Ran's Documentation Blog

My thoughts on In Our Own Image

    In the book, Ritchin said, “One could say that we were entering the ‘post-photographic age’ in the sense that the fidelity of the mechanical age was being replaced by the fluidity of the digital.” So, I think the fidelity of the mechanical age and the fluidity of the digital are two opposite concepts. In other words, the fluidity of the digital implies the ability to adjust and modify digital images, audio, and video with modern technology, which let the digital project looks different from reality.

    It is really common in our daily life. For example, we took a lot of pictures, but because it was cloudy and the light was bad, the pictures of the scenery and people were not as good as we expected. To solve this problem maybe we will use photoshop to let the picture looks brighter and more colorful and pictures can’t reflect reality at that time.

    From my perspective, photography is capable of capturing part of the reality, not the whole.

    According to Ritchin, “We were also rediscovering the initial meaning of ‘photography,’ ‘writing with light,’”. In other words, the basic element of photography is light. So, photography needs can’t create something out of thin air, which increases its capability. But because people are the “writers”, who can control the angle of the picture and even can set up the scene beforehand, photography shows the world that the photographer wanted us to see. So maybe it isn’t the whole reality. Compared with books, especially fiction books, photography is a much more reliable reflection of reality. Because writers can create anything in their book as long as the logic in the book world is smooth. But compared with videos, photography is less capable of capturing reality. Because it is much harder to let a video playing smoothly with a perfect connection between every sound and picture after editing.

Designer: Ran Xu

Title of Music: Falling

Artist Name: INTERSECTION

Concept and Design

    In this assignment, I hope to show the strong rhythm brought by drums and the feeling of smooth melody after the addition of human voice in the music through the transformation of black and white letters and lines.

    I represented the strong drumming and electric sound of the music by changing the position of the letter W up and down and dotted with black dots, which use the closure principle.

    Then, I use wavy lines between letters to show the smoothness of the music and make the picture more integrated, which presents the continuity principle. In addition, I stretched out the I and placed them between the W to show the feel of the score. I chose a stronger font for the letter W, hoping to reflect the strong sense of the rhythm of the music.

    In the middle part of the picture, I chose a soft font for the letter Z to show the chord of the climax of the song. The letter O dotted around them still hoped to show the drumbeat, and the soft font hoped to show the ethereal feeling.

    In the lower part of the picture, I chose the mirror pattern of the upper part of the picture, so as to show the feeling that the song is slightly different from the beginning but roughly repeated again, which uses the principle of similarity. I mainly used the principle of figure and ground in this design assignment and use black as the background color to show my conflicting feeling of the song that is a little bit somber but still with vitality.

The principle I use

Process

When I first listen to the music, what I’m feeling is an undercurrent. So, I use the letter W to show the wave of the melody, use lines in the letter to let this part looks more continuous, and use dots to show the drums and hidden strong feelings. That’s the first part of my design. In the first draft, I used black words on a white background, but after listening to the music repeatedly, I found that the white background could not express my feelings, so I changed to a black background.

My first draft

After modifying

 

I also think it is the most significant step during the process. This part contains the letter W moving up and down and the lines and dots in the letter. In addition, it uses the principle of closure and similarity. I think this part can not only show the dynamic rhythm but also reflects the coherence of the song. Later in the design process, I mirrored this part. The mirror repetition looks a little bit stiff when I look at the picture now. It is a failure.

After design this part, I want to use the letter Z to show the continuality of the music and the letter I to present the music score. Then I have my design in the process, the picture below. I took this picture to have the mid- critique class.

The mid-critique influences my design decisions a lot. Because at first, I just want to save the pots to make the picture have a sense of the whole. After the mid-critique, I know it doesn’t work. So, I decided to delete the consecutive letter Z and use the elongated I as part of the letter W design rather than create a new part. I think it makes my design looks more like a unit. Then I decided to change the font of the letter Z to make the middle part which stands for accord looks softer and plays the role of connecting the picture. I also add some letters o to represent the drums and make the picture more dynamic.

My design in the process

 

Conclusion

If I have more time to work on the project, I will change the design of the repetition. Maybe I will use other letters or change the front to show the sense of similarity.

Image of Project

Pioneer Plaque Assignment

In the picture, there are three screens that show the imaging principle of LCD television. The screen on the right shows the basic element of LCD television imaging. They are red and green quantum dots and pure blue light sources. The middle screen shows the arrangement of three kinds of light sources. The left screen shows the pictures of flowers and houses, the result of the television imaging. There is a reason for the choice of these two objects. They respectively symbolize the natural environment and human environment of the earth, and to some extent show the connection between television and earth civilization. Two squares drawn with black lines between screens are polarizers, devices that enable the eye to receive light. On the left of the picture, there is one eye which means watching TV requires your eye. There is a man standing beside three screens. He is J.L.Baird, the inventor of television. We put him in the picture to show that the television is a human-made object. 

