Semester Reflections

Semester 3

Looking back on the Art Scholars’ Fall 2024 semester, I believe that art can reshape and recontextualize our understanding of our history and beliefs by having interactive experiences. For example, this semester we had a class where we had a guest come in and teach us African drumming and dances. In this class I got to understand more about a culture’s history and beliefs and then have a chance to experience some of their customs through music. In the past semester I also learned about different ways to initiate the creative process and the steps that go along with that process, and that it can be different for people as we saw in a video that we watched in class that was interviewing some artists on the matter. One more thing that we learned this semester was how to understand feedback and develop our projects accordingly. We learned this skill through the multiple classes we had where we had to share our project plans with our peers and TAs to get their perspective and see what aspects we need to improve.

One of the things that has really captured my attention in the past few months is Twin Peaks. This show was created by David Lynch to make a commentary on the state of TV, and how it seems that some shows and media tend to only use good vs evil scenarios with out really taking into consideration the impacts good or evil has on very character including the villains. Basically, Lynch wanted to demonstrate that you need to take the good with the bad, the yin and the yang, and I feel that this kind of message is an important part of understanding the world. You need to contrast the bad against the good in order to understand what moments are really good and perfect, without such a contrast you would take all good moments for contrast and having bad moments make those few good moments that much better. This message is related to all that is happening in the world today and shows us that even though the news and current events scare us and make times more tough, we will still be able to find moments of goodness. I feel that the Arts program has helped my understanding of this message by showing me to look at the artist and see where they're coming from to understand what their work means to them and how that could impact our enjoyment of it.

In my Mechanics 2 course, ENES 220, me and about five other students had to come together to create an I-beam that had to withstand a load of 1000 lbs. This connects to what we had learned in Arts because we had to have our own creative process to design and build this build so we would achieve our goal, and In Arts we learned about how to use and apply the creative process. Another reason this connects to what we experience in Arts is that we had to use collaboration and critiquing others ideas to develop our final product. In the end we were able to clear our intended goal and achieve a max load of 2410 lbs.

My fellow Art Scholars have helped improve my learning of things both in and out of class many times. In class, other Art scholars have been able to help me develop my Capstone project by giving my critique. Outside of class my fellow Art Scholar Noah has helped me with my creative process and I have helped him. We bounce ideas off each other until we get something that we like and is logistically possible. We have also helped each other in learning and understanding the engineering we are both taking.

This semester I have participated in many Arts Scholars events like colloquium, but also the field trip and craft & chats. In my field trip this year I got to experience a Castalian quartet, which was an interesting experience to see how a quartet with those instruments interacted with each other. In the few crafts and chats I attended I got to have time to talk with other Art Scholars and create a quick craft. I feel that the contributions that I had in these activities were enough for me.

I feel that being an Art scholar has not brought me into contact with any people or concepts that have challenged my previous beliefs.For me, I feel that most things that Art Scholars bring me into contact with have mostly aligned with my beliefs. However, I know that exploring the perspectives of others is an important thing to do to understand other people, and sometimes their beliefs align with your own and other times that can challenge each other. In Art Scholars, I have seen other’s perspectives and I feel that they mostly align with what I believe. For example, at the African Drumming workshop we did, the instructor told us they chose to focus on African Drumming because it was an outlet for them to relax and decompress themselves, and I feel that people have a freedom to choose how they relax, as long as it isn’t harmful. If someone relaxes by reading, paint, or African drumming they should be able to without judgement.