Archives for February 2024

When Ritchin mentioned the “fluidity of the digital”, I think he meant the manipulability of digitization itself and its deviation in objectivity. As we can “write with light”, digital photography as an example goes beyond the use of recording the moment. In today’s photography technology and post-processing techniques, we can see that a picture can be transformed into a look we didn’t expect through light and color change, and in the case of a picture of a person, we can also see over-processing that makes it hard to recognize the person. Digitization gave people the opportunity to use smaller and more affordable devices to record their lives. And human beings are intentionally making transitions or creating differences in our work, using digital devices.

For example, in Susan Sontag’s work, On Photography, when I read the part about photographs furnishing evidence, I doubted whether there is the possibility that the truth has been misinterpreted through post-production techniques or changes in light and shadow from a photographic perspective. This kind of doubt is already breaking the balance of the utopia photography itself initially gives us. Also as mentioned in the reading, if taste and conscience are not recognized or delivered negatively, the photography can be interpreted beyond or even contrary to the facts themselves and become aggressive. It does cross the most fundamental recording function, but it also misinterprets the reality of time or space. To some extent, this could be a step towards art for photography itself, where people bring their ideas and start creating in this artistic field, but maybe it’s a double-edged sword.

There is no doubt that the photography is capable of capturing reality. But for example, compared to videos, photography is capturing a certain moment instead of a time period. In this way, the viewers can have the space to imagine the things happening before and after the moment. But at the same time, the viewers are not sure about any of these facts. In videos, we can see the whole thing or a certain stage of a story, which gives us more adequate information and objectivity. In photography, that one moment can deviate from objectivity through the author’s different perspective or artistic creation and post-processing. Even more, the digital format makes this process more convenient.

Pioneer Plaque-Magnifying Glass

by Yixi & Jean

An important tool in the human world is the magnifying glass, a small and simple-structured optical instrument that helps people to a great extent in daily life. The device is so deceptively simple in its design, yet profoundly transformative in its function. 

The need for this tool arises from inherent limitations in human vision and the necessity to perceive and comprehend intricate details that are otherwise imperceptible to the naked eye. In the human world, unfortunately, most people only have limited eyesight. We human beings can neither see things far away clearly nor catch the details of tiny things. To meet the demand for tasks requiring a clear view of distant things, close inspection of small objects, and fine details, the magnifying glass then came into existence to compensate for human visual limitations.

Magnifying glasses typically employ a convex lens made of glass or plastic as the main body, and add some plastic frame to make it holdable. Usually, a magnifying glass is as large as the size of a human being’s hand, which is easy to take and use. We used the difference between the eye of a young person and the one of an elderly to show the limited eyesight and the necessity of a magnifying glass.

The key part that backs up the function of a magnifying glass is the convex lens, shown in the plaque as well. A piece of convex lens is usually curved outwards, like a little bump in the middle. This shape is key because it helps bend light in just the right way. When light passes through the lens, it gets bent or refracted, making things look different. When an object is placed within the focal length of the lens, which is the distance between the lens and the point where the light converges, the lens bends the light rays coming from the object. Light rays emitted or reflected by the object navigate through the convex lens, converging at a focal point situated on the opposite side. It is at this juncture that the scattered beams coalesce into a unified entity, laying the foundation for the subsequent magnified imagery.

Then, on the same side as the object being looked at, a magnified image appears. It’s like a virtual copy of the thing that is being observed, but bigger and clearer. This wondrous virtual image materializes a larger-than-life representation that captures the essence of the original in exquisite detail. It is as if the magnifying glass possesses the power to unveil hidden dimensions of reality, revealing patterns, textures, and intricacies that elude the unaided eye.This trick works because of the way the lens curves and bends the light. Typically, greater curvature and shorter focal lengths yield higher magnification. Magnification is often quantified by comparing the size of the virtual image to that of the actual object.

In human beings’ everyday life, the portability and simplicity of magnifying glasses render them invaluable tools in countless scenarios. Magnifying glasses find myriad applications across diverse domains, enabling us to overcome the limitations of human vision and delve deeper into the mysteries of existence. It is a symbol of our insatiable curiosity, our relentless pursuit of knowledge, and our unwavering commitment to unraveling the secrets of the cosmos.

