Confessions Session 2 Review

I thought that today's confessions were more mysterious than Tuesday's. I felt like a lot of people gave less explanation so I was very curious. For example, we didn't hear the story about the painted footprints confession, and also we didn't hear more about what the girl from the portrait meant to Skyler, or why he lost her. All we knew was that this was once someone he loved and he spent 50 hours or more making a portrait of her, just to delete it in front of us. With an action that bold there has to be a deeper story than just a college relationship break up, not everyone builds monuments (virtual or not) to ex girlfriends.

I thought the most powerful performance was Catie's. Her slide show of her grandmother progressing in age and the action of her being blindfolded got the message across so effectively. It was a beautiful expression of love and loss and not being able to get past the fact that she had lost her grandmother for 5 days without even knowing it. It is an interesting concept to think that as humans we feel a need to know if someone we love is not sharing the same reality as us even if they are far away. The piece was a strongly emotional memorial to her grandmother. I loved the use of digital media as the medium of her project. It helped emphasize the fact that she had essentially relied on technology for her parents to get the message to her, and they did not. I liked the fact that her confession was not easy to give. She had been so hesitant but she gathered her courage and did it.

In class Katie said that she felt that the strongest confessions chose the person, I totally agreed with this. In the process of creating the project very deep things came to the mind, and I feel that we all try to shy away from these because they can be painful or too revealing, but letting out those things make for the most powerful pieces.

I thought that the weakest confession today was Alex's. I mean, I am happy for him that he went to Coachella and experienced music in a whole new way. It was interesting that he made a presentation that mapped his experience and his preconceptions about the whole concert experience. I could tell it was an event that was out of his element by the way that he spoke about it. That was great for him, but I think it revealed very little actually about him. It was more of a story piece or a shared experience piece but not a confession. I feel like the confessions reveal something about the person and that revealed that he went to a concert and had fun. That is just too common of an experience to merit confession status. It was well done. If he wanted to keep the same topic I feel that he could have gotten more personal with it and gone into what music means to him, why it was such a big deal socially to go to his first concert, why he hadn't gone before. He said his friends "just never invited him" his confession could have been about finally going and feeling more accepted or closer with them. I don't know. I just felt like I learned nothing about him really, and I would have liked to.