Week 3

What happened?
In the lecture we sat down as a group straight away.

We were given examples of "evolutionary" art, and told that it is a good source of creativity and in particular, experimental creation.

We were also told to visit an exhibition at the Tate Modern next week and see the work of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia (http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/duchampmanraypicabia/). Everyone in our group decided to go at the same time.

We then did a short quiz as individuals that made us think of a number, and then eventually end up with most people thinking of the same country and animal (follows a simple algorithm).

Then we were given some Plasticine again like in Week 1 and were told to make shapes as a group and pass them round to the next person in the group, who add to your shape. Our group did this a bit wrong and all contributed in our own way to one big piece, where in fact we were meant to just change the person's before shape in our own way (passed each shape round to the right).

In the workshop a member of our group introduced the others to the Blender 3D modeling program, which is very powerful open source freeware. Myself and another member of the group had a little go of it just to see what the basic controls were, and succeeded in making some very basic shapes and editing vertices etc.

After we had had this short try of Blender we looked at some pieces of work made using it, some of which were very impressive.

Then we had a discussion on the main features of the essay (historical, political references etc.), and started to put pieces of the research in the order that would make most sense and also make a start at expanding them into paragraphs.

Unfortunately one of the members of our group kind of voluntarily left during the workshop... he just sat far away from the group and interacted with another one. And also left before our group even started on the essay, without saying good bye. He best not try and get back in our group next week.


Thoughts, feelings, assumptions, beliefs, values, attitudes...
I was a bit annoyed that our group did the modeling clay task wrong. I am also annoyed that I have to pay £11 to go to an exhibition that i think has no relevance to the course or my studies. I am, however excited to be starting to learn a new piece of (free) software!


Reasoning and thinking behind actions and practices...
I think we did the modeling clay task wrong, because we were all agitated and distracted in the lecture, and so weren't paying full attention to what was being asked of us.


Evaluation
Good: The group made good progress on the essay and research, and also in learning new software. It was also good that the group acted more mature than previous weeks.

Bad: The group did not pay attention in the lecture, and so did the modeling clay task wrongly. Group member left.


Reconstruction
Listen more in lectures. Pay attention to group members more, to avoid losing any more people. (not that the person lost contributed much).