Author: Jia Wen Lin

                   Nature In My Backyard

By: Jia Wen Lin

      photoshop                       

The concept for my diptych is to show the beauty of nature and how strong nature could be. I wanted to show that nature is a very beautiful thing and even during dark times, there is always something beautiful waiting for you.

For the image on the left, I went to my backyard and took multiple pictures of a basket of fake lowers hanging on the fence. I thought it looks nice, so I decided to recreate it for this project. Originally, there was nothing involve. Since the picture looks a bit plain, I decided to add water. In the end, I really like how the water droplets turns out. If you look closer, you could kind of see some reflection in the water splash and droplets.

For the photoshop image, the first thing I did was I photoshop the part of my hand holding the spray bottle. I duplicated four times. Two of my hand holding the bottle is pointing to the image in the left, so it looks like I’m spraying water. The other two of my hand is pointing at the leaves on the top left corner. It is supposed to represent the nature and all the beautiful things that we often see in day-to-day life. The background is light pink because nature is supposed to be bright and beautiful. At first, there was only one hand, but I feel like it’s very plain, so I added three more to it. The hand and the staircase looking thing is supposed to separate the dark times and the bright times. The black background in the lower right side represents the dark times. I put some leaves in the black background to say that beautiful things can also grow in dark times.  

If I had more time, I hope to change the saturation of the no Photoshop image. I also want to change the colors to make it look brighter.

I think what Ritchin meant by “fluidity of the digital” is how essay it for us to access a camera, take a picture and manipulate it. Today we have a camera with us almost everywhere we go. When we want to take a picture, we just take out our phone and take as many pictures as we want. In the past, there is limit to how many pictures people can take due to the type of camera they have. Nowadays, photography is so flexible and so much easier to just manipulate it.  

One example of digital imaging is Photoshop. In the past, there is no photoshop so if people want to take a picture in a crowded place, they will have to spend time waiting for the crowds to go away. Now with the power of photoshop, no matter how many people there are, photoshop will help remove everyone out. It will create things that isn’t there before and no one will notice because it looks so real. Due to this, sometimes we don’t know if everything in the photograph is real or not.

I think video is more capable of capturing reality than photograph because everything in videos is moving, such as all the facial expression and body gestures. Even though photograph is a common way that people use to capture the moment, but unlike videos, photograph doesn’t have sound. People can fake a reality through photograph but it’s hard to fake a reality through videos unless the people there are good at acting. In the videos, the sound and the movement really bring out the real reality than photograph does. When I watched past videos, I feel like it pulls me in more than photograph does. I assume it’s also harder to photoshop a video than in photograph because things are moving in a video, whereas everything in photograph are still.

The concept that I’m trying to convey in my photo diptych is light. Lights shines on an object and the object reflects the lights. I feel like the process is very beautiful and I hope to recreate that through Photoshop. Above are the two images that gave me inspiration. One image is showing a lamp that shining some lights. The other image is a water bottle that is being shine on and if you zoom in, you can tell that there are lights reflecting on the bottle. The lights create atmosphere and colors. If I zoom in to the bottle of water, I can see that there are some colors reflected in the droplets of water. The message I want to convey is that  lights plays an important role in our daily life because it helps creates the atmosphere and the mood of the picture.

I plan on photo shopping the bottle of water. It looks plain here so I’m planning on cropping the image and redesigning the appearance of the bottle. I’m also thinking about whether I should make the bottle flow in the ocean with the background being dark as the light is shining on the ocean. I want the whole design to be dark and the only actual light comes from the lamp.

Artist: Jia Wen Lin.         Music & Singer: Reverse by CORSAK                                                                      

The song I chose is a type of electronic song. It starts off calm and soothing and towards the middle, it gets more upbeat and exciting.  The gestalt theory that I used here are similarity, symmetry, continuation, and proximity. One of the black square activities had given me inspiration. In my black square, I was using stripes. This ended up giving me an idea where I tried using the brush to draw a Z and placed it all over the black object in the middle. I think it somehow did successfully create an affect.

