This Weeks Plan

Thursday we will be meeting in Old Main#G23 at 4:00pm to set up and install.

Friday we will meet in the neovox office at 9:30 to prepare and get t-shirts.  Everyone will chose a design to wear to the presentation.

Any questions...email lorraine or I.


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Okay, so this is it.

Okay, so these are my final two panels. I did one less image for the young boy because they are usually either killed or enlisted into the army if they are boys. I changed the third picture for both of them also to symbolize that they are made up of all the labels and emotions that come with this war and going through what they did. I'll have my artist statement soon.

Final Panel look?

I have another panel that will be basically the same but with a picture of a young boy. I tried to represent how she is a woman at first, then she loses herself, then is labeled, then loses her self in the labels, then feels nothing because she is whatever the world made her.

It makes sense to me, I hope it makes sense to everyone else.

Text of the Pamphlet--Critique?

I have posted the text of the pamphlet on Open Salon. Please, if you get a chance, take a look at it. I know it's running long, so please feel free to tell me where it should be cut and tightened up.
Lorraine

http://open.salon.com/blog/fingerlakeswanderer/2010/04/05/what_you_can_do_for_the_women_of_the_drc

Panels

Sorry I was late with the post, my internet has been down at home.

My first panel deals with the idea that the war in the DRC is part of cell phone use throughout the world and the minerals we use for granite that are hurting the women of the DRC.

My second panel shows an exerpt that we got in NeoVox from the new york times about one of the women's story about her torture in the DRC. I grabbed pictures of congelese women and children.

The images are being difficult to upload through mail and blog so i will resize them when I can.

Martine- I will have them in class on Monday to show you.

The Size of the Panels - 24"x72"

Panels can be printed on luster, glossy and matte.  Think about what will work for your imagery.

Images are due next Friday so we have a week to print.  I will need volunteers to help with printing.

This might be larger if you couldnt see the other..

my first poem i ever wrote!

I was talking to my friend the other day and he had an assignment to do for creative writing and the insturctions said something about how with every word and new image is created and words being added to a phrase change and image. So i thought how i could use that and change the one word of. "WOMAN" then i just started brainstorming and my friend actually mentioned some words and i put it together. took a while.. My friend mentioned the word victimized and i thought how perfect it would be in the end.. after all of the words are added to the body the ending statement changing to VICTIMIZED WOMAN.. and starting with just WOMAN...

So i wrote this poem its the first time i ever wrote one so i hope that you all like it. I wanted it to be POWERFUL and really capture the attention of the audience because it is all about rape. I think i did a good job portraying what I wanted to... what do you think?? i had this image of the words within a girls figure and i came up with this.. i worked on it for a while and had help from someone in the lab .. her name was melissa and she showed me how to do it all.
What do you all think??

-Jen

an article on conflict minerals

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/02/congo-gold-adam-hochschild

more news about the Congo

from today's NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/world/africa/28congo.html?hp

One More by Eve Ensler

This one is important, because it discounts the "cultural" argument. We can argue that rape is a cultural phenomenon in the U.S., also, but that doesn't stop us from doing what we can to stop it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/ten-radical-acts-for-cong_b_418425.html

Charlize Theron on the DRC

Most of you know that Charlize Theron is South African. This is an article she wrote after her visit to the DRC:

http://www.vday.org/node/1818

Some things We CAN Do About the Congo

I know after today's discussion, some of us were left with the idea that we can't change anything. I want to provide some links with concrete ideas that we can incorporate into the brochure.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090202/ten_things

http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/interviews/evecongo.html

http://www.glamour.com/magazine/2007/08/rape-in-the-congo

Perhaps we need to once again, focus on the small things--primarily the construction of the City of Joy in Bukavu.

Another organization that is doing a lot of work in the DRC is Doctors Without Borders.

As I said in class today, we can't save a nation. But perhaps we can improve the lives of a few women, which, to me, is worth doing this for.

Lorraine

For the new folks (and the old)

Those of you who are joining NeoVox as a second quarter class know that we are working our collective behinds off trying to get ready for Scholars' Day. I would like to ask EVERYONE who is intending to show up for tomorrow's 1:30 meeting to brainstorm how they might be able to contribute to the presentation. Second-quarter students are going to be different work, but FOR RIGHT NOW, we need help, so I'm asking you to do this as a required assignment.

