"So what is digital media exactly?" I get this question a lot.  I usually say, "everything."  In my moments of retrospection about this program and my classmates and my aspirations the notion of collage  continues to resonate. Digital media is a collage of ideas and tools and people and expression. Returning to the MDM with the learnings of last year and the experiences of the summer provide a new platform of analysis. And even though our day to day here at the MDM is consumed with the beauty of design and the duties of production we are regularly graced with moments of inspiration. Moments that underscore our experience and help contextualize and ground the lessons from our industry work.

This past week the moment of inspiration came in the form of a visiting lecturer, Dr.Ken Perlin from NYU. Ken is an academy award winner, an artist, an inventor, a true master of many domains. His work is a synthesis of art and code; he epitomizes this notion of collage. In his presentation, Ken demonstrated a project of his where different settings change the expressions on a digital face. From happiness to anger to sadness to surprise, the face emoted. He described his process as one of deconstructive assembly; an oxymoron it is not. Break the problem down in to components, sub-problems, construct mechanisms for each component, create parameters then blend these parameters in to chords. Chords that answer the original question and express the idea. And in the case of the simulated facial expressions, these parameters are not tools for emotions but rather notes on an emotional keyboard.

Ken's presentation epitomizes the founds of the MDM. These notions of blending and expression and deconstructive assembly are what we strive to apply to our work.

Personally, this past summer reaffirmed this approach. My work at the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence was a collage of activities and projects and challenges. At the end of the summer, after working on a plethora of assignments from research to project management to graphic design to web design to video editing, I realized that our studies at MDM give us a license to apply our methodologies of collage to any endevour. Our style of problem solving and execution has a place in the stlofts of web startups in Gastown in Vancouver or the Department of Energy offices deep in Virginia.

And now as a second year student anchored by my industry experiences, I get to walk the halls and hear the excited talk from the new class. The first semester of that first year gave us the freedom to do new things and learn from new people. I'm reminded to keep that mentality and energy even with the obligations that the real world bring.

Ken Perlin mentioned there were two essential elements to making a simulated face that we emotionally react to, movement and blinking. If the head doesn't move or the eyes don't blink then our souls don't notice it. So too with our creative work we need to be in constant motion but also take pause to blink.  That's our collage.

Here's a moment of inspiration I'd like to share from designer Stefan Sagmeister who maintains the practice of taking a sabbatical every sevens. In this TEDTalk he describes the experience and the inspiration that comes from it.