My failure was born out of two rookie mistakes (which I will no doubt recreate before my art life is over):
- Putting up very new, unfinished, and mentally unprocessed work for an important critique with strangers
- Not setting the direction of the conversation, but rather limply waiting for them to tell me what they saw
I think post-apocalyptic fantasies are a roundabout way of ignoring or riffing on what I consider to be colossal problems of culture. What is the desired outcome? To change people's behavior. Why garments? I believe costume gives us permission to behave differently.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsp9aimhiq-1Me8fdFttjT4I4PCxaDaRArfoGuoaUSO49O3URHbaz0DqtSwdF5USmNOiBurSP1s8FGzbqX4Kc2Tb0ARDj3y98zN5ctsDzlW2DFW34zatkOH6BGpfr1eEr1UFJoEV2rUyXg/s200/2839933286_0328fe4fb5_o.jpg)
This time around I hope to work more towards the essence of things in hopes that the end form (a book, a show, a website, a farm?) will
In my graduate review this fall we talked about applied and non-applied research. Tony Brock expanded the topic to include experiential research, which I take to be a sublime crossing over of disciplines and methods. Dancing about population control, running data animations to compliment short stories, bringing in the spiritual to look at the molecular, and so on. That’s just the thing. I see in my current topic (mapping local fruit and nut trees) the potential to develop entire systems. In order to do that I need to consider the topic and ideas from multiple vantage points and frames of reference. How do botanists consider these plants? What historical significance do they have? Where do they fit in various chemical cycles? I also worry that I will become enamored of the labyrinth-like process of research and fail to recognize when it is time to put down the book and make something.