Piano

After having played piano for a long time, I haven't played that much since grade 11 or 12. However, I have recently gone back to it with a new attitude. I have been also learning guitar. When I play guitar, I usually just make stuff up and it works pretty well. So I've been doing the same thing with piano.

What I've also found is that I don't really care that much if it sounds "good". I'm more interested in just the different types of stuff I can do.



Kyler

Influence

How far away can I influence people. I suspect that if I hit the right 10 numbers on my phone, I could ring a phone that might get me to within 10 feet of the President of the United States. Or I bet I could randomly press some numbers and talk to somebody in India or something. Apparently I have a fairly wide range of influence.

We have such a wide range of influence that most people feel that whenever something is going on in the world they have a responsibility to whatever is happening. Whether it was a dog starve in an art gallery (fake, read other posts) or an actual war in another country, most people have a sense that they should and can do something about it. There are protests and things that go on all around the world that we hear about. The media boost our sense of influence because whenever anybody does something, it get amplified by the media.

But do we all individually have influence around the world? Well there is the "butterfly effect" and technically I am attracted in a strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitational way to everybody else on earth. But should I care? Should I even attempt to do things half a world away simply because they are right? There are things I can do right around me that are equally right, that I will be able to influence to much greater effect.

I don't want to appear to harsh, but another example that I always feel comes up is raising money for various diseases. It seems every day I hear many ads talking about what I can do, and what things I can participate in to raise money. Usually it is some sort of gala, silent auction, a run, a bike, a walk. Yes these events raise money that will go to helping fund medical care or research, however, consider how much of your influence you are actually putting towards ending the disease. I'd say your might be paying for one day of drugs with whatever money you raise. You are still having a positive influence, but I suspect it would actually be in ways you hadn't intended.

If you were training for a run to raise money, you influenced yourself in a positive way because fitness is good for you. Maybe cancer survivors were at the run, your support probably made them feel good. I suspect that there are many more things that were actually influenced before your influence in ending cancer will ever be apparent.

Hypothetically, what would happen instead of spending the time on organizing runs and all that, if people actually tried to more directly influence things. What if we actually got biology books and started learning from them. What if more people on earth actually knew how cancer worked and were thinking about it?

I think I've been arguing this point from a positive side, which isn't very easy. Suppose your protesting a war in a far away country and you end up starting a riot? Did you consider your influence?

Kyler

Final Acad Project

This is it, the last project I will do at Acad. It was my final for my 3d modelling for rapid prototyping class. Hopefully by Monday I will be able to pick up a version that is actually built by a 3d printer. I highly suggest clicking through to the fullsize view and zooming in. They are highres images.




Kyler

No magic in the world

I thought that my outlook on the world was fairly common, however I am starting to assume that it is not.

To make things as clear as possible here is what I believe about the world.

There is no god. There are no higher powers. There are no supernatural forces. There are no ghosts. There is no "soul" that lives past your body in the sense suggested by many religions (you live in other none "magic" ways). There is no such thing was being lucky or cursed. There is no such things as telepathic communication. There are no ways to defy the laws of physics. There is no such thing as mind over matter in the Chris Angel sense. There are no "vibrational" forces of good or bad energy that are actually real.

Hopefully by the above collection of statements you can guess what I think about any other topic.

Now for a big "however".

Just because the above collection of things do not exist does not mean that they do not play a role in our lives or have very reasonable explanations.

Take god for instance. There isn't one. However, the idea of god can be extremely useful when trying to understand how you fit into the universe. God can offer a way of thinking about the universe which can allow for a better understanding of it. However, a mental image is much different then being "real" as many people believe.

And I will skip over everything else and go right to the "vibrational good and bad energy". Many people might say that if they went to a place like a concentration camp that they feel "Bad vibes" coming from it. This is similar to saying that your eyes shoot out rays which allow you to see (which is what the Greeks believed). It is backwards. By looking and smelling and thinking about the concentration camp, you are creating your own "bad vibes". There is nothing going on that is held in atoms that lasts that way. It is all from you senses, your mind and your memory. This explanations doesn't require any magic. It is the explanation I believe to be true.

Kyler

Good Communication and Really Good Communication

On TV shows, in sports, on resumes, in interviews, on jobs, and lots of other places good communication is always of utmost important. I would suspect most people assume this means there is a fair amount of talking going on, or memos going around, or some sort of board that has lots of information on it. Yes these are all good forms of communication. This blog is generally a fairly good form of communication.

However I've realized there is a point at which communication stops being an exchange between people.

My friends and I were walking through downtown Calgary to the train. As we are goofy art students, we managed to make the walk into our very own performance piece by drifting apart until we were all on different blocks. We hadn't actually said anything that had planned this, but we did all manage to get to where we were going without any trouble.

The reason was not that we had actually communicated. We had all predicted what we all meant by what we were doing, and were able to figure out what to do. We know each other well enough that this type of stuff works out.

When communication between people is really strong, they are probably saying nothing at all. They are predicting everything about the other person so they don't have to ask.

Kyler

Education Design

Upon leaving high school I started to hear bits and pieces of what I had naively ignored and not noticed in my time in the education system. Cheating was rampant. I thought it was a minor concern that was fairly rare. I thought no one I knew would actually cheat: it was only the students who did badly who cheated.

I actually don't remember any specifics about who did the cheating, or in what, or how, I only remember being sort of shocked that it had gone on, since that it was good students who were cheating.

Our school system is set up as a big game of checking answers, writing down words and numbers, and rarely writing an essay. It is a system design to teach and evaluate what has been taught. I had always thought it was an effective system and that I had learned a lot from it, which I did. However, there was one condition which let me (and many people I know) learn from this system. I had to suspend my disbelief and followed the artificial restrictions which allow the system to work.

