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themword's picture

Final Presentation

Here is the link to our video:
www.youtube.com/watch
We initially really struggled to come up with an idea for our project. We met multiple times, and we threw out a variety of unrelated, abstract ideas that we wanted to incorporate into our presentation. Every so often we would become frustrated and found that we would stare off into the distance, not being able to proceed. Everything seemed important, and we were not effectively acting as a force of natural selection. Eventually an idea came out that we felt an impulse to act on. What stopped us this time was not a mental block but an environmental one, in that facilities would not let us borrow the props we needed to carry out this idea. At this point we felt dejected and worried that we would not reach the only goal we were concerned with: completing this project. Reflecting on the huge amount of time we spent brainstorming, by chance, one of us thought we could recreate and document, via film, our process for developing a presentation. In framing our project this way, we realized we were incorporating a variety of lessons learned in class, some of which we originally wanted to capture and others we had not planned on representing. We got to showcase the fragments of presentation ideas we previously came up with and highlighted things we got from the class by, literally, sharing with the class our brainstorming process. We touched upon the concept of self-referentiality, which was an important topic to both of us, by referencing our final project in a video that was our final project. Additionally, we included the idea of endlessness, and by continuing the conversation in our video in person, leaving the class with a question and sitting down as if we were still contemplating how to proceed. Retrospectively, looking at our presentation, we noticed some similarities between the evolution we learned about in class and our presentation. Although we made lots of progress while completing this project, our process, like evolution, was not teleological. In class, we have been talking about the idea of aimlessly wandering, which we feel aided us in our final presentation, since we developed our presentation after abandoning our initial goal,and randomly tried new things out. Ultimately we found that our presentation was effective in conveying numerous class lessons. We welcome any additional thoughts on our presentation.

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