 There are two reasons we chose to use pictures that can be read in any order rather than words to show how television works. The first one is that it is difficult for aliens to understand the earth words which has explicit grammatical rules. Because according to Story of Your Life, “When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: Its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A “sentence” seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.” (16). It means that the alien language is a whole, very different from the orderly human language.

 The other reason is that aliens have seven lidless eyes ringed the top of its body which means that it has no concept of order. This feature can be found in “Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. It walked back to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might as well be ‘forward.’” (5). So, such diagrams that can be understood from left to right or right to left are appropriate for aliens to understand. In addition, aliens see everything as a whole and understand things from a global perspective. For them, the concept of cause and effect does not exist. This character can be seen in “That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.”(23) and “The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.”(23)

 

 

Story of your life

Language

I think it’s a full-fledged, general-purpose graphical language.” (14)

   Phonetic

The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur. (2)

It doesn’t sound like they’re using a larynx to make those sounds. (3)

  Oral

I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking. (6)

“In their spoken language, a noun has a case marker indicating whether it’s a subject or object. In their written language, however, a noun is identified as a subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to that of the verb. Here, take a look.” I pointed at one of the figures. “For instance, when ‘heptapod’ is integrated with ‘hears’ this way, with these strokes parallel, it means that the heptapod is doing the hearing.” I showed him a different one. “When they’re combined this way, with the strokes perpendicular, it means that the heptapod is being heard. This morphology applies to several verbs.

with the spoken version of these verbs, they add a prefix to the verb to express ease of manner, and the prefixes for ‘see’ and ‘hear’ are different. (14)

We made steady progress decoding the grammar of the spoken language, Heptapod A. It didn’t follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language “universal.” It also appeared that the heptapods had no objection to many levels of center-embedding of clauses, something that quickly defeated humans. (17)

It was clear that word order meant next to nothing when speaking in Heptapod A; when asked to re- peat what it had just said, a heptapod would likely not use a different word order unless we specifically asked them not to. (22) There is no word order in their spoken language

  Pictographic

One heptapod spoke, and then inserted a limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of the script, vaguely cursive, popped onto the screen.  (9) The way they write

Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic. (9)

Now I realized all of them actually did contain the logogram for “heptapod” some were rotated and distorted by being combined with the various verbs, so I hadn’t recognized them at first. (11) They express different meanings through the rotation and distortion of symbols

“Their script isn’t word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. (11)

It didn’t appear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration. (12)

This form of writing was reminiscent of primitive sign systems, which required a reader to know a message’s context in order to understand it. (12) character

a semasiographic writing system

That modulation is applicable to lots of verbs. The logogram for ‘see’ can be modulated in the same way to form ‘see clearly,’ and so can the logogram for ‘read’ and others. And changing the curve of those strokes has no parallel in their speech. (14)

It appeared that a semagram corresponded roughly to a written word in human languages: it was meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams could form endless statements. We couldn’t define it precisely, but then no one had ever satisfactorily defined “word” for human languages either. When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: Its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A “sentence” seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.  (16) form

When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn’t trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters: sometimes eye-watering, sometimes hypnotic. (16) effect

Much more interesting were the newly discovered morphological and grammatical processes in Heptapod B that were uniquely two-dimensional. Depending on a semagram’s declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke’s curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means. These were non-segmental graphemes; they couldn’t be isolated from the rest of a semagram. And despite how such traits behaved in human writing, these had nothing to do with calligraphic style; their meanings were defined according to a consistent and unambiguous grammar. (17)

That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke. (23)  the premise of writing

The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams. (23)

Communication style

One of the heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four-terminal digits pressed together. (6).   gesture

The heptapod was confirming my utterances as correct, which implied compatibility between heptapod and human patterns of discourse. (6)

It looked like they had analogs of nouns and verbs. (10)

Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun. (11)

Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid. Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said a word and displayed a logogram. Then Raspberry brought the gourd down between its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bite; there were corn-like kernels beneath the shell. Flapper talked and displayed a large logogram on their screen. (11)  Use gesture, sound, and word

For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place. (34)  Meaning of language

Physical structure

It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them “heptapods.” (5)

Its limbs had no distinct joints; anatomists guessed they might be supported by vertebral columns. Whatever their underlying structure, the heptapod’s limbs conspired to move it in a disconcertingly fluid manner. Its “torso” rode atop the rippling limbs as smoothly as a hovercra. (5)

I could see the texture of its gray skin, like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops (5)

I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking. (6)

It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus too. (10)

For the heptapods, writing and speech may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate languages makes more sense than using different forms of the same one.” (14) meaning

 

This is my first Communications Lab blog post.