Category: Flog

This week wasn’t particularly eventful, so I don’t have many major failures to report. However, if I had to pinpoint one, it would be missing class on Thursday. My family flew in from Bolivia, and since some of my other classes were canceled, I decided not to attend ours. In hindsight, this was an irresponsible decision. While I was excited to see my family, their visit shouldn’t have been an excuse to skip class, especially since we’re getting closer to the end of the semester. Looking ahead, my biggest challenge over the weekend and the upcoming break will be brainstorming for Hack #5. It needs to be a significantly improved version of something we’ve already worked on, which adds pressure. I’ve already found brainstorming for the earlier hacks to be pretty difficult, so this one feels even more daunting. That said, I’m determined to make it work. Right now, I’m leaning toward reinventing something from Hack #3, mainly because I’m more comfortable navigating Notion than the other platforms we’ve used.

I write this flog while at a Cat cafe, my girlfriend works here and I am outside looking at some cats. It is a good day. Good Friday actually. There were not many failures this week, fortunately. I was a little upset on Tuesday though, because we did not have class. This is my one little fun class during the week and missing it did not feel right. I’ve grown a lot of appreciation for the discussion we have for those 75 minutes.

I suppose a failure of mine this week was the readings…. I merely skimmed over them and didn’t really have many thoughts. The discussions on utopias were interesting though!

Also, I think I’ve figured out what I’ll do for hack 5. I feel my first hack had a lot of room for improvement, so I’m going to start thinking of some ideas to expand its capabilities. But more of that next week….

Contents of this week’s readings were unique in many ways compared to concepts we have engaged so far, and required quite a shift into political discourse I’m not instantly familiar with. But I liked how they connected to some earlier readings as well, such as Nooney’s Prehistories of the Personal. Before, we studied the parallelism of collaborative development and technological advancements and now the discussion shifts into consequences of neglecting that parallelism, such as technological utopianism. One of my struggles was in analyzing the seasteading philosophy. The language of the seasteading community is loaded with buzzwords pretending to be sound arguments, buzzwords whose deeper meaning is rarely employed or visible in the discourse itself, which made it hard to really grasp the concept and therefore critique it using insights from the readings.

Coincidentally, the current state of the US is starting to reflect the very concepts we are studying. The capitalistic dreaming that birthed technological utopianism and the illusions of safety and structural integrity of the US, now goes into overdrive with political reforms that simultaneously dismantle the very structures that were sustaining it. I feel this is a good example of said reformers’ “paralyzed understanding of the present” as we discussed in class.

This week I felt like I failed in the sense I could have used our day without class to be more productive and get ahead on the readings for Thursday. I ended up waiting too long to do the readings and it forced me to stay up pretty late on Wednesday night in order to get a full grasp of the concepts. I saw the one reading was 11 pages and thought it would be rather quick, but I ended up having to spend a good chunk of time looking at it because it was rather complicated and dense.

At the same time, I did enjoy doing both the readings and I thought it was a good way to conclude our coursework. Our class discussions caused me to reflect on the design work I have done for the different projects and how not all design is necessarily radical and good. There remains a necessity to still approach design with criticality and remain conscious of how design can promote harmful ideas or practices. Design does not necessarily solve a problem, it also can lead to the creation of new ones.

In regards to the final hack, I am feeling a little stuck as to which project I am going to redo and how I am going to do it. I am hoping that by taking a step back I will be able to reflect and find inspiration to decide the next best approach for my project. I am excited by the potential to redo one of my hacks, but I still have to figure out exactly how. I fear some of my initial ideas may be too big to complete.

This week I was overall very proud of my final remix, but in order to get it to that place it involved a lot of failure along the way. I discussed in my flog last week how I locked myself into one idea, but then decided I didn’t like it and was deciding what to do instead. In class last Thursday, I had actually spent a lot of time finding clips for the camp drag queen idea, but I then stopped because I thought I would come up with an idea I liked better. I was also hesitant to do the idea because I explained the idea to one of my friends and she didn’t seem excited about it. I convinced myself I could come up with something genius, so I ended up spending 2 hours trying to come up with a new idea. This ended up being a huge waste of time once I finally realized I was actually super excited about doing the drag queen idea, I had just second guessed myself. 

`When I actually began working on the drag queen project I had originally edited most of the videos on my ipad in adobe. However, I realized that the app was rendering all of my clips with super bad quality. This was frustrating because it made me realize that I had to completely redo the project on my computer to ensure the videos were at higher quality. However, as annoying as this was, it actually gave me the chance to rethink my editing process and how I was placing the footage. 

I also struggled to find the exact type of film footage of Trump that I wanted. I’m not sure if part of the problem was Tiktok limiting searches that could be deemed critical of Trump, but a lot of my searches of “Trump strutting” or “Trump posing” did not yield fruitful results. However, I learned to search for other things like “Trump’s funniest moments” or “Trump walking” ended up working pretty well. I also had a lot of trouble deciding which tweets to include because there were so many options. My friend ended up sending me about 20 of her favorites she thought I should use. I am happy with the final result, but it was very challenging to narrow them down. 

