In today’s current educational landscape, universities are creating many qualified individuals in overly specialized disciplines. This is leading to a highly saturated job market of qualified candidates with singular specialties competing for positions that demand a diverse skill set. Individuals are at an advantage to gain or obtain multiple skill sets to become more marketable. In the music industry, musicians need to diversify their skill sets to be competitive for performance and academic jobs. This often requires musicians to learn more instruments to enhance their performance output to fit in with various types of gigs. The biggest problem that the music industry and education system is seeing is consolidation. The modern musician has to market themselves within this changing landscape, and woodwind musicians benefit from learning the practices of multiple woodwind performance. The number of current undergraduate university programs in multiple woodwinds performance is miniscule in comparison to graduate level degrees. Through insights from experts in multiple woodwind performance and pedagogy, I have acquired available texts and other resources to understand the demands and expectations of the profession. I will also be practicing multiple woodwinds during this time to acquire first hand experience. This practice, resources, and other first hand accounts have aided me in forming a proposed curriculum at the undergraduate level for multiple woodwind performance. This proposed degree program will benefit university music departments and help students gain more accessibility after completion. This practice will set our future generations up for success in the highly competitive job market.

Since the discovery of the color spectrum by Isaac Newton, color has become directly associated with science. In colorimetry, colors can be measured and quantified using spectrophotometers which measure light in the amount of energy present at each wave. Studies and experiments have been done to scientifically explain colors, but colors produce other qualities and properties are more difficult to measure. In optic and cerebral perception, colors are rarely perceived as they physically are. Josef Albers explored the interaction of color and exposed how color perception relies on context as colors shift accordingly in various color environments. He observed how colors influence other colors depending on their hue and brightness. This presentation undertakes to build on Josef Albers’ general assertions about color experience by introducing the complexity of colored pattern relationships. Specifically, examining the questions: (1) how colored patterns affect our perception of color relationships, (2) how it differs from the relationship and perception of solid colors, and (3) how solid colors influence neighboring patterns. Through exploratory experimentation, paintings, and graphic art were created to address the relativity of color behavior, and the optical complexity of colored patterns. This presentation offers personal interpretation and insight to the presenter’s relationship with color and patterns. It is important to understand how various color combinations create different perceptions so that artists and art researchers can better be informed about the subjective properties of color.

Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, otherwise known as Beeple, has become one of the three most valuable living artists as of this year by selling an NFT of 5000 works at a Christie’s auction in March. While the advent of NFT trading is the most obvious factor enabling such a historic sale, there are many other sociocultural factors at play in Winkelmann’s success and practice in general. This project aims to describe and analyze these contexts along with the implications that the auction of EVERDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS may bring to the art world. Drawing on theories from aesthetics, cultural philosophy, and media ecology, the project examines a range of concepts, including digital ontology, post-internet, remix culture, and metamodernism, relating each one to Beeple’s work in order to situate it within our cultural moment and generate predictions about future art trends.