I have never been one to be too serious about things and I hoped to capture that in my fireside chat. I wanted to make a quick paced edited film that makes some of my beliefs seem high and mighty, while in reality, they are just some beliefs that many people can relate to or at least have opinions on. Like many people will agree and disagree with me on points such as drinking tap water is better than bottled water and Taco is the best fast-food restaurant. But that is what makes us all human. We have our beliefs, and we think they are the greatest thing, yet find it hard to understand when other’s beliefs differ from ours. Yet, I tried to keep these beliefs inconsequential. They aren’t big things worth debating endlessly over, but many of them can resonate with college students. Having the persona of a high-class businessman for small ideals gives a comedic relief in delivering these beliefs. This helps to relieve tension, especially for those who may disagree with my beliefs, and create more community discussion. Those who do agree will have a good laugh right along with those that don’t (hopefully). Another thing with my video is you maybe be tempted to only label these things as opinions. But I think that beliefs are just very strong opinions, ergo, I would stand by these beliefs of mine even under heat. But I hope that everyone enjoys this and has a fun time with these hopefully relatable beliefs.

Adam

My wife edited this photo of me, it turned out pretty cool 👌

Ailed

It is important to me because it was the first picture I took with a camera that wasn’t my phone.

Amanda

This was my art project in 2020. I painted my backyard walls for my kids. It’s special because I never thought in a million years I could actually create something so cool for my kids (I promise I’m not an artist that can draw). This painting represents my daughter Rose (it’s baby Moana). I also painted the garden wall as Bikini Bottom for Charlie. It’s definitely an art project I’m proud of, not only because I didn’t think I could do it but because of what it represents my family ♥️

Brennan

I made this for my sister of my niece because I feel like there’s something about drawing a baby that helps artists understand human form in simple shapes and I wanted to practice that and color as well

Brooke

I think the most recent thing I’ve made is this short film thingy 😂 made it for a class assignment, it’s not good but it’s kinda funny

Cameron

The reason why I did this was because of an old game I played called Metroid Prime Remastered and how it’s atmospheric beauty was so unique that I consider it still ahead of it’s time (especially with how finely polished it is now). Sci-Fi has become an interest for me ever since I played Metroid Prime and I hope to continue to be inspired and create more atmospheric designs.

Colleen

I painted this portrait of my uncle. After he passed away painting this brought me comfort. I then blessed my aunt with it. She loves it.

Courtney

I made a blanket for my cat! Its significant to me because I love the pattern and my cat and I like having a physical representation of my love for my cat so he knows.

Ellen

I call it, "A Glimpse into Eternity." It is significant to me because it is where I can find peace on Earth.

Emily

I wire wrap crystals and sell them at Farmer’s Markets for fun!

Ethan

These are maps I made for some dnd stuff iv been planning the reason I like them is I was able to do a good job after a few years of not being able to do dnd or maps in general and there are things I'd like to fix but ultimately it was a show that I still can do this.

Greg

My life has had a lot of ups and downs. This photo means a lot to me because it shows me that no matter what I have been through God can help me accomplish everything I need to.

Henry

This is art to me. I created both of these and I’m planning on recreating it several more times. It speaks to me. I feel like I could be in that moment on the side of a lake or river, even though it’s just a combination of colors on a piece of paper.

Hunter

It significant cause soldering is hard and I feel like I did a really good job at making this board look nice.

Ian

This work of art is significant to me because this bagel can represent my life, beautifully chaotic. While this bagel has everything seasoning, chive and onion cream cheese, eggs with cheddar and feta cheese, topped with truffle salt and balsamic vinegar is okay on its own. But together is magical even though it can seem overwhelming.

Jacob

Here’s a picture of me as a kid I found in a scrapbook my mom made lol. This is significant to me because it’s a good reminder of how far I’ve come 😂

Jarod

The reason why this is significant to me is because even with a lack of color in this world, when there is something with color, it stands out more.

Jessica

I love this piece because it was an opportunity for me to learn new techniques. This was the first art I outlined with a quill and one of my first attempts at multi color shading. I had a lot of fun figuring out how to balance the 2 forms of ink.

McKay

Here is a sketch I recently wrote for Divine Comedy. I consider comedy to be an art form because it picks people up and can distract them from the worries of life, even while dissecting those same worries. It’s something that digs into human truths to be effective.

Nathan

This is my most recent Humans of Utah post. I took the photo and interviewed this random guy I met at UVU. I find it significant that someone I met out of the blue was willing to get photographed and open up to a stranger about one of his most personal experiences. It shows that everyone has a powerful story to share and a struggle that they are going through. I think of this often whenever I meet new people. It reminds me how great it is to connect with others and how important it is to be kind to any stranger.

Nathaniel

I finished this recently in Procreate. I love Baby Yoda, and I love Trash Pop, so I wanted to Baby Yoda to love Trash Pop too. The result is this beautiful visual representation of the phrase.

