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The playlist below incorporates timeless songs along with ones that are commonly known in today’s age. The blend of the two create the perfect atmosphere of relatability.

Images found from Wikimedia Commons

Recently, the disconnect between students and literature is becoming greater each year. Students do not realize that literature is timeless, even if it was written 100 years ago. Even though means of communication and overall being in the world has changed, the messages we can receive through literature remain the same. The goal of this project is to remind students that just because something is from the past does not mean that it is not still relatable. 

My project takes the themes present within the 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky and brings them into modern day light. The overall vision for this project is to take a text that many students often read and relate to and explore how it is still applicable even when they’re older. The experiences and thought processes expressed by the characters are still what many people experience today. Books are not something that you read once and then leave it to sit on a shelf for years because you believe it can no longer mean anything. By taking the novel and making it modern, I hope to remind students of the timeless quality that literature can have. I will be doing black-out poetry of the book, which I have admired for many years. I have taken the most relatable scenes from the novel to black-out. The most important aspect of this project is transforming not only the text, but the novel as well. The novel was written in letters, but to no one in particular. In order to bring this to modern day, each “letter” will be turned into an “email”, but ones that are saved in drafts. I decided to use emails rather than texts because it is impossible to not send a message. However, once a letter or email is written, it can be saved and never sent. One theme that is pertinent throughout the novel is the idea of mixtapes. In order to modernize this aspect, I made a Spotify playlist rather than a classic mixtape. I employed this aspect to the online portion of this project.

The overall point of this project is to show how even as the times change, the life lessons we experience do not. We can still learn from literature, and this project will hopefully remind students that you can still go back and learn from literature even if it is something of the past.

Works Cited: Chbosky, Stephen. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Pocket Books, 1999.

“Read Receipts” is an exploration of two types of toxicity: communication habits through the medium of texting and the hidden poisons in everyday objects. The primary focus and the inspiration of the project roots in the two types of “read receipts.” The physical receipts received after a purchase which contains Bisphenol A (BPA) a chemical easily absorbed through the skin. The other type of receipt is the digital receipt that indicates the read time for a sent text message, which is a key indicator of if an individual is ghosting or not.

The visual component of the project involves an artist book in the form of a receipt gushing from the inside of a book. The words: “TAKE RECEIPT HERE” points to the mouth of the dispenser. The blog post for this project is a one-sided text conversation between the narrator and the reader, where the narrator talks about the toxicity of read receipts and receipts you read. What we view as mundane exchanges have hidden impacts out of the field of our consideration. And, if you’re wondering what impacts you have on people, check your read receipts.

The links for the four sources present in the text conversation are as follows:

Link 1: https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.5406/amerjpsyc.129.2.0161.pdf?ab_segments=0%252Fbasic_SYC-4222%252Ftest&refreqid=excelsior%3Af226e80474d5ea47076025c7ccb55546

Link 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/smarter-living/why-people-ghost-and-how-to-get-over-it.html

Link 3: https://proxy.geneseo.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/919707916?accountid=11072

Link 4: https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2016/12/23/is-bpa-on-thermal-paper-a-health-hazard

Every day we are bombarded by hundreds if not thousands of images that are unwanted and at times offensive to our senses. You can’t open your favorite social media without seeing commercials for more stuff. From an early age, we are taught that to be happy you need to acquire material objects; who can have the newest, biggest, shiniest item that money can buy. Often times this leaves us stressed, overworked, and generally miserable. Images and pictures have been important all throughout history as a form of communication, today we still see this with the use of advertisements everywhere we look. Below is a short clip of images that we may have all seen at one time or another, and has become a social norm to view, something that we just put up with because we have no choice in the matter.

What if we were to surround ourselves with images of our own choosing; photos that produce some kind of emotion, whether it be good or bad? The pages in my artist book is a collection of images that I found to have some type of emotional response to me. Some are meant to be upsetting, others are meant to be pleasing. The important thing is that I am surrounding myself with images of my choosing and not ones that are forced upon me. Plus I get to feel good that I am recycling magazines instead of throwing them into landfills as well.

