Event 1- Eco-centric Art and Science Week Workshops with Linda Weintraub


This week the event I attended for our first event was the Eco-centric Art and Science Week Workshops with Linda Weintraub.  This workshop was all about the human body and how we perceive senses when we are not distracted by technology and manufactured.  Linda began by asking the group what percent of items we thought we interacted with that had not been manufactured.  Everyone had different guesses but the group consensus was between 0 and 3 percent.  This made me think about and realize that almost everything we come in contact with has been manufactured by humans.

We were asked to enter the room without our shoes and spend an hour in silence, observing and interacting with the different boxes.  There were six different categories for the boxes: flavor and aroma, mass and weight, volume and dimension, touch and texture, form and beauty, and bare your soles/souls.  Each box had a different activity and the instructions were written on the box.



All the boxes really made you think about the world from a different perspective. The box I found most interesting was one that contained a honey comb. It was surrounded around the difference between a rectangle and a hexagon. Questions were posed, asking why we think bees construct hives out of hexagons and what we find more beautiful, a hexagon or rectangle?  The reason why they construct their hives in hexagons is because it is a shape that can hold the most potential of honey.  It is amazing that nature is able to construct something so beautiful, yet it also serves a greater purpose.  I believe that we find a hexagon more beautiful because it is a shape we do not see as much, unlike the rectangle. However, I feel the bee would believe a rectangle is more beautiful for this same reason. 




Another box that intrigued me was one that had to do with touch.  We were instructed to close our eyes and arrange the different pine cones by category.  It was interesting to experience a sense without your eyes because I felt it made the others stronger.  It forced you to pay more attention to detail about how it felt and the texture each one had.  It was also crazy to see how much longer it takes you to do a simple task when you cannot use your eyes.  We are so accustomed to our senses that we do not recognize or appreciate them as much as we can.

https://www.123rf.com/photo_14163776_one-bee-works-on-honeycomb.html
Altogether, this workshop really opened my eyes to a different way of perceiving the world, while being more in tune with your body.  By just being barefoot, I was able to experience a variety of different sensations that go unrecognized when shoes our on. I highly recommend that everyone should take time to observe and appreciate the things in life that existed before industrialization.


Comments

  1. UnknownApril 25, 2017 at 7:27 PM

    I really enjoyed reading your post. Given that we went to the same event, It was interesting to see that we both felt the same about pine cones! This one amazed me the most; I was totally shocked by the capabilities of my hands! I couldn't figure out much about the honey comb though. I guessed the functionality of hexagons for bees correctly, but I couldn't think of why I liked hexagons more! I didn't think being rare would make some thing look more attractive. But I guess you're right! It does! I liked the fact that each and every one us who went there had his/her unique experience.

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