There are several tasks that need doing. For the writers, our primary task is to put together the brochure with information about what is going on in the DRC, the statistics about the numbers of women raped and the numbers of people who have been killed. We also need someone (maybe one of you science folks?) to do some research on conflict minerals. Coltan is the major conflict mineral that is being used to finance the war in the Congo, and we want to bring Cortland students' attention to the fact that our use of cell phones and computers may be inadvertently contributing to financing the war. We need a list of officials that people can write to. I would suggest the following: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice; President Kabila of the DRC; First Lady Michelle Obama. I have some templates of these letters from last year. We could consider putting together a postcard on the back of the brochure that folks could tear off and send to one of these officials. Can we brainstorm what we might like the postcard to look like? Should it have an image on it?
Finally, for those of you who are feeling moved by what you have been learning about the Congo are free to write prose/poems/ or any other type of art that not only expresses how you feel, but may also move students to action.
As Martine notes in her post, we are RUNNING OUT OF TIME. Please consider that this assignment--which you will tell me tomorrow what you're going to take on--needs to be in good shape by next Friday.
If you are one of the folks who cannot attend class on Friday, please e-mail Martine and I with your idea, and plan on e-mailing your assignment to both of us by next Friday.
My most recent blog post about the DRC can be found here:
http://open.salon.com/blog/fingerlakeswanderer/2010/03/23/did_your_cell_phone_kill_someone_today

Any questions? Contact me at lorraine.berry@cortland.edu. Feel free to comment.
I

Thank you for your posts

Firstly, on Friday 3-26 many of the art students are going on a field trip to NYC. So, for next week we will have a critique on our Scholars Day image panels.  Everyone needs to come to class next Friday 4-02 prepared ready to critique!  Between now and next week, please post images in progress.
We will need to decide on the sticker on this day as well.  So if you have not posted an idea, do so asap.  We will only choose from designs submitted to this blog.

Remember:  you will each create 2 image panels based on the DRC.  In the software of your choice your document needs to be 24" x 72" 200dpi. 

Secondly, we need to move quickly on the booklet that we were discussing to hand out.  The printer will need some turn around time, so I would like to see comps for the layout next Friday as well.  Lorraine and I will supply content. I would like to get this to the printer no later than April7th. Does anyone want to head up the layout on this?

Lastly, I would like to spend our time printing all of the panels when we meet on April 9th.  The imagery will be done a week before we install.

Please be ready to work, and work really hard.  Scholar's Day is around the corner.

Sticker Proposal

The color is a burnt orange.

Also, for the construction of the tunnel, I was thinking thick black fabric, almost like canvas. Or maybe a burlap so that when people rub against it it feels rough and unpleasant. We can form the tunnel by getting rounded PVC piping or a malleable yet strong wire and forming a bunch of them into circles and attaching the fabric to them.

For the sounds, I agree with distant gun shots, screams, and crying, but not as a constant. Maybe some ambient jungle noises like rustling of leaves and twigs snapping mixed in to make it feel like the people are walking through the actual world the woman do when they hide from the soldiers.

Another Version of the Panel

So I was playing around with my idea for one of my panels, and this is more what I had in mind with the words creating a picture. I don't know if I like it better as just one, or both, or in black or white. The words used are Awareness, Hate, Shame, Sadness, Rape, Terror, Nothingness, Death, and Horror. The final version will probably have a lot more words.

This is just a quick post

So, this is just a quick post because it's last but for one of my panels I was thinking about taking text and creating a picture with it. Right now, The words say "Send Love To The Congo" but I think ultimately it will be a poem or something...I might just stick with a simple phrase.

I'll update with more on the sticker designs and the artist statement soon.

Ideas for Scholars Day

I'm having trouble uploading a picture of my sketches, so I will hopefully have that sometime this weekend. Until then, here's my artist statement, a description of what I want to do for my two panels and some ideas for the sounds to be played in the background.

Artist Statement: My intendion is to give people a different perspective on statistics about the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Numbers mean little to nothing for many people so by physically showing them how the numbers add up, they can gain a better understanding of how the people of the DRC are affected.

Panel 1: I want to create a small symbol and repeat it in order to physically represent a statistic. I was thinking about using a statistic about how many people died in a specific amount of time (day/week/month) and then create a very simple coffin shape to represent each person.

I did the math and found out that each panel can be divided into 27,648 1/16" by 1/16" squares. I want to find a statistic close to that number because I want to fill the page with as many symbols as possible, but I don't want them to be so small that the person can't see what it really is.

Panel 2: I'm trying to find a comparison between the Congo and a well-known place in the US. Although there are tragic things happening to the people of the DRC, people can emotionally detach themselves from something they're not familiar with. So by trying to show these things happening to people that they can relate to, hopefully it will have a greater impact on the viewer.

Sticker Idea: I want put a short phrase on the sticker, something that will catch a person's attention. Possibly controversial. Underneath the phrase, there could be a web address to a Neovox webpage about the Scholar's Day event. I feel that it would be better because we only have a limited amount of space on the sticker, so by making a short phrase as big as possible on the sticker and directing them to a website, we can give them much more information than what we could on just the sticker.

Sounds: gunfire in the distance, screaming in the distance, crying. I feel that the screaming and gunfire can be overpowering, so by putting it in the distance, it won't be as harsh but can still get the point across. The sound of someone crying can be pretty powerful and I feel that it should play by itself because the other sounds can take away from it.

For the sticker design, this is what I came up with.