Soul Collage Cards are meant to help you deal with emotions and feelings that you can’t seem to express in words. Not only do you get to have fun like a child again, cutting with scissors and using glue, but this form of art therapy helps you to cut up some of these images you are often bombarded with, and make them into something enjoyable and often time beautiful, for yourself.

When you look into your soul what do you see? Welcome to my Inner Soul and the Demons I hide inside. Stay and browse and see what you will.

Art can be the outlet you need to release the demons that are gnawing at your brain. Ripping, Cutting, Glueing, let these simple acts be the release that you need. All that’s required is some old magazines, scissors and glue, and a bit of your time.

Soul Collage is often a tool used in group therapies but is something that can be done in the comfort of your own home. You can assemble your cards with purpose or purely without thought, either way, the relaxing use of art to express your emotions is both therapeutic and fun. Once you have a good size deck established, now is the time to ask the cards your life’s questions and hopefully get some helpful answers.

For my own deck, I found great photo material amongst discarded magazines, such as National Geographics (after all they have the best photos out there), along with other random nature, travel and women’s magazines. The cardboard backings and plastic covers can be bought online at either crafts stores or the official soul collage website, which I’ve included in a link below. It is up to you what size you want your cards to be, I found that the standard 5″x8″ was more than enough room to express what I needed to show.

Once you have a good size “deck” of cards completed the next stage of this project is underway, journaling. It is helpful to look at your cards and to ask them this simple question, “Who are you? What are you trying to tell me?” You will be surprised that even the most simple of cards can have the deepest meanings. This is where the true therapy begins, where you can start to deal with your emotions and issues.

My project is going to center around the umbrella effect of cell phone use on today’s society, specifically in teenagers. Nowadays we see people so attached to their phones that they miss out on many important aspects of life and human interaction. We have grown so used to the comfort of that warm feeling of our phone in our hand or close to our body. We almost feel out of the ordinary when we do not have it. Everyone has experienced that moment in time when you are in a room full of people, or walking somewhere in a crowd and we cannot do so without looking at our phones or simulating a phone call that that we know is not really there. Why is it that when we feel awkward instead of interacting with each other we look straight to our technology? I wanted to showcase how alone our technology really makes us. We think we are making connections but those technological connections do not supply us with the human interaction we actually need to be happy. We are replacing the feeling of happiness with things like social media and texting. We cannot make proper connections this way, and the goal of my project is to give us all a rude awakening in just how alone in this world we are when we rely solely on technology. 

The documentary is a portion of the project that takes the real lives of teenagers and brings them under a microscope. It is an interview that forced subjects to really think about how much time in a day is allocated to phone use, what they are missing out on because of this, and if they can understand that this is the equivalent of an addiction. This digital component will force viewers to take a step back and think about their own phone use. This is a social issue that is causing us to lose out on the world around us and forget what is important.

I further represent these issues in my project through photographs. I wanted to embody a sort of realist mindset, and capture a moment in time. I will capture different moments in a subjects life where technology takes precedence over human interaction. Every picture will be a distinct moment in time that we will be able to watch the world going on around the subject and nothing else matters except that of what is on our phones. We don’t even notice that every second we choose the adrenaline rush that our devices give us over human interaction, we are letting life pass us by bit by bit. I want each picture to showcase how disconnected we are from the world because of technology alone. We will see how much we lose while we truly think are under the impression that we are gaining. I would hope this album would serve as another realization for readers, allowing each line to cause intense thought that makes you question normal actions in your everyday life. 

The faint sound of the notification bell is almost like a shot of adrenaline shooting into your veins like a drug. We can’t live without that satisfying feeling of that technological heroine. Will we ever be able to put down the phone? The only connections we make on a daily basis are the ones we make to whatever network we are connecting to. What is the wifi password? That is the first question we ask at the threshold of a new friends door. Headphones? They are pure protection from the sounds of the outside world, denial to face any sort of human interaction.