At first, I was just playing round with the letter O and I realized I can change the shape of the O. That is how the middle looking black O came to be.  In my first draft, I used an uncommon Chinese character as the background, but for my final draft, I changed it to a squiggly line.  From my first draft, the critiques that I got was that the outer part looks very empty, and it feels like it’s missing something. I ended up adding two big thick black lines on each side of the page as if it’s slowly closing together, compressing the objects in the middle. I made the big thick line continuation where it looks like it’s continuing after the page.

If I had more time, I really want to create a 3D effect to it because whenever I listen to electronic type of song, it always gives me this feeling like I’m there and the person is standing next to. I think 3D affect would really fit the vibe of the song.

 

The topic that me and my partner chose is transportation system. I assume that if the aliens(heptapods) can land on earth, they must have their own transportation system to get to earth. A possibility is that they have the power to transport themselves through space from their planet to earth, or it might be that they built their own “spaceship”. On planet earth, we have many ways to transport ourselves from one place to another. I would assume that they might not be able to operate the transportation system on earth because of the way their body is built. However, the aliens could sit in a car or in a plane. I think it would be a great experience for them to truly learn what life on earth is like or what humans are like.

I drew an earth in the middle which I’m sure the alien could recognize. Some common transportations system that I drew are plane, car, trains, bicycles, boats, and the most basic one is walking.

With how their physical structure is form and their ability to arrive on earth, I think their transportation system is way ahead of us. However, the pioneer plague is to show that humans have long started using our intelligent to invent more ways to transport ourselves faster and easier. Through the showcase of this drawing, it would give the aliens a glimpse of what human’s daily life is like and how we went from nothing but just our legs, to creating inventions that is ten times bigger and powerful than us. We have changed and evolved.

I also drew stick figures(humans) uniting. With our transportations system, sending people to places around the world has help connect people in ways we could have never imagine, in terms of culture, language, etc. The transportation system brought people together where we could all learn from each other.

In the story, it mentioned that the heptapods’s written language can be rotated and that it looks more like graphic designs. This description reminds me of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are like pictures and there’s no specific letters to spell the characters out. I think in some way Chinese characters can relate to transportation because I see that a lot of characters in Japan are very similar to Chinese characters. This made me think in some way time long time ago, there was a language exchange between the Chinese and Japanese. Japanese people went to China or Chinese people went to Japan and they started exchanging their languages and cultures. This reminds me of the whole plot of the story. The aliens came to earth and how the narrator had to learn their language. There was a language exchange between them and through the learning of the alien’s language, the narrator mindset on the world change. I believe the alien also got something from the humans too. Thus, this shows that transportation plays an important role in society and that it’s important for alien to know about it.

• “Heptapod A” (spoken) and “Heptapod B” (written)
• The narrator can see the future( use future tense?)
• The alien has a system for speech and written language. Their written language can be rotated, and they’ll still understand the word. It looked more like graphic designs. Their bodies have no forward direction, and so is their language. The heptapods use a logographic script. Eventually, Dr. Banks realizes that the logograms should instead be called semagrams. They discover that heptapod speech contains free word order and center-embedding of clauses. They also learn that the way in which semagrams are written(rotating or orientation) changes their meaning. 
• This reminds me of Chinese characters. Chinese characters are like pictures. From what I remember, there are 6 types of Chinese characters. One type of it would be the pictograms. In this group, the characters look like the objects they represent. In compound ideograms which is another type of group, the characters are created by the combination of two or more pictograms but more abstract. When I was reading through the passage, these two types of groups were what I use to help me imagine what the alien’s language is like.
• “For the heptapods, all language was performative. “This led me thinking that acting is also a way to communication. Facial expression or gesture is way to communicate. It doesn’t have to be through words. I think sometimes our psychical gesture can indicate what we’re feeling. If we want to reject someone or something but don’t know how to reject them, it’s obviously through our physical gesture.
• Throughout the readings, the narrator talked about the time with her daughter “when you cry, you’ll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your body employed in expressing that emotion. It’s funny: when you’re tranquil, you will seem to radiate light.” I try to find a similarity between how an infant learn language and express themselves and the alien’s language. I feel like they are very similar in terms of being very performative to convey messages.