Project 3 Artist Statement

For Project 3, I chose to make a comic book on morality. This project is made on regular wide-ruled notebook paper, just as if a child were to make one. On the front cover reads "Morals?!?" colored in with red and purple crayon for the comic effect. Inside this booklet are different comic squares that I found on the internet pertaining to morals and moral dilemmas. I added color to them with crayons and markers and filled in the blank spaces to make it more cartoon-ish.
My first decision I encountered with this project was which topic to choose from. I chose morality because I'm interested in how morals come to be. This topic is also something that many people are familiar with (whether they have any or not) and you don't need to know a whole lot of scientific terms or zero in on a particular sub-topic- although you can if you want. My next decision was what medium to choose. Morals are usually learned at a young age. Parents will teach their children what they think is right and wrong and reward or punish for certain acts. I look at comic books as a child's entertainment more than a grown ups and there lies the answer as to why I decided to make my project in that kind of medium. Children are interested in comic books and find them fun to read and they also learn lessons from them. There are always the bad characters and the good characters in each story line and a kid always knows which is which. The good guy is constantly looked at as a hero.
This piece of work can compare to other creative projects such as Batman, Superman, and Spiderman. They each had their own villain and at the end the super hero prevailed.
This project on morality is based on all of the guiding questions. It is different for projects done about hunting or beliefs on stem cell research because that requires to have a set opinion. But what are opinions mostly based on? Morals.
My message of this piece, that I hope people understand, is that everything comes back to your morals. Every decision you make and every action you decide to take has a thought process behind it. And on that train of thought, morals are aboard. Whether you were taught one thing or learned from your own experience, everyone has a set. Parents are the first to pass these on when their children are young so they can grow up to what they hope to be a respectable and decent human being.
My comic book had both specific situations and a general outlook on morality. It could have been made a little more organized and kept the same type of cartoon throughout the project.

Shaun Slifer - Railbiking

1. The fact that I see a bicycle on a railroad track itself draws me to it. I see the picture of this invention and think it is a little bizarre, but cool.
2. It is compelling because this is an on-going project for one thing and I would like to see how this turns out. It is interesting to think that these two means of transportation are being used as one. There must have been a reason as to why this railroad is abandoned, whether its because there were no funds or it leads to nowhere, but it's interesting. It makes me conjure up questions.
3. One time this past summer, some new friends of mine had brought me to hang out on abandoned railroad tracks by a Tony's grocery store. I thought it was the coolest place ever. We had to climb up a slope which wasn't too bad but the way down was worse. When we got up there though, we started walking down the middle of the tracks and they seemed to go on forever. I wondered how far they went and how long they have been abandoned. It was a chill place to think.

Can you turn the bicycle around to ride it back to where you came from? What would be considered illicit for this particular project?

Project 3 Idea

I plan on doing project 3 on the science of morality. I am going to try a photography medium by showing pictures of situations in which people contemplate what is right and wrong and what we see as moral or immoral.

Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and Art - extra credit

I attended the Consciousness: Philosophy, Science, and Art discussion on Wednesday, April 8th at the Chicago Cultural Center. When I walked in, practically all the seats on the floor were filled so I had to find a place on the window sill. To be honest I really wasn’t expecting it to be that crowded. There were four different speakers that had backgrounds in four different fields of study: Psychology, Philosophy, Evolutionary Theory, and Art History. They all related their fields to consciousness. One speaker talked a lot about Artificial Intelligence and its differences from human/animal intelligence. He mentioned the “binding problem” which I wrote down in my notes so I could later look up what it is. There are two different interpretations of that term- one being how the brain segregates elements into complex patterns of data and the other being how the unity of conscious perception is brought about by the distributed activities of the central nervous system. One of the other speakers talked how the mind was OF the body, not just in it. He mentioned the term “qualia” which, among many others, I didn’t know what it meant. I now know it is a term of art used in philosophy for sensory occurrences of all kind. I found that very interesting, like thought experiences versus real experiences. The speaker who majored in Art History was very much into surrealism and talked a lot about a novel titled Nadja written by a French surrealist, André Breton. She even brought the novel with her and passed it around the room for everyone to flip through and take a look at it. One last thing that was said that I found interesting was that real events, emotions, ect, result in unconscious thoughts and not vice versa. It seems very simple and almost like common sense, but thought-provoking. After all the speakers finished, there was time for a question/answer session when people can bring up any questions they had about anything that was said. Overall, I really liked it but I didn’t have the capacity to fully understand what they were talking about, which is why I wrote a few things down. They were also speaking fast but i’m sure that was only because they had a limited amount of time to talk.