Author: Grace Margaret Currier

This interview was eye-opening for me. Yoko Ono, an artistic genius in every sense of the word, touches on how her conceptual pieces came to fruition. She discusses the difference between the art one can create in one’s mind, which knows no limits, and the art that can be produced as a result, which does have limits. For example, she says, “In your mind, you can be in touch with a six-dimensional world, if you wished. You can also mix an apple and a desk. It is physically impossible to mix an apple and a desk in the real world. But you can, in a conceptual world.” Despite this fact, she has constantly tried to break down those barriers by creating conceptual and objective rather than subjective art. She understands that art is dynamic, not static; it inevitably evolves over time. One of the most interesting concepts that she shared in the interview, in my opinion, was that of the “Wish Tree.” It is an ever-growing sculpture containing people’s wishes from all over the world. This was such a beautiful idea, and one that redefines art. It involves multiple people, and those people are what make the project unique. It is forever changing and evolving into something fresh and different. This interview allowed me to change my perspective on art and its creation; it is entirely possible to defy expectations and unspoken rules on what can and cannot be.  It was incredible to get a glimpse into the brilliant mind of the iconic Yoko Ono; although it was only a small look into her thoughts and ideas, they were thoughts and ideas powerful enough to incite change. 

This was an extremely enriching TED Talk; Christine was so eloquent in her communication albeit nonverbal.  My biggest takeaway from Christine’s message was that sound is not solely heard. For a deaf person, it can’t be heard, thus it is experienced through sight, touch and ideas.  Watching Christine’s expressions and presence while giving her talk helped me to understand how under appreciated the visual aspect of sound is. Although there is no verbal communication in ASL, it is possibly the most beautiful and vibrant language of all. With her art, Christine was able to combine her language (non-hearing) with music, an audio-centric language. She signs, “you don’t need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you need to be hearing to learn music.” So, she brilliantly decided to combine the two. Her message was one of inclusivity and awareness. Sound can be more than just heard, it can be experienced. 

The link to our comic can be found here.

The Process

Our initial idea for this project was for a character, living in a black and white world, to discover a door within his house that leads to a colorful alternate dimension (or several). We realized later that several dimensions is a bit ambitious, and given the limited time we had, we decided on just one. As someone who is very environmentally conscious, I wanted to have the storyline within the dimension be something along the lines of a conservation theme. So, once the character enters the ocean, he has to pick up trash / plastic that is polluting the water and affecting the sea life.  Evan and I worked together on both the visuals and the comic itself. Evan is extremely talented at Photoshop, so I was able to learn a lot from him in that respect. We are both first-time coders so the comic proved to be a huge challenge. Although not as advanced as we would have hoped, for beginners I would say our comic is something to be proud of. 

The Challenges

I spent so many hours trying to figure out how to incorporate Javascript functions into our code, but was unsuccessful more times that I can count. I also had a hard time figuring out how to use the onclick() function to clean up the plastic in the ocean, but again, was unsuccessful. Styling the buttons again proved to be a challenge that in the end, I was unable to overcome. We managed to incorporate audio (ocean sounds) when the character enters the ocean, which I was quite proud that we were able to pull off. All in all, although it may not look like it took a lot of time, Evan and I have invested countless hours into making this comic. I want to reiterate that it is not quite as advanced as our peers, but given our backgrounds of no prior experience, despite the challenges, we created a comic, and a pretty cool one at that. Here is one of many (over forty) pages of code: 

Conclusion

All in all, this project was definitely a learning experience. It was scary to create something like this from scratch, especially since I had so much trouble with the code. I am happy with the result, and although we may have had to make a few changes in the end, the product has achieved the goal we initially wanted it to. It is nowhere near perfect, but I have learned that in this class especially, it is impossible to expect perfection.