week seven: Good fedback and horrid writing

Meet with my mentor on my birthday last week to review my projects. Natasha is a great lady. Her enthusiasm builds off mine. I left energized, gained perspective from some constructive questions and returned home eager to continue the momentum. It was an exciting session sharing my personal work of storytelling and my exploration into instillation through collaging issues of land use. This is a good term. I am doing what I love and pushing myself into new terrain. The portraits and interviews portray the living landscape and timelessness of the North Woods. This narrative of space has revealed new knowledge on this place I call home. The details of family tress, employment, means by which person landed here, why a person stays, how seasons define personal experience especially surviving the winter and on and on. Lives are lived. This is a space I am eager to explore and understand. The Humanity of this place transcends the smallness of numbers and isolation on the map. Folks come here because they love the wilderness. All the stories share strong characteristics of individual strength and passion for experiences connected to the landscape. These factors may be in common with rural American life in other places but the distance to city centers and the edge of wilderness makes Moosehead unique. It is a different and special place. At least for me it feels like no where else.

Horrid writing is my curse. I do not like writing; actually I hate writing. The word syntax is evil and throws me into a tailspin. I enjoy the readings, love the process of making art work and debating ideas in the process of seeing how it all relates to my work. Writing is like nails on a chalk board, irritating to the point of distress. I have never liked to write. Actually that is not true. As a child of fourth grade in Mrs. Carter's class I loved writing folktales on the animal characters and plants of my world. My writing was surely horrid than too but she encouraged me to keep me engaged. I have to embrace the process...It is a tedious process to write a paper others can access. I need to read everything aloud, I need an editor who can stomach my lack of syntax, and I need lots of paper for edits. Any volunteers?

week six: research annotations & interviews

Busy week first getting my annotations into my advisor and in the studio. I am reviewing last week's interview, tweeking the questions, interviewing more folks and setting up interviews. I am really enjoying the perspectives. My last interview shed some interesting details about the train industry. I was aware two track systems came into the region for industry and tourism but the extend is impressive. People are a living history. The landscape has changed but folks remember fondly the past. I tweeked the questions because I want folks to be open to answer without any leds but the topics are needed to gather any experiences. I do not want to get off track from experiences into political rants. Dangerous mud! I am shooting with the 8x10 field and box, pentex 67, and my digital nikon. It is surely overkill but each is so different in the visual feel I want to see a month's worth and determine how I will proceed. The Hobo 8x10 is my favorite camera followed by the 5x7 deardorff. I do not like the 8x10 field because it is heavy and combersume. Folks love the experience and have facinated by the sheet film. It leds an interesting conversation about history and how come old processes are best. This is great fun and I am very excited for it all to come together and be shared with my peers, my mentor and my community. Our region's school is concerned with diversity. I see the differences within our community and see many lessons of acceptance, respect, and perspective. Life is a prisim; each cut is a different slice of life. I did my unergraduate thesis on the prisim of identity. That title sticks with me as a tried and true method to respect variances.
Concerned about my recording equipment. I am using a Olympus digital voice recorder and my blackberry phone. I was also using a zoom T4 but it died. Research on the internet revelled this expensive gadget is doomed with errors. So, I am on a quest. My concern is if I use sound, what format edits well and also what program shall I use. Work progresses...

Generous and Kind

First week of interviews productive. Each one's experiences of the North Woods of the Moosehead Lake region were dramatically different. Need to tweek the questions for tourists. I will have a option B for each question to relate it to the transiant stay. Folks have been very generous with their time and interviews. Story telling grants an intimate connection into the personal space: the ability to comprehend who someone is and why places connect us. The compresention of the so what behind experiences' meaning reveals the interdisciplinary weave of human geography. The land is symbolic because we engage it with meaning. We are one however separate at things.

