from lessons for students, by zach lieberman:
In my talks I sometimes show two artworks I saw at the Venice Biennial as a contrast — the first is a high tech artwork which is a giant UFO which you enter wearing a brain wave meter and you experience an animation based on your brain waves:
I waited for a long time to experience this project:
But honestly, I didn’t feel anything when on the inside, and it was hard to understand what the point of this very complex and quite elaborate project was (I will admit, it was quite impressive in terms of the sheer number of credits, it looked like a movie!). In contrast when you came out of that space, there was a project called “Enamoured” by a Brazilian artist named Laura Belem with two boats that are facing each other:
You can see two lights on these two boats blinking back and forth, sometimes in sync, sometimes out of sync. It was like they were talking with and over each other. I sat at this exhibit for a long time, watching this communication, and to me the contrast between the projects was really stunning —
here was a simple project, very modest, but to me expressing something truthful about what it means to be alive and to communicate. I always try to encourage students to remember that small, honest things can win. We don’t always need a million dollar crazy project, but tiny acts of expression and intervention.
i am not nikolai, cody, phil, or nasif — i don’t have decades worth of experience.
neither am i jagi, shobhan, pedro, amitabh-aarthi — i am not brilliant.
neither am i jasmine or zongze — i don’t have polish.
this is what nikolai was alluding to: