Tuesday 

Even though I wasn’t able to do my own presentation during Victoria’s food studies fiat lux, I really enjoyed getting to see my peers’ presentations about the history of kimchi and breadmaking. I came before our official studio class time and was able to appreciate the work and time my peers have poured into their projects this quarter, and especially resonated with the kimchi presentation: kimchi is a huge part of my own lived experience and I grew up watching my grandmother make season’s worth of kimchi in her tiny kitchen and her two hot-pink rubber-gloved hands. Every family has a different taste profile and recipe, which makes it such a beautifully rich and diverse dish and almost an entire food category of its own, and my grandma even has her own custom kimchi refrigerator: a refrigerator appliance built specifically for housing and fermenting jars of this liquid gold. I really appreciated how the group brought in so many varieties for people to taste, and interact with the content projected on the screen; it was so thoughtful and heartfelt and genuine. 

Although I wasn’t able to present, I was able to finalize printing my product to show on Thursday, and ran into a whole host of printing and paper issues, as well as barriers in translating my digital design accurately into printed form with the limited resources we have at the print lab. In the end, I was able to produce two prototypes solely for the purpose of displaying and conveying my idea, to be supplemented with a projection of my PDF for more accurate reference of what I had in mind. I hope to be able to find a way to re-print my zine in a final, more clean version, to have a final product that represents what I had in mind. However, this may or may not be possible depending on the capabilities of our DMA printers and the paper I’m able to acquire on time. 
 

Thursday 

I was so impressed by the conceptual ideas presented by my peers during class! I like that everyone’s final projects focused on entirely different things, as I feel like that is the beauty of our class and program with a very diverse set of interests. Each project tackled a very relevant, intriguing and gripping issue we currently face in our ever-accelerating culture, and really made me think deeply and feel deeply about the materials they presented. Annabeth’s group made such a cool immersive AR experience and incredibly professional renders that looked far beyond the timeline we had to work with, and conveyed strong emotional differences with environmental aesthetics. Ryan’s group’s piece was very visceral and made me reflect on my own experiences and understandings of chatGPT, since I hadn’t heard of its jailbreak capabilities until then, but was both mind-boggled and terrified upon finding out. Alexia and Matt’s piece almost moved me to tears and struck several chords that resonated with a lot of things I’ve been feeling in the last year, in so many ways both similar and adjacent to grief, loss and change. The words were beautiful and I really hope to be able to keep them in mind as I navigate the current uncertainties of my life.