The purpose of the Conceptual Project was to develop my abstract thinking skills in order to see how I could use unconventional forms to express myself. In order to achieve this goal, we wrote four pieces of poetry in English class, composed, shot, and edited a photo in Design class, and made a music piece in Digital Media.

On this website, you can see the various art pieces I made in each of my classes, along with commentary on how I made each piece and what I got out of making each one. Overall, I learned a lot about how to use various equipment and programs, such as my camera, Photoshop, and Pro Tools 12. I also learned how to use color, placement, and metaphors in order to get my message across to viewers. Overall, I enjoyed making each piece and being able to express how I felt.

In addition to making the various art pieces, I also wrote an Expository Essay about a passion either I had or I had observed in other people. I chose to write one about logic puzzles and why they were appealing to various people, since the Rubik’s Cube in particular helped me get through some rough spots in my life, and I want to be able to explain why a puzzle that doesn’t seem remotely fun to many of peers is fun to me and many others.

For English class, we were told to write two different poems: one focusing on the way it looked (free verse) and one focusing on the way it sounded (spoken word). I wrote "Cold" as my free verse poem, focusing on a series of events in my life leading up to eighth grade. "Lunchtime", my spoken word poem, similarly focuses on my past, but goes up to the present day rather than ending in eighth grade. Later in Digital Media, we were told to arrange the poems into an image. I decided to use a bleak concrete region for "Cold", emphasizing the final location of the poem. I wanted a picture of a lunchbox on a plain background for "Lunchtime", but couldn't find what I was looking for, so I used a picture of a lunchbox and a picture of a wood pattern and photoshopped them together, so the lunch was atop of a wooden surface.

In addition, while going to the SFMOMA, we were told to look for a piece of art to use in an ekphrastic poem, or a poem written in response to a piece of art. Again, this poem is largely autobiographical, focusing on my journey throughout the museum and my reaction to the "Policeman" statue in particular. I decided to go for a more simple route for this poem's design, with it featuring just the text and the art the poem was in response to.

After I wrote "Cold" and "Lunchtime", I started writing a lot of poetry, with over thirty additional poems being published online within a month. While I found writing the poetry easy, composing them onto the image was more difficult, mostly due to the sheer length of the poems. However, it allowed me to explore other ways of focusing on parts of the text that I felt were important. It also allowed me to practice using my photoshop skills for altering photographs.

For English class, we were told to make a haiku based off of randomly chosen concept statements. My concept statement was “exploring the feeling of gratitude through the experience of speaking up / standing up for yourself (or someone)”. In addition, we were supposed to include a “kigo”, or a seasonal clue, and a “kireji”, or cutting word that creates a sense of playfulness or sudden insight into the poem’s meaning. While I was unable to insert a kigo, I did manage to put a kireji in, which is “beacon”. After completing the Haiku, we used a photo we took that added additional metaphorical layers to the piece without being too abstract or too literal. I took a photo of boiling pasta since pasta is a warming comfort food to me. Later in Digital Media we recorded ourselves saying the poem and composed music to set the mood at the beginning and end of the poem.

It was a challenge for me getting everything I wanted to across with a highly structured poem format such as a haiku. I also had difficulty making music that set the mood for the haiku, but I think I managed to get the message I was aiming for across. It was very insightful learning how to use Adobe Animate for making the final video.

I am exploring the feeling of loneliness through being in public.

In Design, we were told to make a piece of conceptual art based around the concept statement for one of our poems. Conceptual art is art that represents an idea in a very simple manner. I chose to make a piece of conceptual art based around my poem "Policeman", where I got the above concept statement from. To make the image, I used my dad's marble collection and an LED lamp when it was dark. I learned about how to use various Photoshop techniques to alter images, such as filters, layers, and selections.

I used my Ekphrastic poem “Policeman” as inspiration for this piece, specifically the lines “The two of us are solemn, / still, emotionless, / mere shells of existence— / appearing lifelike, but lacking life”. These lines focus on feeling alienated and alone, along with the feelings that come with depression or anxiety, in particular how the speaker feels less of a person than the people surrounding her due to a lack of interaction and how she feels more like a statue than a person. I wanted to make a picture exemplifying the feeling of standing out while being isolated from the populace.

I used marbles since they could easily demonstrate the differences I was looking for between the subject and the surrounding populace. I used over three dozen orange marbles along with a solitary blue marble and a couple marbles with both orange and blue on them—added to show maybe the subject isn’t as alone as they think they are. I then laid them out on our hardwood floor—an orange like the majority of the marbles—in a formation where there was a large radius of space around the blue marble, to add some literal distance to the piece. I then blacked out the room and placed a fluorescent lamp close to the ground to create long shadows, to add to the overall sad feeling of the picture. I then used Photoshop to make the majority of the image have an orange tint to it and adjusting hue and saturation to everything except for the blue marble, to make it stand out from the rest of the picture even more. The hardest part of the process was definitely trying to come up with ways to edit the image to make the marble stick out, yet keep the overall realistic look of the image. Quite a few of the edits I did at first added a very high orange filter over the whole thing, which made it look like there was an orange filter added—an impression I didn’t want to give to the viewer. To combat this, I simply removed some filters or lowered the opacity to keep the filter, but not make it so intense and obvious.

The final project I worked on was making a piece of Experimental Music for Digital Media. I decided to try and create a piece of music based around one of the poems I’ve written entitled “The Observer”, which is about a girl who watches over the timestream. Originally I intended to make it into a song, but dropped that idea during production and decided to simply make a piece of music about the girl in general. The song uses music loops from the category “New Jazz” and is intended to create a balance between the supernatural elements of this girl’s life and the human emotions she still has. I used music samples of various tempos, so I made sure to make each track set its tempo to the click track (or metronome), and made it “polyphonic” so it would change to always match the tempo of the music. I also changed the audio level of certain tracks so that they didn’t necessarily overshadow each other.

I enjoyed trying to make a cohesive piece of music out of various unrelated clips, which was a bit of a challenge. It was also fun trying to create a piece of music based on a character I’ve spent a lot of time developing.