NC State University Honors Philosophy Seminar Guest Lecture

I’ve had a great time so far at my North Carolina State University visit; I’ve already participated in an honors lunch, the moral leadership panel, and an honors dinner with students. Today I'll be guest lecturing in NC State University's honors philosophy seminar HON 355 Feelings of/from Technology: Analog Bodies in Digital Spaces on art, technology, and the New Aesthetic!

If you’re interested, here’s the course description: “While we live in a Digital Age, we have only begun to understand its full significance. What new possibilities arise in a virtualized future? Can we escape scarcity, this planet, even death? What problems might our technologies solve? Modern technologies also raise new existential challenges: Why has the increased prosperity that technologies provide been met with seemingly impoverished and unhappy lives, loneliness, and alienation? How does technology mediate our sense of identity and the relations we have with society, nature, and ourselves? This course will explore the phenomenology of technological life - that is, the descriptive study aimed at looking at the relations between humans and our world, a technologically-mediated world. We will use this experiential and descriptive approach to consider the moral dimensions and psychological and sociological consequences of digital and emerging technologies, especially information and communications technologies (ICTs) like the internet and social media.”

A Sneak Peek at My In-Progress Sloth Bas Relief

As I've mentioned before, I'm teaching an extra course this semester - Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art.  The course is structured into a few different sections, with the first exploring my own interdisciplinary interests (science and art, particularly involving the fields of ecology, biology, anatomy, botany, and my collaborative work in chemistry with Dr. John Pojman developing 3P QuickCure Clay).  

For this segment, the students must use QCC and make at least one piece of artwork that explores the fields listed above that are interdisciplinary interests of mine.  Since it's such a personal-to-me assignment, I decided I'd join in on the project.  I'd considered doing a sloth for a while - I met and got to directly interact with one named Peregrina in Peru during my 2014 residency there - but I didn't want the piece to be too cutesy so I kept dismissing the subject matter until I felt ready to tackle it with a somewhat more complex take on the animal.   I decided the time is now, mostly due to finding this elongated panel (its dimensions are 6x12") which felt like a perfect match to the gangly nature of the sloth.  

I plan to paint it, so the end piece will look considerably different than this, but here's a sneak peek at the relief work before adding any paint.

Spring Classes are Coming!

The Spring 2017 semester is almost upon us!  At the University of Saint Mary, we commemorate Martin Luther King Day instead of taking it as a holiday, so Monday was slated to be out first day of classes... but the weather has other plans, and to avoid the predicted ice storm and attempt to help unravel the resultant travel complications our students are already facing, we have canceled classes on Monday and will instead begin Spring 2017 classes on Tuesday.

This semester, I am teaching an overload (five classes instead of my typical four): Basic Design, Drawing II, Typography, Honors Seminar: Interdisciplinary Art, and Art Career Internship/Advanced Studios/Senior Exhibit.  The overload is due to taking on the Honors Seminar; I'm very excited about it as I got to create the class entirely with our honor student population and my own academic interests in mind.