i am worn out!

i have been so tired this week! it's inexplicable. it's almost inexcusable. i was falling asleep in class today, literally falling! my head kept swinging to the side, my eyelids were stuck at half-mast, i was practically drooling from slack mouth. embarrasing. earlier this week i went to bed at 10 pm, to wake up at 7:30 am, work for an hour, then go back to sleep for another hour!

while i worry about my bouts of narcolepsy, i wanted to share some exciting developments in my project process!

first, a new title: "Revolutionary Praxis: Empowering Alternatives for Renewed Democracy" [thoughts? do you like it better than the last one?]

and, most exciting of all: i'm (tentatively) teaching an upper-level seminar next semester! yes, i'm currently in the process of designing the curriculum for a Western junior sem that will focus on democratic education, its history, theories, philosophies, practices, applications, and implications in social movements. the class will likely be called "Education for Social Change" and will feature creative projects and civic engagement projects. i'm excited to get started, and even more thrilled by the possibility of my "students" getting institutional credit for it, a class i hope is so fun they forget about grades all together!

it's nice to think of myself and my beliefs being couched within this institutional reward system and having it work in my favor, for once. it is a radical posture.

so, my class schedule for next semester (my last semester) is looking decidedly revolutionary:
5 credits of Senior Seminar (writing the thesis, no small task, to be sure)
3 credits possibly taking Social Work Policy (a class taught by a friend to the living wage movement, Dr. Alfred Joseph)
3 credits of independent study (to work with my mentor Nick Longo on creating and planning the aforementioned seminar)
3 credits TA'ing for the aforementioned Nick Longo in one of his first-year seminars, "Leadership for the Public Good"
=14 credits, a bare minimum for Miami in my final year here
(barring any exciting electives, such as Social Dance or Photography, ideas my friends and i are batting around as last hurrahs in undergraduate education)

if i weren't so tired, i'd do a backflip. //
i'd do a backflip if my back didn't still hurt from paddle-boating on the Potomac.
-stef

my take on the kuleshov experiment, with gnomes

i spoke with my media aesthetics professor today and she said i could try creating an internal conflict. this, rather than an explicit narrative arc, is more appealing, but also more difficult. i'm not interested in crafting a dialogue, but am more concerned with providing the images that will elicit the dialogue themselves. i'm fairly laissez-faire in my own affairs, why not be that way with my art?


i'm so picky. is that the sign of an artiste? or mis-direction?

---

i've decided this gnome project could take a Lev Kuleshov historical turn. for those who don't know, the Kuleshov experiment took the same shot of a man with a neutral expression and juxtaposed it with images of different things: food, a woman, a funeral, and found that ppl read different emotions into his expression, based on their own associations.

see a short clip from the experiment here:

since i am working with a non-expressive, fixed/static subject (geoff), the responsibility for emotive effect lies solely on me and my ability to manipulate the images in just the right way.

only instead of intercutting images, i'm using lighting and camera angle to create my effects.

you see what i mean?