As this blog is to document the the experience of my Independent Study, its probably only fitting to explain what that even is. I’ll try to be quick and dirty.
I.S. is…
Independent Study (I.S.) is the Senior thesis project that every College of Wooster student has to complete to graduate. For most disciplines, the end product is a properly thorough academic paper- one that has taken the better part of a year to research and perfect. For an art student like me, the end product includes a visual expression of our research topic. While an accompanying paper is a major part of it, our concepts are primarily communicated through a collection of artworks or an installation piece.
And as for me…
Everything and everyone is connected. Once when I was asked the open-ended question “What do you believe?” I happened to have a ball of yarn in my hand. Not knowing how to spontaneously verbalize my deepest convictions, I let the ball drop to the floor. I tugged at one end of the string and watched the energy travel down the line making the ball roll and wiggle. “You can’t do that without that happening,” I said.
I am fascinated and overwhelmed by the fact that every action affects something and is affected by something. No single being or event is isolated. I wouldn’t be typing away in my easy chair right now if it were not for a specific series of actions and interactions. These actions and interactions are all connected, creating a sort of personal narrative. These narratives, though they may seem linear, are connected in an infinite number of ways to an infinite number of other narratives of an infinite number of entities. The resulting fabric is a web of connections, the magnitude of which is barely conceivable.
Due to its very nature, I see this principal of connection occurring in everything I experience. However, there are two activities that serve as daily reminders of this- knitting and the Internet. Perhaps it is because I am both an avid web-surfer and knitter, but I find these two things to be among the best representations mirroring the Greater Web. Because they are visual, tangible and, to a certain extent, contained, they make the concept of an over-arching web a bit easier to understand.
The more I thought about these two things and their broader implications, the more I realized that they, for the reasons just stated, are inherently analogous. In my installation, I explore knitting and the navigation of the Internet, specifically navigation of the online knitting community, as intrinsically similar activities that demonstrate the concept of connection among all things.
Look Ma, I’m blogging…
Given the nature of my topic, I figured it would be fitting to have an online appendage to my installation. I hope to use this blog as sort of an alternative sketchbook. So all I can say is bear with me…
