Assignment 5 - Quietest Place: By Maxine

                              

Assignment 5 - Quietest Place: 

Provided By Jace Clayton
Quietest Place:
and the Sounds that Surround it 

By: Maxine

Episode 5 Instructions:
1. Go outside and talk a walk from where you live or are staying at the moment. 
2. Continue until you've found the quietest place possible.
3. Take a moment to absorb it. Then document the place through photography or video. Upload it to your social media platform of choice using #theartassignment.

     So I set off for my Quietest Place last week on a Wednesday at about 2:00pm. My house is in a very busy aria of Toronto between two of the main roads. Just down the street from me they have been building things for a long time, and the construction noise is very loud. So I set off towards a small kids park, and faster than I expected all the sound around me was gone. I had thought I had found my spot when I sported the edge of a church yard. 

     It was a very simple yard, not very big there was a lonely play aria for me which felt even more empty than the tiny little park with one small bench and for some reason there wasn't grass just hay everywhere...      I decided when I got there that my walk had been really short (about eight minuets away and I had never seen the place before). So I decided I wanted to look at the Sound waves that the quietest place made and compare them to the waves of the road around it and my home.

     This is what the wave for the quietest place looked like. Which confirms to me that it was what it sounded like to me... though it seems that later when I returned that there was sound from somewhere that had started up because the final waveform is no where near as nice...
A few other interesting ones I will make video's off to show the sounds and the waveform...

                             
     The first one is the Quietest Place itself

                            
     The first busy road I hit when trying to walk around the aria.

                           

     And the big main intersection... I kinda love that you can hear the beeping of the cross walk... I guess that's the point, that it can be heard above everything else that is happening.

     The interesting thought I had when I was walking around the aria was that even though when I first got to the road everything was loud but as I keep walking I found it neat that I was able to hear softer things underneath the general noise that is everywhere in a city. You can hear your footsteps, you can hear the spinning wheels of a skateboard. I can even see it again when I go to edit what I filmed, for some reason the street my apartment is on was REALLY windy, but it was noise I didn't even hear at the time...

Camp NANO - a different kind of Art Project

Camp NaNoWriMo

By Maxine McCurdy

     So this is an aside while I (Maxine) edit my Assignment 5 and finish my last exam. NaNoWriMo is an event in November when writers (and non-writers) everywhere challenge each other to write a 50 000 word novel in a month. The idea is that many people will often have ideas that they "always wanted to make into a book" but they always intend to this this "when they have time" which turns out to be never... I can't even remember how I found it originally, the first year I attempted it was 2006 and again in 2007.
     I thought about it again when I was living with a friend who entered a similar challenge to write a novel in 48 hours (or somthing like that... I am not sure now what she was participating in and we no longer talk so... well... ya) and then returned to NaNo in 2010 when I was working on the correspondence highschool work in the small town of Nanaimo BC. I won that year, I think it was a combination of already having built up the discipline I needed (since I was teaching myself highschool classes so I could go to University), having the time to do it, and being very active on the NaNoWriMo forums as well as trying to get as many people as I could together in the small little Vancouver Island town (which turned out to be about eight to start 3 to finish...)
     Since that successful year I have started November somewhat hopeful (the most hopeful was in 2011 since then I start but know the way the month will end...) but get adsorbed by the last month of class by the end. Camp is the acknowledgment of the fact that for some people there really are forces out of their control in November and they might like to participate in a different month. It also is a place to write something different than a Novel, a play, a bunch of Poems whatever you want your word based project to be.
   This is the third time I have done Camp... but its actually a repetition of the first story I started with it... I have actually been nursing this story to life for a while now, I worked on it last NaNo and into december. I like it, its not something that really makes any honest sense, but it feels a lot more like a real book and not like the random rambling set of thoughts I normally write. I think it has a real idea... if I could understand what the bad guy was doing...
     Anyways all of that was to introduce what this entry is really about... how Camp NaNoWriMo relates to Art and the Art of Art Assignments...

Camp NaNo - In Maxine's Office

     I had told Flow about NaNo some point near the beginning of the month, a few days after Camp had started and I was still writing strong... she joined in with her own project right away... My boy there often half wants to do NaNo but generally already has huge writing projects of his own that he is working on. 

