My Writing Blog

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Text/Image Project

I choose to accentuate the bicycle wheels of my friend bicycling on Del Playa in Isla Vista. I thought this was a “natural” object that encompassed Isla Vista a classic California college town. I created the word “look” from the tires of the bike because it’s a sight to see, biking along the beach to class. I utilized the brush tool in photoshop to write over layers of text and connect them to the tires. Also any UCSB student or faculty or Isla Vista resident knows that you have two look both ways, and then some, to watch out for bicyclists.

I had an idea to create a sort of skywriting in this image of palm tree near campus point. I wanted to use the common saying “California Dreaming” compiled with cloud writing to illustrate the idyllic sense of the idea of California dreaming. I used photoshop to create the text writing, using layers to brush over the text and create fluffy cloud writing. The image, taken on campus, is to embody the picturesque aspect of UCSB.

For the meme I choose a raccoon, or mapache, on the beach. As raccoon are the unofficial mascot of UCSB, as we have “No Bad Waves, Only Trashy Days,” I thought they would be fitting to represent the conundrum UCSB students face of whether or not to spend hours or days on the beach, in January, while midterms and papers loom in the distance.

For the final image, I chose to use the word “home” to be expressed by a photo of me and my roommates in Isla Vista. I wanted to overlay the word over an image from my ‘host city’ in Germany. Since my exchange year abroad, I have had a lot of conflicting feelings about where my “home” is. My host family laughed this summer how I choose to come to Germany on my vacation instead of a beach vacation, because I already live in paradise. Yet while my host sister years to come back to Santa Barbara (she spent a year in language school here) I often find myself aching to move back to Germany.

WPP #2

The world has changed significantly in the past two decades, and Santa Barbara has not been exempt from such change. While Santa Barbara, or rather Isla Vista, has only been my home for a few months now, I can really only speak my understanding of the student population in Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara is without a doubt a special, unique place, that I certainly feel privileged to live in. However this “puritan utopia” is not exempt from struggle. I would say that there are levels of anxiety prevalent among people in Santa Barbara. Beyond anxiousness regarding exams and papers, the community of UCSB, or at least a significant portion of it does in fact experience “nervousness” that Hickey found lacking in this “coastal paradise”.

Many, like myself, struggle with the existential weight of the future, as an individual and for humankind as a whole. As a population who face unprecedented student debt and a difficult job market are grappling with the grim environmental projections that may leave us with no future at all.

We students, have grown up through the financial crisis of 2008 and many of our childhoods and young adult lives have been affected by the aftermath. This financial strain extends to the current reality of higher education today, as students today and in the future face crippling debt in the name of higher education and a better life. The state of today’s university student gives a new definition to being a “broke student”.

In the background of financial instability is the looming environmental crisis, which is predicted to produce significant devastation in our lifetimes. I personally have found the reality of the state of the environment debilitating at times. It’s challenging to make personal lifestyle differences in the face of the reality that the issue is being decided by a few individuals in power and corporations.

In recent years, the calls to preserve art in the education system have become more prevalent, as budgets have been cut and the importance of STEM emphasized. Arguably one explanation for the presence or lack thereof of art today is the pressures I mentioned above. I know I personally haven’t spent time on creating or consuming art as Hickey defines it, but I attribute it in part to the expectation to pursue other areas.

Where that leaves us in terms of art may differ from a “traditional” expression of art, but arguably art nonetheless. As digital media has become more accessible to the masses, people have embraced it as a form of communication, a channel to express oneself through a multitude of mediums. Digital photography and graphic design are mediums of art that are being used to express and evoke ideas and emotions. I think one of the biggest differences is that these are often shared online as opposed to on the streets.

I don’t think Hickey’s argument is entirely false when examining Santa Barbara, but I think there are a few glaring differences in today’s Santa Barbara that make the community what it is today.