2.2 On/Off Experiment Summary

For my On/Off experiment, I decided it may be worthwhile to kill two birds with one stone by combining this assignment with another assignment from my A&HA5060 Intro to Drawing class. Per the mandate of my professor for that class, I am required to draw outside of class for at least six hours each week, and I figured that this would be a perfect goal to set in order to best gage how long I could last without any form of technology (although six hours is a bit lofty). For this week's assignment, we were tasked with drawing a wet teabag using both our dominant and non-dominant hands; Thus, with my parameters set, I went to a place far away from my laptop and game systems, turned off my phone, and set out to drawing as many wet teabags as possible.

About ten minutes in, I discovered that the decision to bring my phone was a horrible mistake, and one that nearly compromised the entire experiment. Almost as if I was some sort of drone, anytime that I became bored, idle, or zoned out from my focus on the teabag, I instinctively reached for my phone. Naturally, when I reached for it, I turned it on, but I instantly remembered what I was doing, and quickly set it away from myself--far across the room. The fact that it only took ten minutes for me to gravitate toward technology was already somewhat concerning, but even more concerning was the fact that it genuinely took a concerted effort for me to keep myself away. After this initial blunder, I honed in on the teabag with a newfound intensity, attempting to draw as slowly and deliberately as possible. Once I hit a rhythm of drawing, the experiment became far easier to handle, and I began to forget about what I was doing. When I'd finally had enough of drawing wet teabags, I checked the time on my phone and discovered that I'd barely managed to survive an hour without being connected to the digital world. It'd only been an hour and fifteen minutes of being unplugged.