Self Portrait

This has been, as if yet, the most interesting session for me from this workshop. Rolando drove us in one of the School's vans (Even though I wanted to drive) to an art gallery near the city's center. There we were fronted with certain sounds and ideas that were supposed to show us what we looked like to ourselves outside the "canon", or the literal way of seeing things. This took me on a strange trip showing me my favorite things as I closed my eyes and thought of the things that I feel make my life beautiful. I was able to see myself and my life as a beautiful lapis blue E21 3-Series convertible from 1983 being driven by what seemed like to be an anthropomorphic heart with driving gloves and sunglasses, taking the car up and down winding roads on the countryside as the sun was setting, I could almost feel the fading warmth from the sun on my skin, the rapidly descending temperature hitting me with the wind's gusts of air and the soft tremor coming off from the BMW's little engine. 

I was about to take another literal meaning from what an "auto retrato" meant, and still stay out of cannon, I giggled a little.  

Sadly, my vision was barred from the physical world by my poor painting skills, summed with the project's requirement of only painting with out non-dominant hand. Still, it was a fun, eye opening experience that I enjoyed deeply and now I look forward to work on my masterpiece and show it at the end of the semester as expected. 

Creative Writing

During the second week we had a hand at creative writing, we were given different words that we had to include in our story which we wrote on short intervals, exchanging papers every five minutes or so. This made an interesting exercise, everyone has a different writing style, and the fact that everyone took a turn writing different stories kind of liberated us to write whatever nonsense we felt like, we weren't barred to a certain concept or genre, there was only a limit on time we were allowed to write, it was a writing race against time and the prejudices we had ourselves. 

Paper Tower

During our first week of classes we had our first experience with the innovation and creativity workshop with Ewelina as our instructor. She had us look into the different factors that stall innovation and how is it that most innovators differentiate themselves from ordinary people, this being their ability to break free from this barriers as we learned with a practical example by building a paper tower, first by ourselves and then as a team. 

By trying to build the highest tower in an individual manner we were compelled to compete and try to find the way that our tower could remain stable and still be as high as possible, then we had to discard our work. This made us experience letting go off our ideas, even though when they seem the best in order to continue the process of innovation during our team run, combining ideas and sharing experience, and being open to these other points of view allowed us to create even taller towers.