Balancing Act

Solitary

In McLuhan's words, "Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one's environment."Here, I have put together an environment that balances quietude, peace and introversion with noisy extroverted joy. This to me is a mythical balance which I can never quite find- and this montage of sounds represents that elusive balance. My moments of introversion are represented by the purring of my roommate's kitten curled up beside me one afternoon while my roommate was out of town, as well as quietly lapping waves which I recorded at my relatives's cottage on Kangaroo Lake in Door County. This is where I lived during the past summer while I worked, and the cottage represents some of the most extended times of solitude which I have ever experienced. I was completely alone sometimes for weeks, until relatives would come visit the cottage for a weekend getaway. It was both incredibly fulfilling, and distressingly lonely at times. In stark contrast to that lonesomeness, this past weekend I stayed at the cottage, but this time with several of my friends in tow. It was almost surreal having their chaotic noise filling the empty cottage with warmth. I captured an impromptu session of song, and our rhythmic sloshing through leaves on a nearby trail to represent this feeling of  clamor and companionship. This past weekend was a mixing of the worlds I try to balance- I escaped the bustle of campus life, yet brought a little of it with me in the form of my friends who gave the cottage light. At the same time, I managed to find time for myself to simply stop and listen to the waves. Hopefully, this sound clip shows that balance that is so hard to achieve.

https://soundcloud.com/tashi_adriel/warm

Silly

Slow Destruction

In making this photo collection, I struggled initially with letting go of a controlled plan and just allowing myself to go out and find images to create a collection from later. However, once I had begun taking photos here and there and finally went on a walk through the autumnal glory along the Fox river to see what I might find, I noticed a certain pattern which had been hidden before. McLuhan mentions "invisible environments" and how their "groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception." This was certainly the case with the photos I took. Though I had been drawn to the beauty of changing leaves and last blooms outdoors, when I went through my photos I noticed that the ones which were most compelling to me were sometimes darker and often showed things which were discarded, out of place, or dying. I was reminded of the simple trajectory of Autumn into Winter, life into a slow decay, and though some of my photos were influenced by humans, I thought it was interesting to see the hand humans and nature mutually have in causing this slow destruction. I wanted to capture a journey which I could see forming from the 20 photos I chose, and creating the Flickr set allowed me to do so. Though the photo set isn't in the chronological order in which I originally shot, it depicts a walk through a dreary landscape with two main events- the desiccation of a tree by swarms of insects and the discovery of a scene of death- the withered bouquet of wildflowers sprawled on the path evoked a stumbled-across crime scene, and I enjoyed snapping the different angles of its decomposition.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tashikat/albums/72157674241002358