Our Presentations

Art & Nature and Technology
This chapter was Cooper's choice so he took the lead with most of our discussion and the artist's selected to show in the powerpoint. The beginning turned into a discussion that kept spiraling and tangenting, people were expressing deep opinions and it was hard to get a word in to direct the conversation (as leaders). However, we managed to start with the presentation of the chapter. This took a long time and I felt could have been skimmed a little less in-depth but it wasn't my show. I tried to keep discussion on the topics that the book was talking about, and I asked the questions I wanted. A couple times my questions weren't really discussed but that's okay. We had thorough coverage of the main ideas, including the ethics of using nature and where's the line etc. There was a lot of meaty material and I think everyone got a good education on the topic. Oh, the article wasn't discussed much at all, we tried a little but it ended up not playing a large role in the conversation.

Art & Identity
This was the chapter I took more of a role in as it is an important subject to me and my work. Coop wanted to have the opening questionnaire and I think it was a very effective way to introduce the class to a complex topic. This time we went through the presentation without as much side conversations where it was difficult to pull everyone back, but the whole time there was conversation happening on each slide/artist. A couple of times I felt tripped up when a slide came up and I was left a bit out of things to say about it... sometimes when you're thinking about something too long you lose a bit of the details. I wanted to talk about Louise Bourgeois a little more and about that method of using identity in art but it was the end of the night and everyone had pretty much checked out by then. Improvements: I think I was lacking in artist examples from outside the text, somehow those seem more interesting in all the other presentations anyway. But in general I felt we had good discussion about all the main topics and I even learned some new things from the class.