This week, similar to last week, was not filled with many big failures! Although, I ran into some small road-blocks regarding the required readings for class. While I thoroughly enjoyed both readings and their concepts on the future of humanity with respect to technology, I had a bit of a tough time reading the MIT article. I think that the friendly medium and article format of the reading led me to believe that it would be an easy read, so I went into it with a casual mindset. I was quite wrong as the concepts and ideas soon became not so digestible for a casual lunch-time read. Once I had begun to focus more, however, these ideas of extinction and profitability revealed themselves to be quite fascinating, especially when thinking about the current “panic” like state of the world right now. One last little failure that I had was that I had to miss class My older brother just graduated from college last year and is now working in NYC, so our family doesn’t get to see him often. He decided to surprise my parents for Easter break and booked his flight for Thursday morning. With that being said, I had to pick him up from the airport at home, so I had to miss class. I was looking forward to discussing these readings and hearing the guidelines for our last project, but I’m also glad to see my brother! FLOG: out!

My flog of the week isn’t filled with many failures. In fact, this week was our screenings for Hack #4, which I had a great time with. I was super proud of my remix and I was really excited to share with the class what I had made. I wanted to do my music piece justice, so I actually brought some of my own speakers to play the remix. I, in fact, avoided a big failure of playing the audio out of the TV speakers, as it would have made my remix sound SO terrible in my opinion (at least to my OCD ears). One big failure, though, is that I didn’t think we had a Flog due! I saw on the course website that there was no Flog assignment posted, and because of the two class periods dedicated to our Remix screenings, I assumed that there was no Flog due for the week. Regardless, it was a great week and I had an awesome time watching / seeing everyone’s creativity through their remixes!

Last week’s Hack was kind of hard. I generated a lot of ideas and tried every idea before I realized it wouldn’t work. For example, I initially planned to complete a remix of urban homelessness with Black Diamond of Peter Criss as the background music. I did gather the material to start production. About a minute into it, I realized that this might not be what I wanted to have for this hack. It’s not that I don’t like how I’ve done it, I actually feel fair and the song is good, but since it’s not a topic I really have inspiration in, I felt like I don’t know what to do next, which makes me feel very unmotivated. So I had to give up this half-finished project. The technical aspects of editing the video didn’t particularly bother me, what was really difficult was finding footage on the Internet that I was going to use. I’m glad I finally managed to find what I was looking for. The artist statement also left me a little confused. Compared with the previous hacks that are based on specific topics, the remix is more complex because the content expressed requires me to spend time sorting out my thoughts and the order of writing.

WRITTEN ON 4/11

This was possibly the hardest week I’ve had to face. I had this assignment, and another paper due on the same day, and spreading my time between the two was very difficult. However, I am very happy with how my hack turned out; I spent the entire day on Sunday working on it, and Monday turning out the final touches. I hadn’t edited in some time, other than my previous hack (where I used AE), so it was difficult to get a sort of creative flow going. Originally, I wanted to keep my focus on the design aesthetics of the early 2000s, but it was too broad a subject, and it started to cross into other “generations” such as Vaporwave. I wanted to find a specific niche that the majority of us could feel nostalgic about, but one that could support my argument. After some discussion with my friends and family about the hack and my current ideas, I came across the conclusion that it is in fact, our environment, that makes us “grow” faster.

A big indicator of this was actually my little sister and her friends. She’s 12 years old, yet is aware of many more social things that I wasn’t aware of when I was her age. I notice this is the same situation for other kids her age, and I think this is because technology (namely social media) makes information much more accessible (and because parents are less privy to keeping their children off devices).

I hope my hack made sense to those viewing it, and I hope the argument was visible. Now, the next challenge is figuring out what Hack 5 should be…

To me, this was the most challenging Hack. I think I got too intimidated and caught up in my head, believing that it needed to be perfect—even though I wasn’t very familiar with video editing platforms. Part of the struggle came from not thinking creatively; I became fixated on one single idea and couldn’t move past it. As I mentioned in my Artist Statement, I was initially working on a TikTok about how happiness has been visually demonstrated throughout the decades, starting with the 1950s. I was almost done with it and had spent the entire afternoon on Tuesday “perfecting” the video, but in the end, I didn’t like how it turned out. I decided to delete the whole thing and start over from scratch.

That was the moment I realized I needed to do something I actually cared about—something that wouldn’t feel like just another assignment. Since we’re in the middle of another testing period, I wanted this to feel fun and meaningful, not stressful. I’m really passionate about my country, so I decided to focus on one of Bolivia’s most pressing issues right now. This also allowed me to meet the “recovery of ‘undiscovered public knowledge’” criteria listed in the rubric.

After presenting yesterday, I noticed a flaw in my project. I realized that the first part of the video—the section with all the beautiful landscapes of Bolivia—was too long. Or maybe the second part, which focused on current events, was too short. I think I could have included at least two or three more clips to better balance the two halves and create a more powerful contrast. Still, I’m proud that I was able to pivot toward something meaningful and personal, which made the process much more enjoyable and authentic.

I did not have too many hardships last week (except for submitting this late yet again; I can’t seem to get this together. This semester is killing me with interviews and so much work). ANYWAYS . . . I enjoyed this Hack, which was refreshing because #3 was really hard for me. I had so much fun making this remix video. I did, of course, run into some hiccups with merging everything together to get it to look the way I wanted, but I really enjoyed the creative process. I also got so much great feedback in class. I felt like I had so many things to talk about in my artist statement that it was kind of all over the place. However, I had so many objectives and things I wanted to accomplish that I needed to bring up everything to paint the full picture.

I also really enjoyed seeing everyone’s creations in class. I felt like everyone produced really important yet fun pieces. It is really cool to see everybody’s varying interests. I am really excited to start working on the final Hack. I think I am going to work on my board game. I want to redesign it, make it look more professional, and push my critique.