Why? Why is it that our bodies are built like a program. We can’t force ourselves to connect on a deeper level, we believe the deepest level is that of the layers of the screen. What about the layers to a person? There is no layers to a screen, it is one two dimensional level that will send us into a spiraling hell. There is no way out of it once it begins. The trouble now a days is it is starting in the youngest of our society. Instead of counting their numbers (1,2,3), they are counting their comments and likes on social media.

How long can we go without the satisfying glow of the screen we hold so close? A screen that means the world to us, anything and everything feels right when we have a device is our hand. We can’t even see the disconnection, we are connected to the wifi, but are we connected to each other? How do we know if we are allowing all of our memories to become a blur. One that cannot be cleared because all we can remember is the faint glow of our screens. However, our memories are deferred because we can’t remember exactly what lies beyond that screen. Who we were with, what we were doing, and the connections we were making. Life goes on around us, sometimes even in circles, we don’t even realize what we are missing out on and how many memories become lost in the cloud.

Our life is indeed a sequence of numbers. That move quickly. We look down for hours on end not even recognizing that there are things that are more important moving right in front of us. We cannot break out of this sequence as it is certainly an addiction. Just as any other drug addiction, withdrawal will come fast the second we try to break this cycle. We cannot even imagine life without this device we hold so close. How could we ever let go from this sequence that controls our each and every move. What do we do in this situation? There may never be a simple answer to this question.

Technology and everything it encompasses is similar to the clouds over our head. The same way we can collect and store all the information we feel we need in a technological cloud, is the same way the clouds in the skye collect and store precipitation. When will it all come out and fall apart? There is no way for us to know, there is no weather forecast for technology. We are simply loading these clouds with all the information we see fit, will this be eternally satisfying? Instead of making memories we can remember ourselves, we are taking pictures we believe will last us a lifetime and entrusting them in some “cloud” that is not at all tangible.

We can continue on in this cycle for however long we see fit. The side effects of this addicting drug have already started the show through. We can no longer make the same connections, we are missing the daily occurrences that should come so naturally. We let life pass us by while we place everything of importance to us in the cloud that is constantly glooming over our head. Teenagers and people close in age to these subjects were born into this world. They know no other ways, so do we really feel like we are doing anything wrong? When we are born into a cycle and born already pre-addicted to a drug like technology, it is impossible to break. We were trained as young children to utilize this kind of technology (ie. cellphones) for everything. We can see clearly that without this addiction our lives would be completely different. Can we even imagine a world where this would not be the societal normality?

When we take a step back and try to make a mental photo album of all the memories we were not able to capture on with our cellphones, what can we actually remember? The answer to this may be little to nothing. We can no longer put full memories into place to make a big picture. We can only remember bits and pieces, the things that do not seem to hold much importance, and in this exact moment it becomes, A Memory Deferred..

This project strives to raise awareness and bring attention to the increasing amount of vandalization and waste at our National Parks here in the United States. Pastel drawings and photography are the mediums used in this project to show, not tell, the realities of our precious Parks and what they will all end up looking like if nothing is done to protect them.

To begin, it is crucial for readers to understand the significance of the color orange, which is the color of the photobook holding this project together. Orange is associated with “joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation…Orange increases oxygen supply to the brain, produces an invigorating effect, and stimulates mental activity. It is highly accepted among young people. In heraldry, orange is symbolic of strength and endurance. Orange has very high visibility, so you can use it to catch attention” (Color Wheel Pro)

That said, not only can the color orange represent the joy, sunshine, enthusiasm, and happiness that most people correlate with National Parks, but the objective of the orange book is to catch attention. When that attention is caught, mental activity is already stimulated before the reader opens the book, all because of the color of its cover. The symbolic strength and endurance of the color orange resonate with the strength of our Earth but also gives strength to the young readers who are the ones in a position to finally encourage and make these changes to our struggling planet.

On six consecutive pages, handmade pastel drawings are presented on the righthand side. Specifically, Zion, Joshua Tree, Grand Teton, Mount Rainier, Saguaro, and Sequoia National Parks are the six parks drawn. On their opposing page to the left, the name of the park is stated. Between every set of pages, there is a clear plastic sheet protector, each with different cutout coverups; garbage, graffiti, and other vandalism. The sheet protector can be easily moved on and off the pastel drawings of the Parks to juxtapose the pure nature and respect humans should have with nature at the Parks, with the original and disgraceful “art” that visitors have tainted the Parks with.

