Connection: Street Art and Freestyle Soccer

We just recently watched the movie "Exit Through the Gift Shop" and it was all about street art. This movie showed me that street art is nothing like the art you see in a museum or an art gallery. Street art is made by the a citizen trying to spread the word or trying to express themselves. They write or draw on walls, signs, sidewalk, anything they can find. This reminds me a lot about soccer and how there is another branch to soccer, called freestyle soccer. 

What I realized while watching the movie is that the street artists of course have a love for art, but they may not have the money to become professional or famous. So they do things on their own. This is pretty much equal to what freestyle soccer players do. They love the sport and they love the technique and everything, just like how a street artist would love art. But they may not have the ability or the amount of skill to become professional. Instead they take time just learning skill moves, moves that look very appealing and are also very difficult to achieve. 

Also I saw in thought to myself while watching the film, "I bet most famous artists can't do some of the stuff these street artists can do" and I really do believe that. The same goes for freestyle soccer. These freestylers, they can perform the most crazy and ridiculous moves I've ever seen! Most professional soccer players can't do all the moves a freestyler can do, they are beyond amazing!

I just thought that these 2 things could be related to each other pretty well, and I think they can go together hand in hand. They are pretty much identical cases except the subject is different; one is a sport, and the other is art. 

Metacognition: The Mashup Process

           While creating my mashup assignment, I realized 2 major things. 1 being that it may seem easy just to put together a bunch of stuff together about a certain topic. The second being, in the topic you are creating a mashup about, there are sub-levels to that topic and you can recognize them as you are creating the mashup.

           Putting together a mashup is not just putting random stuff together in a random order with random meanings. That is chaos. I realized while creating mine, about love, that you couldn't just put completely random things in no specific order, there is a meaning behind what you are doing and just adding something just anywhere ruins that.

           I also realized while creating my mashup of love, that the different types of love should be incorporated into my mashup. Their is more than 1 type of love and these sub-levels helped me sort out and order my mashup for it to make sense. My recognition of this really allowed me to understand and to organize myself and how I will try to structure my mashup. Structuring the mashup is what gives it it's meaning, it is what gives the mashup a purpose. Otherwise, it would just be words and pictures scrambled together with no sense behind it at all.

           Although the mashup was hard and time-consuming. It was one of the better assignments I've done for a book in a English class. I really enjoyed the freedom of use of things. I also enjoyed the whole, "not writing a paper" thing. I would actually enjoy doing this type of project instead of a essay or paper any day. I am glad that we were able to do this assignment because I really did not want to write another 1000 word essay.