I did some research on the tunnel of oppression and it was originally developed at Western Illinois University. Its to create an environment oh harsh reality situations that over through life, mostly pertaining to college students. This first tunnel of oppression loosely based off of the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, CA. I found some pictures and ideas that previous people have done, above. We can collaborate past ideas that people have used in the tunnel of oppression and collaborate it with an art exhibit. The idea of sound and lost direction through art, will give the viewers more emotions then prepared for.

The sound I was thinking about using is cell phone ringing. We should stick with the Congo sounds, but if you throw a cell phone in there, its an awkward place for it. When people think of the Congo, they think of the jungle. The jungle usually doesn't have cell phone towers, so it could be interesting.

Assignment For Next Week - Work your research

The official title of our presentaion for Scholars Day:
The Democratic Republic of the Congo:  An interactive performance


For Next Friday:

1. Research the idea of Tunnel of Oppression
2. sticker design 5x 5
3. sketches of your 2 panels 24" x 72"
4. with written artist statement to accompany panel imagery
5. present idea of sound
6. think about how we can construct the tunnel or structure using the imagery panels.

My idea in progress

Like Graciela, I wanted to focus on some statistics about the Congo. My original idea is to possibly use the sidewalks as a unit of measurement and have signs next to the sidewalk to indicated that a certain distance equals a certain statistic. By using a large distance (for example, walking from Corey to Dowd), a statistic will have a bigger impact on the audience than if it were just a poster. In addition to showing these statistics, there can be information that informs everyone about our group presentation and where it is.

Also, I really like the idea of the stickers throughout campus because we all go to different places around campus during the week so we could cover alot of turf. With the presentation, the idea of stamping people with a number or marking there hand with a label, could impact someone more then you think. Them not having a choice of being branded like a animal can come across as the lack of choices the women of the congo have.

For the own artwork in our presentation, im not sure how I want to create it, but I want to involve the cellphone research that i did, maybe likea bad phone connection irony rom america to the congo, why were not getting more involved due to a stupid cellphone, which is the main cause. An anti-war poster, something that has text but sends out the right message.

puzzle

I originally had an idea for the Haiti t-shirts revolving around a puzzle concept and making Haiti into puzzle pieces scattered on the front and then on the back having the puzzle pieces put together with the country as a whole to show how if we make a difference we can “Piece Haiti back together”. Since we are not doing the t-shirts anymore I was thinking about how to put this together for Scholars day. Since I am not an art major I was brainstorming what I could do for writing to contribute to the art. Then I think I figured it out.

Either as a group or individually we could come up with a written piece related to the concept of making a difference and the puzzle concept or an art piece related to the Congo and what we are focusing on. After the written piece is created we could create it into a puzzle. On the back of each puzzle piece we will number each one to make it easier to match it to the original art piece. Depending on the number of people who attend on Scholar’s Day we will distribute a puzzle piece to each person. We will also have a blank board or something where we will place the puzzle pieces to their original destination eventually putting together the entire puzzle and then presenting it to the audience in the end to show how every person can make a different and by working together we can make a difference. If one person doesn’t participate then a puzzle piece is missing just reiterating the importance of everyone being able to make a difference.

I also was thinking that we could use this piece as something for Neovox to save as a memory of what we did on campus Scholar’s day 2010. Maybe we could have that puzzle in a shadow box with glass over it and the end result inside.

This would probably be easier to explain in person.

Um....Hello?

Where is everyone else?  Please post your proposed ideas ASAP.  We need to get going!!!
Thank you for those that did post in a timely manner.

After talking about all the things that are affecting the war in congo, especially our use in cell phones, I wanted to know more. I researched sites on google including the V-Day site that explains a little about there effort to stop the trade of the main minerals in cell phones that the world uses today.

"Tin- often used on circuit boards, and used on cell phones and all electric products.

_Tantalum- or coltan is often used in ipods, digital cameras and cell phones

_Tungsten- used to make our cell phones vibrate."

Its interesting after knowing that a simple mineral is affecting part of the raping in congo is something that we don't take for granite. Sometimes I don't even realize that everytime my phone vibrates or is charging, It continues to use that mineral.

visit this website and it explains an article about our electronics causing the war in congo.

http://www.enoughproject.org/publications/can-you-hear-congo-now-cell-phones-conflict-minerals-and-worst-sexual-violence-world

Graciela's Proposal

(that is supposed to be primary red) please double click, looks better without the visual noise of the blog's background.

I still don't have a clear idea of what exactly we are going to do.
So I continued with my proposal for scholar day. Please correct me if I am wrong.

STICKERS



2. Minimal symbol. referring to the silence held in this war, and the exponential problematic situation due to this same fact.

the idea is to give an incentive, dare people to answer. And cite them to the place we are going to give the demonstration.

naive engagement with a powerful, ending, message.



MY ART PIECE
I am not sure how I want to portray mi idea. I do know I want to base it on the statistics, facts and percentage of women raped in Congo. Their Stories basically.

I can bring rough sketches but I still have not a clear idea.
My medium will be illustration, photography, collage.

On a snowy day start blogging!

Let use this today to discuss our ideas for Scholars Day and see where it leads.