I can't change them because I saved incorrectly. Although I don’t hate the outcome of my work, I felt frustrated at my mistake and often wished I were creating with physical materials. Despite this, I acknowledge the uniqueness of digital collage, which allows the artist to use images without compromising their quality during printing.

Personal Learning Objectives

On my About Page, I talked a bit about my current experience level with different technologies, as well as how much I look forward to refamiliarizing myself with tools I’ve used before and learning to apply them in classrooms. This remains true and aligns with Learning Objective 4: Education, Curriculum, and Teaching in the syllabus. As someone who has not yet taught, I am very curious about how new technologies can be used in art education; How does technology fit into teaching? I am also very excited to expand my artistic practice through what I learn in this class (Learning Objective 1: Art & Media Literacy). I am especially interested in Session 13, Basic Circuitry. When I was around 7, I really enjoyed experimenting with the circuitry kits my brother and I had received for Christmas by combining them with other objects. This leads me to Learning Objective 7: Connecting All Materials. I really hope to connect the technologies I love from this course with more traditional art practices, like printmaking, much like I would combine my circuitry kits with other materials as a curious kid messing around in their basement.

Circuit kit I played with as a child

Image credit: Midwest Technology / Elenco Electronics