Noah

I’m not an artist with paints and brushes but I consider baking to be an art and it’s a relief to me when things turn out like this loaf did. I consider it art because it’s a personal extension of myself that someone can enjoy and I can take pride in. Additionally, I can always improve on making it better and more tasty than the last batch! and it’s also significant as an outlet for stress or desire to improve and usually requires some amount of skill

Sam

This piece was my first attempt to express how ADHD feels to me. I think the most poignant piece of it for me is that the face looks calm—it might be three faces smashed into one, or three faces pulled out of one, but it’s calm. The person experiencing it is just a regular person in the midst of a storm, being pulled to a million different directions, different thoughts leading off to who knows where, but the person is still just there and quiet and normal. I was diagnosed with ADHD only a few months ago, and it’s been a cool journey learning to recognize what parts of myself and ADHD and what parts are actually me. This piece has helped me understand myself better because of that.

Truman

So this is my aquarium that I designed recently. This is significant to me because I feel a sense of joy and peace in creating beautiful aquascapes. This type of art is intriguing to me because I can see how design elements such as rocks, caves, and plants change the behavior of fish in regards to territory disputes among one another.

Tyler

The following is a detailed map I made of the Wyrmroost dragon sanctuary from the Fablehaven/Dragonwatch series by Brandon Mull. I made this version during quarantine in mid-2020 before my mission and following the release of my individual favorite book in the series, Dragonwatch: Master of the Phantom Isle. Leading up to the release of the book I started rereading the series over and over, having a new and renewed interest and adult perspective on the story up to this point and this book not only delivered on the hype, but gave me the final details needed to complete this map. Upon submitting this to the author's Facebook fan page, it was directly seen and commented on by Mull expressing his intrigue- high praise! In Christmas of 2022, after returning from my mission and finally reading the long awaited tenth and final volume, Dragonwatch: Return of the Dragon Slayers, I received a package that had been forwarded from my old address while I was serving in Idaho printed with the cover photo for book ten. I opened it to find exclusive stickers, posters, a Tshirt, knickknacks, and a signed copy of the book with a note from Brandon Mull saying he admired my work and appreciated my dedication to the story. The coolest part was that there was a short part in the final book where the characters returned to Wyrmroost and travel to a new location, all the while describing their surroundings with some of the same extrapolated details I included in my map, down to the relative positions in the same cardinal directions as I took creative liberties with to draw out. Without being officially credited in the foreword, I have no doubts whatsoever that this project was directly used in the official release of the final book, and that blows my mind! This success has in turn renewed my desire to learn and grow my skills to reflect my passion and help create interesting and immersive visuals for myself and others, allowing my ideas to take shape even if only in this small way so far. I have hundreds of more sketches and pages drawn and planned for this series and beyond that will fill much of my free time for years to come.

Weston

I recently finished this puzzle with my friends. It took a lot of time and cooperation to put it all together. We had to coordinate on which parts we were working on and when we could work on it. Even though we have a physical canvas to show for it, I also consider the combined time and effort to be part of the artistic experience.

All the Beauty of Art

Art is a very subjective topic, to one person a simple cake is nothing more than a delicious dessert while to the baker it is their finest piece of art. Because art is so subjective, in this project we wanted to highlight the unique forms of art that our friends and family make, and even more so, we wanted to give them a platform to be able to explain why it was significant to them.

Something unique that we noticed in doing this project is that we received submissions from people of all ages, children, adults, and seniors. Everyone has a piece of art, and by participating in this project some were able to see how significant a piece of art they created really is. According to Ito and others in Connected Learning an Agenda for Research and Design, there are still challenges that we face in connecting different generations using this form of technology, however, it is through this technology that we are able to bridge the generational gap as people discover shared interests that for some reason or another they had previously kept to themselves (70). By creating this website where people of all backgrounds can share an art piece that they have put a little of themselves into, we are hoping to help be able to bridge this gap and encourage the interconnectedness of others.

This part of the website allows for people’s art to be seen individually while still being able to scroll through and see how the other art pieces compare. It allows time for the viewer to take in each individual art piece separately as if they were at the museum instead of all at once as if they were on someone’s instagram page. This type of collaboration helps us to study not only what other’s think is art, but also what type of community we have around us in the similarities and differences we have with certain art. For instance, many of my friends had actual drawn pieces of art which is also what I would have submitted if I was asked our prompt. We could have even created a hashtag to get more submissions and bring an even larger community just like #BlackGirlMagic did. Though we aren’t pushing something as important, it is helpful to know that their are people out there all considering their little slices of life to be art, making many more people artists than we originally thought.