Questions for Interview

What is the character of the North Woods of the Moosehead Lake region as a place, a space defined by people. Your experiences make the region unique through relationships and personal bonds.
1. Make is your full name; including your maiden name?
2. How old are you?
3. Where do you live/stay in the region: address, neighborhood, and type of dwelling, date of structure/contractor? If you live here, where do you recreate in the region? What do you call these spaces?
4. How long have you lived/stayed in your current location? Have you lived anywhere else in the region?
5. How long have you lived, visited or worked in the region. Please explain the nature of your relationship with the region: relationship through activities, family, and work.
6. If you came to the region, what drew you to the region?
7. What interests and experiences connect you to the region?
8. Who do you do activities with in the region? Explain these relationships ?
9. What is a typical week for you? What activities do you do at home, and what takes you out and about? When you come to the region, for work or as a visitor, what do you do while here?
10. What traditions do you observe in the region: holidays, seasons, and activities…? Are you a participant?
11. Have you lived elsewhere? If so, where and how long? What brought you back or to the region?
12. When you travel, where do you go? Where would you like to go?
13. What are the economic sectors of the region? How does your life intersect with these sectors?
14. Define the region in terms of geographic landscape? Define the region in terms of cultural landscape. What space defines the place, the region? What images have authority in defining the region such as in marketing, history and culture? How is the region different from other places?
15. How does the history of the region live on in the present? What cultural heritage remains and what symbolic representations exist?
16. What is specific to the current time and place at the region? How does the issue effect your life? Economic situation [woods, rail roads, tourism, service sector, etc], Political debates [nuclear waste dump, Big A damn, clear cutting, Squaw Mt.'s name change to Moose Mt., Plum Creek rezoning, road plowing, school consoladation, hospital, Moose hunt, number of moose permits, Deer, Bear baiting/hunting, lynx habitat, ATVs on Main Street, Scammon road for snowmobiles, etc], and what are the demographics of the region [Socioeconomic groups, characterized by age, income, sex, education, occupation, etc., that comprise a market]?
17. What do you see as nature or the wild in the region? How does your life intersect with nature and the wild? Explain the boundaries that separates the natural wild from the tamed cultivated space.
18. What objects define the place for you: trophies, keepsakes, and knick-knacks? What objects do you bring into your home, work and personal space to represent the region? What maps do you use?
19. What social dynamics exist in the community: neighborhoods, families, and economics? How do they shape the region’s experiences for residents, visitors and workers of the region?
20. What will the region be in twenty years? How will your place s change?

experimental geography at colby college

Visited Colby College yesterday to view the museum exhibit, Experimental Geography. Enjoyed my time tremendouly and intend to visit again before June. Hope many visit, bring friends and share their experience. The selected works offered varied media and methodology on the experience of and dynamic possibilities for questioning space as landscape, cartography and urbanism. Our lives exist in places. These constructed space struggle with their defined spaces; This exhibition didacticly engaged issues of experience. The issues of boundaries for a particular place and individual was tacticly achieved through pieces such as Ellen Rothenberg's De-Stabilized Geography and Yin Xiuzhen's Portable Cities. Whe I found the advertisement for the exhibition, I was drawn to the video piece, The Road Map, 2003. The work followed the travels of an israeli passport and a Palestinian passport along two routes in the same latitude. The Israeli traveler took 1 1/2 hours where the Palesinian took 4 1/2. The video projection with color and sound brought you with each traveler simotaniously. The viewer experienced the particulars of the region's landscape, culture, human relationships, political boundaries and the random changes of military requirements. The journey poetically disected the human conditions of landscape. The use of cartography is a new idea for me. I first encounter the form at my first Vermont residency, winter '10, in the work of my advisor, Ashley Hunt. The power of the map as a trusted didactic form and the ability to address and transform language limitations and problems of address are both matters I look forward to reading more about in the exhibition's book and in my research. Great Show!

week four-reading

Finishing up the first readings. Exploring the meanings of space and approaches to understanding the individual and the collective space. Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place explored the landscape of daily life and seeing beyond the expected. The close readings of Olson's poetry and commentary by John Stilgoe exposed how thin the vineer of expectation lays. Poety slows times passing to experience and see the beauty of a moment or action; the beauty expossed by knowing a subject, knowing it as a loved one: familar and intinate. Next book, Tuan's analysis of space and place: perspective of experience establishes grounding for questions I want to ask and caused me to pose new one in my interviews. Tung comes from human geography and engages theory familar to the disciplines of anthropology, psychology and literature. The subtitle places explains his quest clearly and concisely, The Perspective of Experience. The sharing of experence through ethos and imputing personality to space transforms space in effect to place (Tung 91). This ordering brings post structuralism into consideration as I use language to understand and explain this phenomena of a place defined by not just the geology of the land bu the people and thier lives. It is the process of making language understood. Learning the terms and diction. Like a poetic each work in a question changes the intent and gathers different responses. Besley's Post Structuralism, a very short introduction takes the pholosophical persepctive of "what it means to be human" through the twentith century of scholarly/ philosophical debate. In the end she puts it all in the most lucid sentence, "What Post Structuralism offers is, in the end, an oppertunity and cause for reflection (Besley 107)." Continuing to view the materials at the Cneter for Land Use and Interpretation. Their recommended reading offers wide range of human geology issues. I read on...

Collecting lingerie and researching the history of undergarments. Developing a base of understanding to design the collection.
Developing a list of land use issues and vocabulary particularly relating to access. Aspire to bring humour to the topic of zoning.