Our education system has been designed from the ground up to work on most occasions only with the full and complete cooperation of the student. The instant a student can break the system by cheating it stops working.

There is a general trend, at least in IB and higher level courses, towards teaching that is designed from the ground up to make cheating nearly impossible. This type of teaching usually means writing essays, or showing all your work on a math problem, or class participation. The final work should be only a proof of learning. A scantron test for instance can be both a proof of learning, or proof of cheating, its design is fundamentally flawed.

I think it would be a fun exercise in a class to give all the students a test on which they were supposed cheat. Make the test impossibly difficult and see what happens. Would they all work together to do better? Would they mess each other up? How would they figure out how to hide answers? Would they use computers or cell phones? Would they use actual methods they had used to cheat on real tests? Would they end up learning all of the same stuff anyways? Would they learn more?

Kyler

Scratching

These are drawings scratched on slide film for a drawing project. They will be presented using an old school slide projector. More images are in my photo gallery.






This is a drawing made on a scratch board made for my figure drawing course. I think I might do it one more time.


I've come to realize after doing these 2 projects how in alot of my art, I will sort of jump into learning a style or about something and make art around learning about whatever it is that is new. For a few weeks all I seemed to be doing was printed work. Or work related to typography. Or this week everything is about slides. I seem to work in waves of inspiration and new things.

Kyler

Big bang theory

Today I watched I show called the Big Bang Theory which I have seen once before. It is a fairly standard sitcom except the main characters are giant nerds. One of them is a quantum physicist.

At the beginning of the show this character started a conversation out of the blue explaining why even if teleportation existed, he would never use it due to the fact that it would kill the original and only send an exact copy to the new location.

I have actually brought up this same topic a few times and had the exact same opinion.

What this revealed is how I think. When I think about things in the present day, and see things around me, I'm not simply trying to understand them. I actually think things through to such a point that I plan how to do hypothetical or improbable things far into the future.

I suspect that I already have thousands of "what if" plans formulated with little bits of knowledge that help support them.

Here is a short list of things which I suspect I have vague plans for if they were to happen:

Space travel
Operating a backhoe
Running from the police
Flying an airplane
Being on the Apprentice
Going into the business world
Being a politician
Being a chef
Supporting myself through fine arts
becoming a hitchhiker
being an engineer
being a teacher
competing in high level sports
Getting into a fight
Being some sort of military person
Being an author

Most of the above list are strongly influenced by things I've seen or read. I have little actual experience in anything listed above.

Kyler

Mess

For a long time I considered myself to be pretty tidy. My room is pretty clean. My work space is clean. I rarely find myself consumed by any messes.

However I realized that I had a mess lurking where I hadn't considered one to be. On my computer. I know most people probably feel their computers are messy, but I think I my situation was quite particular simply due to the scale of the potential problem. I have something like 100 000 files on my computer which date back all the way to my days in junior high.

Today I decided to go through it and think I actually got it to a state where I understand most of what I have. Have things fairly well organized. And I have gotten rid of a lot of unnecessary junk.

Another thing I have come to realize are some of the problems associated with computer file collections. Take for instance my MP3 collection. Since everything doesn't actually take up much physical space, and because it is easily organized, I never feel as though I have the right to get rid of anything in it for fear I might want it in the future. However I am starting to get over this fear and have started to delete albums I am sure I don't want to listen to again.

The same is happening in my photo collection. I am trying to delete all of the bad photos and am trying to be very critical of any bad photos I find.

Hopefully computers and everything will stay advanced enough to keep up with these massive collections. Or I can get rid of stuff fast enough.

Kyler

Tracing

In this drawing project, I took classmates and friends sketchs, and traced them over and over and over and over again, until they had changed alot. It made apparent how my way drawing compared to how they draw. In some cases things changed immediately. In other cases, it took much longer for things to change.














Kyler

"Starving Dogs is not art - Please stop this Artist!"

Dog starved in museum

From news on the internet, this story was apparently a hoax. No dog was actually starved in a gallery.

However for the last few weeks I have know about this story, and I believed that a stray dog died in a gallery. The reaction against this story on the internet was exceedingly harsh. Everywhere I saw comments about the story, most people wanted to send the artist to prison, or simply kill him. It was complete outrage.

And I saw a bit of an Oprah show where they did an investigation into puppy mills, where dogs are kept in cages for their whole lives. People were outraged. Things were happening. Dogs were being "rescued" (or humanely put down). Everybody was exceptionally concerned about the dogs.

And the only real opinion I could get myself to hold about this topic was that I couldn't feel really bad about either case. I don't hate dogs, and don't want to hurt them. But I couldn't rush to a conclusion on the topic. There are trillions of animals that are kept in cage, caught in nets, and killed. It seems that people are lying to themselves if they believe they can both be concerned about dogs and ignore where their food comes from.

This type of gut reaction is apparent in a lot of places. Look at every side of the story, avoid being a hypocrite.


Kyler

Going

"If you want to go quickly, go alone.

If you want to go far, go together."

Good quote said by Al Gore during a new TED presentation

Al Gore: New Slide Show


Kyler Kelly

Light Drawings

With the help of my brother I did some really cool light figured drawings. He did the drawings of me. There are more images posted on my Google photo thing that gets linked through the photos.






Kyler

Wrapping paper

I started simply working off of the idea of a mystery box, which turn into a present, which turned into using wrapping paper as canvas, which turn into cutting and layer, which turned into just lots of cutting of canvas. Experiments,not final pieces. No I don't hate puppies.





Kyler