In order to help facilitate a more haptic experience, we need people to guide this interaction and turn it from an occasional random opportunity to common practice, which I think is supported by the exhibit analysis. People, even though invited and led to touch the work, they were nervous because of past encounters. Having people available and ready to break that mindset is crucial.

This shows that even if we choose to evaluate art through one lens, there are so many sub-lenses and techniques. We can look at art, but there are so many ways to look with our eyes. Similarly, we can touch the art, but still, there are so many different ways to touch and understand art.

By not talking/engaging in certain practices, we lose a whole way of analyzing art.

These tours are seen as an obligation rather than an opportunity, and as such, the potential to learn and discover is lost.

I think this adds to learning about art and its meaning. Artists have to constantly make decisions during the creative process on how to create their work, and to ignore a whole set of these decisions limits the art. Part of what makes certain art so powerful is their separation from traditional techniques and practices.

Once again, placing a personal connection to the research makes the work more accessible and understandable. It feels less like facts/stats/data being thrown at you and more like an evolving story. Learning through stories helps establish relationships in a way we can process more easily than facts on a page.

By starting by making the audience guests/reintroducing the host/guest relationship, S7palek not only showcases part of his culture but also challenges colonialism once again. The situation of collaborators at performances allows S7palek to control the way his art is seen.

I think that actually integrating the culture of the affected peoples is a much more poignant way of reconciliation, rather than a simple admission of guilt. Rather than making an apology and recognizing the past, actually working to restore the lost practices has more of a cultural impact.

The culture of thanking more than just humans helps foster more of an appreciation of the world around us, which I think makes it easier to be happy and content. When the little things each day bring you some happiness, that's important and beneficial.

By straying from traditionalism, these dances are thought-provoking and allow us(or at least me) to exit the mindset that I am in when I see "typical dances." It gives me a chance to think about new ideas. On a personal note, I find that getting out of traditional environments challenges me as a musician really well.

The demarcation of rights to songs and effectively culture seems to be the way that the indigenous people's culture is protected. It cannot be used by others and thus appropriated. It preserves the identity of the group over long periods of time. In western-European culture, that is not really a thing. Preservation and traditionalism have sort of been the historical enemies of euro-centric groups.

I like that a bit of background is given on S7palek. It helps locate this story and introduce the different groups that are discussed. I think that it also helps add a human element to the discussion. By giving a story to the collaborators (like how Tsing does in TMATEW), the analysis feels more accessible. As Tsing said in TMATEW, it is easier to understand ethnography and history if stories are present.

The way S7palek interacts and deals with their audience seems to be very important in the way that their art has meaning. Here, by bringing the audience into the dances as guests being welcomed, imperialist and colonialist views are challenged, forcing the audience to accept that they are not on public lands but rather that of an indigenous group. Essentially, this host/guest relationship becomes a platform to challenge imperialism.

Personally, I really appreciate movies because of their fantastical aspect. The 'subcreation' that occurs provides a chance to escape, which is nice.

Leech is so fitting as interpreting excessively sucks the meaning out of art.

This reminds me of something my writing seminar has been discussing: the excess of intellect. We have been talking about how dense theory can sometimes be pointless and that we should take language a little less seriously. Similarly, we should take art a little less seriously.

I think this issue of interpretation fuels conflict. By allowing society to focus on content, we have opened up art/literature to become tools or pieces of evidence. Rather than understanding religious texts, for example, in their respective historical times, the act of translating the broad meaning of those texts to our time has become very important. As a result, when analyzing such texts, we categorically assign meaning to different sections, attaching it to modern-day conflicts. Such connections between art and modern life lead art to be the backdrop to hate. We look for deeper meanings in art and then can't help but reflect on our own lives and use that art to explain ourselves. Hateful people proof-text art excessively to defend their crusades.

What I like about Albert Bierstadt's works back home in DC is that I have not researched their meaning. To me, they are beautiful landscapes that take me elsewhere. If he intended to mean something else, oh well. The power of his art is its form, not its meaning. Its content is its form.

Meaning has taken precedence over form in a lot of art. I think that their separation is wrong. The way we show our emotions matters, not just that we show them.

I won't lie, playing my violin has been a massive help to me in settling into college. Whether it serves as a distraction, a way to channel my emotions, or reminds me of home, art is definitely therapeutic.

I think the reason why minority athletes can inspire so many kids is that they are real people with depth and stories. Characters input into a story just to check the diversity mark fail because they are not real characters, but rather shells. They lack depth and are unrelatable. The author nails that with this assertion.

This goes back to what I said earlier. Unless you know something is wrong, it's hard to change. It's like how I never thought of 24/7 and influential in my life until we read about it, and I connected with the work. Subtlety is not always the best approach for affecting change.

Fantasy is not all good. What is a dream world for one person might be the very validation and almost confirmation of another person's fears, leading them to struggle.

As the author asserts, whiteness and womanhood have become synonymous. It demonstrates how our society fails to separate gender and race, which excludes so many people. It homogenizes the life experiences of so many people, which I think stifles the growth of our society. If we cannot acknowledge our differences, how can we prevent them from being a source of conflict?

