Sound As Material: Lesson Plans

Lesson 1:

Exploring everyday sounds by collecting and recording sounds from your day, then using them together to make a sound art piece that describes the fluctuations of your day from quiet to loud - could become an interesting reflection to how different parts of our lives are characterized through sound and the noises we are surrounded by.

In a way, this project reminds me a line exploration project we did at TCCS where students varied lines to show the ups and the downs of their day - characterizing what they ate for breakfast, the drive to school, etc all through a singular line. How might a single clip describe an event, a feeling, a reaction?

Lesson 2:

Unusual sounds; learning to mix and amplify unusual materials to create interesting samples to create different effects; end experience could be to play in an empty room to see how it changes the atmosphere. Given the space and equipment, it could be great to experiment how the sounds and sound pieces change given the place - whether through headphones or an empty room to a loud room. Students could examine the impact of the space in which they listen. The second part of this is using unusual materials to create sounds - examining how cardboard sound when it is rubbed with a pipe cleaner or the swishing sounds of bubble wrap being crumpled. Could the bubble wrap sound be amplified in an empty space to reflect the crunching of leaves? What could this say? Etc.

Homework #6 (4.) Lesson Plan: Old and New

Lesson Plan, Old and New: Video and Sculpture

Objective: Through the creation of a mixed media sculpture and experimentation with a digital video camera and editing, students learn to experiment with video manipulation and taking their sculptures one step further with digital media.

1. Mixed media sculpture. Using found and recycled objects, students will create a structure exploring view points - may be related to a house, or model (?). Exploring the materials and how they can create "spaces" that we will later explore with the camera.

2. Exploration: Change the Photo. Exploring the upclose - what happens when we zoom in? Crop things out? Using found images, students will experiment in their sketchbooks with different ways of cropping, rotating, and transforming (analog) with scissors. Students should reflect verbally or written about how the image and its meaning changed.

3. Video: Initial shooting. Students pair up and explore their sculpture with video - can incorporate moving objects but should focus on exploring how the sculpture changes from different perspectives, view points, and angles using the video camera.

4. Editing: Manipulation via iMovie. Students take footage from the sculpture and learn to manipulate and edit in iMovie, creating a new way of looking and interpreting their sculpture, perhaps structuring a narrative or else pairing the video with music to create an entirely new work.

Homework #6 (3.) Photography and Children

left: self-portrait no. 3, digital print, 2006

right: Cindy Sherman, Untitled #282, chromogenic print, 1993 (Carnegie Museum of Art)

One of my first assignments was to copy an artist's work in my undergraduate program - so I copied Cindy Sherman. It was my first time experimenting with photography. Although later on I began to use film, my first experimentations in photo were all digital. Though I think understanding manual/analog photography is very important, for children I believe digital can also be a great entry way to using photography as a medium.

Possible connections to students:

1. Self-portraiture and fantasy. Cindy Sherman's works can be used a reference here. Also my old professor, Elizabeth Raymer-Griffin, and, well, many more. Identity development is a major component of adolescence, and the idea of self-portrait and playing with both costume and deformity, restraint, and body expression are things students could really make their own through a series of lessons and practices. Digital or film, the main objectives would be to explore what a portrait is and how we can either play to it or disorient it. For example, in the Cindy Sherman photograph above, she is playing with the idea of direct gaze, as well as the mythical Medusa. Students might look at traditional paintings as reference, as well as other portrait photographers, both commercial and fine art (maybe they are both!)

Other artists: 

Carrie Mae Weems, The Louisiana Project

Nikki S. Lee

2. Documentary. Using photography to document their friends, family, and everyday lives. While we do use photography as a documentary format all the time now with our iPhones and digital cameras, it's often that we take many instead of just one - in the classroom, part of this would be learning to examine narrative through the use of only several pictures - placing constraints on how you might tell a story - perhaps only through object, or only through landscapes, and what can be conveyed if you mix them together. Another important component might be talking about layout.

Documentary/fine art photographers

The Teenie Harris Archive (CMoA)

Alec Soth

Dylan Vitone (panoramic imagery)

3. Journalism. Recording events but also using text - similar to documentary, but a different approach and could be integrated with Language Arts.

James Nachtwey

4. The Complete Imaginary - Creating scenes, sculptures, and works solely for photographic work, i.e. Thomas Demand. What changes when it is photographed versus as a sculptural work? 

Homework #6 (1.)

How I might alter the use of the image:

I liked the idea Annie had to make a three-dimensional form of the photograph using paper - I think it could be applicable to the idea I had about textures - after students photograph a texture, they find a way to translate it in a physical dimension - moving from digital to three-dimensional and perhaps back to digital.

Another idea:

"Continuing the image" - similar to short activities such as "what can you turn this shape into?," using the photograph as a starting point for a drawing / artwork where you use collage, paint, or pencil to continue the lines and spaces found in your photograph.

Homework #5: (3.) 4 Creative Ideas

Based on the photograph from class, here are some ideas on how to use the photo creatively.

1. Using photography to explore obscurity and abstraction; taking a space we see everyday and reinventing it by exploring different camera views, zooming in, or even zooming out. Questions could be, what is the space and object usually for? How might you change its purpose through a photograph? Alter its meaning and function?

2. Telephone booth as a space. This could be a collaborative group project where students are asked to reinvent the space knowing they must keep the structure of the telephone booth. In an imaginary scenario, students would be brainstorming and designing a new function for old telephone booths in a public space - what could it be used for? What could you add to it? remove? repurpose?

3. Cut-up: using previous photographs and cutting them up to create new, refracted images; self-portraiture could be interesting. Students could take photos of themselves and divide them up and intersperse within those images textures, colors, objects, etc. that reflect an aspect of themselves (or several aspects).

4.Surfaces: using photography to explore textures that are physical (foliage, material-based) versus those that are visual (2D prints, text, etc); could also use collage as a physical exploration.

(1.) My "piece of technology"

The piece of technology I brought into class was actually a "seeing" toy - a small trinket which you can look through and see "up" or "down" due to a small mirror which reflects the view.

During class, I started with the question of: what does this object do? it reflects sight from up to down while your eye is still looking "forward" - it creates an interesting disorientation of vision and the "physical" difference of direction and what is actually reflected.

With this in mind, I thought an interested lesson might be for students to create their own gadgetry that would interrupt, enhance, or alter their line of sight, in a hypothetical way.

Question: What is the act of seeing? What do we see?
- Things are backwards in mirrors
- Images can be obstructed by your blindspot
- Colors, refractions of light

If we were to enhance / change / alter our eyesight what could we do?
- see "all around"
- see behind you
- think about your "plane of vision"
-see vivid colors. see only black and white.

Think about:
eyes who see out of the sides of their heads (placement)
cropping (in movies)
carsten holler's upside down glasses
"rose-colored" glasses

Can experiment with:
Black bars (covering, cropping)
Mirrors, titlted
kaleidoscopes (multiplicity)
cellophane (color filters)
eye "extensions" - lens, depth
Magnifying glasses

These experiments could be documented through photography but it could be interesting for students to actually construct objects to "alter vision" or to play with vision (such as boxes to peep through, like nickelodeon animation, etc.

(4.) Media Art Teacher: artismessy.org

paper relief, by Petra

While the above work isn't exactly new media, I thought it was too awesome to resist. This instructor (name is unknown!) is an art teacher is Shanghai, China and an alum of the Art Education program at NYU Steinhardt. Her previous background was in graphic design, and she's been keeping a blog of her interests, student work, and other miscellany while teaching. Currently, she teaches a graphic design class, Art 2, and yearbook for high school students. 

Not only does she teach media art, she also has created different websites for each class to display their work on the web, inform them of their assignments, and include other links that might be useful for their projects - for graphic design for example, she has included free font sources, additional add-ons for photoshop and illustrator, as well as other online resources to help out her class. 

On her sites, you can see the different requirements for projects, objectives, and vocabulary. It's a great resource for us teachers and students alike.

Below, please find links to student works in digital media.

CD Cover Project: Graphic Design 1

More Paper Reliefs: Art 2 Class