Final Reflection
Author of How to Use Your Eyes, James Elkins, had a unique way of presenting information. That creative insight might come from the field he chose to study, the arts. Elkins is a professor at the School of the Art institute of Chicago. He received a Ph.D in art history in 1989 from the University of Chicago and has been teaching ever since. Since I think of him as an art and history major he is normally asked to challenge reality and perception. After all, art is subjective, and history can be very subjective once you try to read between the lines and explore the unknown. It all makes sense that some day he would write a book on how to use your eyes.
Brian Martinez and I decided to emphasize only one chapter from Elkins book, How to Use Your Eyes. We felt the use of our own footage, would more than encompass the allotted time restriction of 7 minutes. As expected, our final product rolled over into an 8 minute clip, much further than we would have liked but all of it was necessary. Brian and I used Elkins study of pavement and how it becomes distressed as the building block behind our video presentation. We scoured around campus shooting video of distressed pavement in the attempt to make a countdown of the worst pavement on campus. We had some objectives in mind to accomplish that were greater than just collecting footage of the worst pavement. Elkins described several forms of distress cracks in pavement and how they formed. It was our goal to locate these very same attributes in pavement down here on campus, rate them, and then explain how these images of pavement were different from all the others.
One of the first types of distressed pavement Elkins explains is actually also one of the most common. It is often called fatigue cracking or sometimes alligator cracking. Fatigue cracking was displayed in probably every clip of our video but Brian and I decided to analyze it in the first pavement of our countdown, near Newman Hall. It is most commonly caused from pavement overuse or water permeating underneath the top surface. It appears as a series of stress cracks causing usually a large network of broken pavement loosely held together by underlying layers. This type of distress only gets worse over time and can lead to further repairs in the highway.
Rutting is caused through the continual wear of pavement by wheels from vehicles over the same stretch of road. This most commonly occurs in country dirt or stone roads after it rains causing the substance to get softer and give when vehicle traffic drives overhead. As these occurrences happen more frequently, the wheels begin to tear into the road and form groves or ruts. This can happen on pavements as well and is very dangerous to motor vehicles. If water collects in these ruts, a car that passes over them can hydroplane and lose control. Cities rarely let rutting occur all that often as they are aware of the danger and quickly fix the problem. Advanced forms of rutting can generally only be seen in country dirt roads due to the fact that many of them are privately owned, and thus difficult to maintain.
Shoving is actually nearly as difficult to find on modern pavement due to advances in technology and techniques for dealing with it. Shoving is normally only seen on asphalt that hasn’t be compacted properly. It occurs when the upper layers of asphalt are stripped from the lower layers and are shoved on top of one another, creating a small mound. This rarely occurs and usually only happens where large heavy vehicles come to quick stops over the same patch of asphalt repeatedly. Heavily trafficked bus stops and truck weighing stations are the most common locations for shoving. Other than the fact it can be bumpy and it can create rippling effects in the road, shoving is typically harmless.
Corrugations are ripples in the road that appear at specific intervals, or frequently enough to know that one is correlated to the other. They appear horizontal to the flow of traffic on the road which is counter intuitive to the direction that one would think they would form. Corrugations are frustrating to engineers for this very reason, unfortunately they have not figured out the exact cause of corrugations or why they go against the flow of traffic. For whatever the reason, corrugations seem to stem from tiny bumps naturally in the road, over time vehicles somehow add to the depth and number of these corrugations. Eventually the whole road contains them. This phenomenon does not only relate to roads, apparently it also occurs on railroads, ski trials, or wherever there is a track with decent traffic.
This is a large sample of what will be presented in the final video. Brian and I used iMovie to tie together several pieces we had created for the project. Brian had a great idea to use an old SNL skit with Chris Farley called Bill Swerski’s Superfans. We used the characters created in that skit as our narrators for the top ten countdown of the worst pavement in Champaign-Urbana. Brian and I write a script and then recited the lines into iMovie, all the while mimicking the voices of the two characters we were trying to portray. Our goal was to put a comedic spin on this information since it can be seen as pretty dull to some viewers. Even though, our project is a movie, I feel that our best work was in the dialog between the two characters and made for some funny moments in the clip. We considered adding music to the project but eventually stopped because we feared it would interfere too much with our commentary.
Overall, Brian and I used several forms of media: audio, video, and photo, to capture the viewer’s attention. We tried not to leave out any detail and approached the information from a new angle different from Elkins analysis of pavement in his book. That in turn was the message he was trying to send with his book. Don’t always look at something from the surface, dig a bit deeper and see what is underneath, you might just find a completely different answer than you were expecting.
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