The original Joshua Tree drawing seen on the first page in the art book, was a gift for a significant other after we visited the park in the Summer of 2018. Because the 2019 government shutdown had such negative effects on our National Parks, this project strives to not allow these actions to be overlooked or be forgotten. The park became a special place to us, and the harm done to it felt more personal than it ever would have before.

The two women sketched in each drawing – whether sitting on a rock, standing, canoeing, sitting cross-legged on the ground, or hugging a sequoia tree, are always gazing into the distance, together. The devaluation of women and the environment undeniably go hand in hand. Thus, isolating and juxtaposing the two highlights their relations to one another. Though these ideas were brought together coincidentally, it goes without saying that both women and the Earth must be respected and empowered – and like the women in the drawing, we must come together, hand in hand and look forward, directly at the problem.

Graffiti, engravings, spray paint, cutting down trees; are just a few examples of the vandalism appearing in our National Parks. But it doesn’t stop at just etching your name into precious rock, the amount of waste in our parks is becoming extremely difficult to manage – leaving our parks dirty and polluted with plastic bottles, food wrappers, bags, and other non-biodegradable waste.

So, why a physical book? Simply stated, according to the British Psychological Society, “it’s easier to develop meaningful feelings of ownership over a physical entity than a digital one” (Jarrett). “The greater sense of ownership afforded by a physical product is only an enticing prospect when there’s a motivation to experience a strong sense of connection with it.” Hold this book, flip through this book and develop this meaningful connection discussed above – that’s how the change will begin.

Though most people that see this project will see it through the bright screen in their hands, my hopes are that the digital experience itself is enough to convince viewers to empathize with me for our National Parks and raise their voices. So, bring food and drinks in reusable containers, throw out trash and recyclables in appropriate bins, and dispose of organics in compost bins. Live, climb, hike, and explore – but, respect the land. The Earth gives us these beautiful lands to witness and enjoy – so, don’t be the person to destroy it for everyone.

Art, no matter what format, no matter who created it, and no matter when it was created, is inherently political, and as I sat wondering one autumn day what concept to base my book around, I knew that I wanted to write about something important. To me, there is nothing more important than respecting nature and taking active steps to protect it. I have been a vegan since I was fifteen years old, and a vegetarian for years before. As I began to buy vegan cookbooks and started going to Vegan festivals and restaurants, I learned the importance of community, and how a community together can make an impact on the world. Art is one of the best ways to find that sense of community, a sense of community that can activate change in the world.

My project is titled GRETA, after Generation Z climate change activist Greta Thunberg. It is called GRETA not in an effort to idolize her or shift the focus toward the individual. Thunberg has been vocal about her opinion that “the climate movement does not need any more prizes.” Instead, it is named after her to honor the new generation of activists who are speaking for the planet as a whole as they call out adults and established politicians for not using their power and wealth to make a difference in the world. The modern climate change movement has been led by young people inspired to use their voices by the stories they have heard of other activists through social media taking part in strikes such as #FridaysForFuture.

GRETA is a vegan cookbook compiled in a book with one purpose: to further inspire change and celebrate this connectedness. It is broken down to share the story of seven young people inciting change, each from a different continent, and the effects that climate change will have on their country. There will be drawings based around some of the effects of climate change, such as textured blue paper cut outs of rising oceans, or ombre shaded fires. Following these descriptions of effects such as heat waves, earthquakes, and increased precipitation, and descriptions of their collaborative efforts, there will be a recipe inspired by each activist and specific aspects that are relevant to their own activism, and their home country. For example, for activist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, who has emphasized the way that fracking in Colorado has destroyed vegetation in surrounding areas, a taco recipe calls for hibiscus flowers. At the end of the day, the message that my project is trying to get across is that any change that will happen will be the result of young people using the social platforms given to them to elevate their voices.