    So with Flows exams done, and 2/4 of mine finished we took a day off to "Go to Camp". We each look at Camp differently, My main ideas of the theme came from overnight camps I stayed at over the summer. Flow's came from there too, where Stefan mostly referenced the normal Camping with friends in tents idea... 

     We started off by building a Fort in my office... so chairs and books and a broom Pole held up sheets that conveniently connected to the air conditioner and made the place nice and cool (which is not like camp at all... but they are wimps... :P) 

     My camp Inspiration came in the form of Tuck Shop Snacks...

  

I was extremely happy to find those strange little sherbert  froot things... they are CAMP to me... dinner was more of a Camping thing... with Packit food and at Stefans suggestion Crappy Bear that we had convinced some adults to buy... :P (not really but in this we are camping story that was how we ended up with Canadian...) 

There was a small emergency because I had forgotten marshmallows and it was Good Friday but the day was saved by a Pink Bunny... ( though I don't think he wore his bunny pajamas to 7-11) and we made smores in the oven using chocolate covered cookies.

     The amount of actual writing that was done on our Camp Themed Write amounted to probably one 20 min word war... most of the time was spent talking and hanging out in our fort... 

     I feel this is Art because it is taking an idea from the past and trying to recreate the feelings and experiences that came with that moment. Its the reason candy that is not that great can be overpriced, you remember it from when you are little and when you eat it you are remembering that time. This feeling can be found in many ways... the most common I find is through music. I hear a song and i remember what I was doing when I used to hear it a lot (this is normally in relation to what job I had at the time...) I think this is why people listen to the music of their Youth, since it reminds them of that time. We used food, and candy, and a fort to feel like kids who were excited about summer vacation because Flow and I are very happy to be done another semester and are kids who are excited about summer vacation... even if our vacation involves jobs and studying for next year...

    Besides sometimes you need to build a Fort... 

Assignment 3 - Intimate, Indispensable GIF: By Maxine

Assignment 3 - Intimate, Indispensable GIF

By: Maxine

Assignment 3 - Provided By Toyin Odutola

Episode 03 Instructions:
1. Think of something intimate that is indispensable to you. (It doesn't have to be a body part. It can be an object, place, memory, anything.)
2. Depict it in the form of a GIF. You don't have to make drawings—you can use photographs, make a sculpture, or whatever you like.

     The first thing I thought about when watching this assignment was the necklace. I have worn a simple pendant around my neck since I was in grade 10. 

     The original version was given to me by an important friends mom. She was the person who first showed to me that Art was more than just paintings. That it was a big, complicated world with lots to say and think about. I first wore it as a headpiece to enhance the outfit I had made and was wearing in a Glass Fashion Show. My friend and I had created costumes and were "Frit Farries". 

     The current pendent I have now had for four years, it is a bottle cap that has the image of a fish inside it behind some clear plastic. I switched it because my life had moved on, I felt that as much as the old necklace meant a lot to me that friendship had ended. It hadn't ended in a bad way. It had just ended. I was ok with that but I felt the need to change the pendent because my life was moving on. 

     So here it is, an image that shows me over time, changing but staying constant at the same time.  

A Summer of Art, By Flow and Maxine

A Summer of Art, By Flow and Maxine

     This is a blog meant to share, enjoy and explore the different assignments that are being provided by the YouTube channel The Art Assignment. It is a joint blog between Flow and Maxine, because it is fun to be able to share Art with a friend. Both the Art you are creating and the art that others are creating. 

     We are using this as a place to put the different creations we come up with as we attempt to find our ways answers to the different kinds of challenges that are set by the artists visited by the program. We are also using it as a place to write about our thoughts about our answer to the assignment, what we thought about when doing the project or after. 

     If we can convince anyone else we know do participate we will probably post their projects here too. 

     Maxine is a Chemical Engineering Student, and Flow is an Interior Design Student. They met through an English liberal and realised they had many things in common, one being that they both enjoyed sewing strange, elaborate costuming and pretending to be people other than themselves (Maxine LARP's and Flow is a Cute Orange Cat). They also learnt that they both love to be silly, play video games, and do art. When Maxine found The Art Assignment YouTube she shared it with Flow because sharing things that look fun makes them more fun!