I read Toni Morrison's Jazz in high school and we touched on this notion of perspective. Without spoilers, we came to the conclusion that looking with a perspective aimed at seeing something specific betrays you. It makes you accept things that are wrong, or reject things that are right. It's hard to talk about this without spoiling the book, but I am referencing what the narrator says at the end about love and hate.

This quote made me think about all the social media comments you see when an account posts about hiring a minority for a role or engaging in diversifying their workforce. The comments are often along the lines of why do we care/so what, demonstrating that people do not understand that without accurate representations of everyone, unfair stereotypes get enforced.

This mediation helps POC reject white supremacy; however, I wonder how it affects the actual racists. If the people propagating the hate do not realize they are being challenged, I am curious as to how the dynamic shifts. Perhaps POC are then able to challenge racists more directly after mediating racial negation.

I like that Foucault challenges this assumption. In my opinion, power and freedom cannot be separated. Nobody likes being told what to do or being caged. The natural response to power or systems of domination is to rebel or exercise your own agency. Power and domination almost invite resistance. I think about how as the USSR became more violent and controlling under Stalin, the more resistance they faced. Where militaristic resistance crumbled, artistic resistance from people like Shostakovich rose.

The ability to control somebody's vision is a crazy thought to me. The power you can have by being able to develop and influence a child's perspective is so great, I would argue that you can shape the kid's life into whatever you want. The author of this essay asserts that as we repeat actions, we build muscle memory. If you can get a child to repeat the same line of thinking, you can basically predict/control how they will react to the world in the future. It's just a scary thought to think about how easily our minds can be molded.

Do we want all of society to be controlled at all times though? Is discourse not the way we advance in society?

This idea that making a person adhere to social forces on their own by causing them to feel surveyed can be more powerful than any government or ruler demonstrates the power that sight has. Vision seems synonymous with judgment in the panopticon, which is why people are constantly made to feel watched. Nobody likes to feel judged poorly, so if somebody is always watching, people naturally act in the societally mandated way.

This line about how the panopticon has so many variations reminds me of the Berlin Philharmonic's hall, which is a stage that is surrounded by the audience 360 degrees, sports stadiums, older concert venues, and some new theatres that utilize a central stage with a surrounding audience.

While it is interesting to have people with different opinions and upbringings converse, to use orphaned kids and then give one of them a totally false education is just cruel. These philosophers, in their thought experiments, seem to avoid ethics. It makes me think of Klara and the Sun, and the ethics of genetically altering certain kids, and how that develops into classism.

The fact that we as humans have the capacity to enact mental torture and use mind games to break somebody's soul is terrifying. It makes me think about what else our society could do.

Being able to see the outside world and know you cannot interact with it seems more cruel than the dungeon idea. It's like causing envy and jealousy to fester and that seems terrible. I think it also furthers the idea of binary vision with the notion of enclosed and free people.

It's interesting to look at how institutions deny the idea of gray area of middle ground in an attempt to exercise control.

This reminds me of how in society, people often use threats in one area of life to make impacts in other areas. For example, covid-19 deniers used the virus and its accompanying lockdown rules to spread propaganda about government corruption and surveillance. Additionally, western countries used Covid-19 as a basis to alienate the Chinese government.

There's an interesting, maybe subtle, contrast here between care and control. While citizens are confined to their homes and forced under a quasi-martial law, the Syndic still endeavors to hear the complaints of the people. By listening to each citizen, these laws seem centered around the idea of community, co-existence, and transparency. It differs from how the Covid-19 policy in the US alienated the voices of scientists and average people, reducing transparency.

I don't have anything really analytical for this, but it reminded me of uber eats/amazon whole foods deliveries in 2020, where you had to order groceries and then pick them up at a designated space.

Interesting idea because responsibility often feels like keeping up fluency with technology, staying on top of work with the eventual goal of wealth, and continuing with other acquisition-based actions.

Interesting contrast between power and personalization, where we actually lose power in an effort to personalize our digital lives. We become ingrained in the systems of social media and software upgrades.

We really do live in an age defined not by technological advances but by consumer patterns and behaviours.

The wage gap is growing, resources are more divided, and educational standards across the world are still contradictory. I am not sure that this truism has merit or that the equality of intelligence is coming.

As we (humans) try to order changes in society, we seem to erase the reality that change takes time and effort, turning important shifts in life into just asterisks or notes in a history textbook.

This is confusing to me. Is the idea here that 24/7 pushes us to infinitely want more instant access/gratuity?

As I mention earlier convenience is not a bad thing, online learning would exist without the constant push of convenience.

By itself, perpetual access is not a bad thing ie. medical attention, food, water, internet. However, when perpetual access begins to break down regulation of our day (eating at random times because food is always available, procrastinating because something can be done later), that seems to be the issue.

This assertion makes me think of the way that the media creates a social reality using specific "order words" and terms. 24/7 is not the type of word that I would expect to have similar power, so it's interesting to look at how even minute phrases can affect us.