 I chose to do this off of a song called “It’s Only” by ODESZA which has some nice overtones, but the lyrics can be kind of dark. I wanted to include most of the song’s lyrics in there but to go on tangents throughout the twine to distract the player from their main goal. Especially since the song emphasizes a lot about the imagination, and the imagination wanders a lot so I tried to capture that. The instrumental of the song plays throughout the background so as to immerse the player more into the game. This too is where I hope the active creation of belief comes in on part of the player. Murray from our readings said, “The great advantage of participatory environments in creating immersion is their capacity to elicit behavior that endows the imaginary objects with life.” My twine attempts to do this with some wordplay and many GIFs which take you into multiple movie references. I tried to be like James Halliday from the book Ready Player One who was always quoting movies and putting them into his games. So, with some wordplay, quotes, and GIFs brought these references to life. The active creation of belief I am going for is that this game is just a big puzzle. Technically, if you have the lyrics to the song then the puzzle is really easy, but those who do not will find themselves on some long, some short imaginative tangents that might remind them of some good movies. I even put some easter eggs in there to reward (or punish depending on how you view it) when they get deep enough. The whole game is one big, trapped cycle as well which means you can discover new things in different playthroughs. This is where I think we need Murray’s advice to “structure our participation as a visit.” That way we separate this world from the normal world (especially with so many references to the normal world) and so we can become more immersed for periods of time. Maybe you won’t discover everything, but that is ok. Those who want to can discover the twists and turns while those who don’t, can attempt to beat the game and move on. Creating all the different words, colors, music, and GIFs to combine into one elaborate story really was a great way to experience text in a new way. This would especially be fun if apps like iMessage could become this powerful and would affect how we communicate with our friends and family.

I really enjoyed making this piece as I have always wanted to get creative in combining amination and cinematography. Using After Effects I was able to create a sort of border of GIFs around myself eating cereal. All these GIFs can be separated into their own respective piece which I think could also look cool by themselves but together they tell the story of how I never stop eating. In our last reading it talked about the Blackberry phone being replaced by the iPhone since the iPhone appealed to the visual senses instead of textual. Creating with GIFs I think has done the same thing here. Text in and of itself is stuck in time so to say. We can keep texts on our phones forever and read them over in the future if we are so, please. It just not the same with a long video to be stuck in time because it is such an ordeal to watch an entire video. While GIFs on the other hand can take 5 seconds and keep you stuck there for a long time. In my case I thought about how much I eat every day. Seems like I can’t escape the desire for food, therefore I stuck myself in an endless loop of eating cereal surrounded by a GIF interpretation of my mind. The stars multiply as I eat more and fill the screen representing the neurons firing in my brain eventually signaling when I am full. The blaring large yet distorted letters spelling out “food” indicating what I am thinking about. They are distorted because they sometimes get in the way of what I am currently thinking, yet they never are fully out of focus since food is huge motivator of how I act and interact with the world around me. The colors were also pretty important to this piece as they make the piece feel less stagnant. I had them constantly changing as if to create the colors of the food pyramid or MyPlate or whatever it is they are calling it now. Eating the same food over and over would create a dull and colorless existence such as America is heading for with all the fast-food restaurants serving lots of brown meat and bread. Having a colorful diet makes a well-balanced individual and fills one’s life with color. So constantly changing color also indicates how one feels if they eat a well-balanced diet. Please enjoy this piece and remember that food should be fun!

As I listened to the composition of “Glacier” by Kainbeats, I imagined some sort of redemptive story. The piano is slow and contemplative yet constantly there throughout the piece. Towards the beginning it is basically by itself as if it is searching for another to complete its yearning. The lower notes keeping it grounded while the higher notes explore the world around them. Then soon we are met by some bass and some high hats that make the piano go faster as with excitement. This all boils into my photos as I try to capture the redemptive and sometimes forgotten items covered in snow. As if the snow was covering up these well-known items but the emergence of spring, the sun, and higher temperatures shows that these items are not forgotten. The footstep depicting the inkling of a leaf stem and the asphalt beneath which may be gone to the eye but is not forgotten. The piano in the piece hides its talent in the beginning but emerges into a beautiful and quicker pace piece as other instruments are introduced. As sign is partly covered but is still readable, yet is the sign being noticed amongst all the snow? The traffic cone slightly covered in snow as well showing it wasn’t enough in use to be dusted off. The carpet, looking and feeling its age, reminisces in the part of the song where the piano falls back into a solo piece. The carpet and the song had their high moments but fell on hard times as they wore out their use. The fast piano in the middle hitting periodic high notes as if it is reaching out for help. The carpet doing the same as it is left outside all alone. Yet we move to a picture that looks almost like the light at the end of a tunnel. Being surrounded by darkness but being contained in light. The song has its second redemption story, like a determined person getting up multiple times whenever they fall. The piano, high hats, and bass meets again giving that redemption. Other pictures that show their wear and tear are the window, focused in on its cobweb, as in the song the piano has riffs that always end in high notes. Kind of like how we end a question, both the window and the piano questioning if this is who they really are. The tree, both pictures, one creating a “v” shape, the other part showing its scars. Both being vulnerable but being unsure about its vulnerabilities. The song having its first high period then quickly descending into another low and slow period as if it questions if it deserves the happiness of the faster parts. Lastly, a leaf and a green slide. Both left all alone, no children to play with them. I made the pictures all a bit bluer to capture the melancholy and somber notes of the piano. As Bogart said, “there is something preposterous about writing criticism--particularly criticism of objects we use as much as experience.” I hope I embodied this as I captured many things, even childhood things such as a slide, that we have or had used or seen in the past a lot. Then to show how the snow covers them up but that someone still sees them.