Jingran Zhang

A Million Dreams (Reprise)

By Hugh Jackman, Austyn Johnson, Cameron Seely
From the Movie The Greatest Showman

Music Soundtrack
Movie Clip Version

 

Concept and Design

The song has two cute girls’ voices singing and a low man’s voice singing at the end, and there are the elements of violin and piano with a gentle flow. The song mainly gives the audience a dreamy and emotional feeling. Also, as the girls’ voices are singing together, I used similar and overlapping black and white “S” to show the echoing feeling in the sound. Also, from my perspective, though this song sounds pretty emotional, it is still powerful and curable with the use of low voice, and the girls’ sounds are committed.

By using the theories including similarity, closure, proximity, and continuity, I think the work applied the Gestalt theory well. The uses of different sizes and orientations of “S”s used the principle of similarity and good figures and can bring a neat image, the curved letters matching with the flow in the song as well. Also, with the “f”s connecting with each other on a curve, we can feel the continuity and the gentle flow in the song being represented. Also, with the use of black and white in the design, we can view the closure parts of the work. In the figure and ground relationship, I used the white color as my background and used the black color and color contrast to give the work more depth.

Process and Conclusion

In the process of the design, I had my first draft before the mid-critique. In this work, I used the comparison between black and white to show the difference between the sounds. Also, I wanted to build the feeling of the words bursting out from the dark side to the bright side. However, the results didn’t go well. The image gave the audience a realistic imagination of something growing from the ground as there was a straight separation between the colors, but the whole composition did not seem nice. Also, the dreamy and emotional feelings could not be shown as there were too many angles in the image.

(In Progress Work)

Therefore, in my adjustment to the work, I thought of the advice from the professor and my peers about using curves and creating a dreamy feeling in the work. I started over and kept the dreamy, magical, and emotional feeling with the long flow of the song. I started with the white background and S as my main figures and got them connected to show the feeling of echoing. Also, for the violin and piano played, I used typing on the path to use a lot of f on the way and create the feeling of flow with the principle of continuity. Then, I added the part of black to create depth in the image and show contradiction and closure in the image. I adjusted a lot on the color contradiction part to make it seem more balanced.

(In Progress Work)

If I had more time, I would consider adjusting the black part to make the figure and background clearer to be distinguished as the professor advised. Also, the change in the main figures can be shown more clearly to highlight the main part of the work.

Project Presentation

 

How do the aliens’ language and communication styles in the story differ from human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?

Human beings communicate with oral language that each word has its pronunciation and the word has its own meaning. Words can be grouped and these combinations have their new meanings and can build up sentences. In oral communication, language is highly dynamic, allowing for nuances such as tone, pitch, and rhythm.
According to the reading, the oral language is quite similar between human and alien languages. The aliens’ language also has certain words with certain meanings based on their own lingual system. But the pronunciation of the words sounds more vague for us humans to recognize.

For written communications, human beings commonly use an alphabetic script. These alphabetic writing systems represent individual sounds or phonemes with symbols and can build words with different symbols or letter combinations. Also, logographic writing languages like Chinese use symbols to represent entire words or morphemes and arrange the words in lines to create sentences.
The aliens’ writing appeared to be logographic. They use images to indicate different meanings, but these images look more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. For the combination of the words or sentences, the different graphic designs seem as if they had been melted together, and actually, some parts of the logographic writings were rotated and distorted to show the combined groups in words. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, the aliens would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration without punctuation. According to the linguist, it’s a complex semasiographic writing system. 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.

According to the reading, the aliens’ language 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. Peculiar, but not impenetrable. The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.

In human language, our speaking and writing of the language are corresponded. But aliens have two systems for writing and speaking. For the alien heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. It has its own system of rules for constructing sentences, like a visual syntax that’s unrelated to the syntax for their spoken language.

 

How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?

As human beings, we use our larynx to make sounds and pronounce different words with tones and rhythms. Also, we use gestures and body language to express our moods or relate to the content spoken. Humans also use their auditory system to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes to communicate. Human beings also use writing to communicate, using the alphabetic and logographic systems to represent the languages.

The heptapod aliens probably used their bodies to speak as the linguist heard brief fluttering sounds and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrating, possibly showing that it was talking. The aliens have 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. For writing, they did semasiographic writing by inserting limbs into a large socket in the pedestal and creating a doodle of the script.

Also, the reason why the logograms are rotated can be related to their body structure. The aliens’ script isn’t word-divided as a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. Since their bodies have radial symmetry, they don’t have a concept of forward direction, so they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated.