Narrow Frame


In a cognitive science course on Art & Perception, we learned that part of what makes us recognize art as an art object is that we understand the frame. Without the frame, we can mistake a construction for reality. 

Yesterday on a podcast I heard a successful creator speak about how he organizes his life by narrowing the frame that allows choices to flood in. This helps him reduce the cognitive load on decisions so that he can simply get to work. He produces a lot, including a daily blog.

Today I am thinking about the frames as I work on learning how to frame the commands for making this blog space. I am on day 2 here. The window of this blog is a frame, yes? I am working to narrow my frame and figure out what is essential enough to put here. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is Agreement?

Image
Agreement is not the same as agreeing.  Agreement is a state of being that is separate from point of view. Agreement is a way to adjust your mindset in order to be accessible, flexible, and civil as a participant in any discussion, classroom, public office, or any meeting of more than one person.  Agreeing to disagree is a form of passive aggressive stonewalling that has nothing to do with a state of agreement.  This is going to be a many faceted and often visited topic for the next few weeks as I work out how to express ideas and assumptions about agreement.
Read more

Oh oh oh for the love of a ukulele

Image
It took me three years to sit down and really learn ukulele. And it wasn't easy. Not because uke is hard to learn or play, but because I mostly played guitar and learning the new chord progressions for songs I already knew, well, that was difficult. Because the songs I knew on guitar didn't live in my head next door to the words, they lived in my hand. And using the ukulele chords was like using a different set of streets to get to my friend's house. And ukulele is soooooo small. It's a clown car of strings tied to wood, and for grown-up hands a soprano ukulele is a crowded little driver's seat with no head-room. It was precisely because it was small and could fit into my backpack next to my camera that I even packed the thing as I was flying from Connecticut to Florida for a weeklong playwright residency, which is fun, but can be lonely when you are not in rehearsal and in a strange city.  And this residency ended up being extra stressful and lonely for me when I d...
Read more

Plasticity and the Play World

I'm working on a play. After putting a few pages together and figuring out most of the characters and a few of the major scenes, I'm puzzling out the rules that will govern the world of the play. This particular play is an adaptation of Oedipus at Colonus, and I have been thinking about it for a number of years. While the original material is a tragedy by Sophocles, my version will be a comedy. It will take place in a small pizza parlor, with a counter and one or tow tables. Through the story several Greek myths will unwind. It will be like a crossroads of stories that pass thru the tale o a refugee and his daughter living under a curse.  I am working to determine how the world will move. Will it all be in the confines of the pizza parlor, or will some of it take place outside? If it does move location, how will it be presented? These are some of the aspects of play-world plasticity that I am thinking thru. Besides being a playwright, I am also a designer. In order to compose a...
Read more