Archives for October 2022

Concept

For the overall concept of this project, I want to use photos to convey emotions and ideas. The main character of the main subject that I want to take is goldfish.

Goldfish are confined in fish tanks, plastic bags, and glass bottles, they keep swimming forward, but only touch the walls. In these glass containers, goldfish can see the outside world, but they can’t do anything about it. However, goldfish have only 7 seconds of memory, they soon forget their troubles and swim freely in their own little world.

Goldfish are very much like the flowers in the vase, the fruit being washed in the sink, and also like us living in the big city. We are not frogs at the bottom of the well because we can see a lot of the outside world, but we are not free, even less than goldfish, we will sometimes be mentally internalized.

This work hopes to convey a desire for freedom, and at the same time, to convey an optimistic mood, so that we can learn from the goldfish and always live freely in the place we can reach.

Conversation between two images

I imagine that the elements of the two are different from each other, but the metaphors are similar, and the two may have color echoes.

The image that I plan to take

Different from the photo that I post, I wasn’t particularly thinking about this angle of the photo, I was hoping to get some macro shots that would highlight the subject.

• Goldfish
• Orange Flower in glass bottles
• Empty glass bottles/ fish tanks/ vase
• Oranges/blueberry/Lemon with water
• Laser Paper
• Mirrors
• Wire Mesh

Manipulate the photos with PS

I would like to make a collage in the form of a barbed wire fence as the background. I would like to say that the above items are reasonably combined. The specific situation depends on the actual situation.

I will also use Photoshop to adjust the color of the photo to bring out a retro feeling of high saturation and more noise particles.

This photo has gone viral on social media of a bear chasing a bicyclist in Yellowstone Park, who appears to be protesting that the cyclist is violating his home —- i.e. nature. Such a photo is very unusual, and the vision behind it expresses the hope that people will protect nature to give wildlife a dream home making this photo more valuable. But is it real?

Actually, it is not. Here is the original image of this photo.

As Ritchin, author of the book “In Our Own Image”, says, due to the rapid development of digital technology, it has become much easier to make some changes to our images, which may make photography lose credibility among people. Many people can confuse the image with the reality it refers to. It is by taking advantage of the fluidity of digital that we have to suspect that these photographers are more passionate about doing something to their photos as a way to gain the attention of the public. This makes photography a medium of vanity, where people tamper with the real images captured at will to control the controlling view of others. However, it must be mentioned that being able to tamper with photos more conveniently is not entirely undesirable. The photographer of the above photo had the best of intentions, as he wanted to appeal to the environment through his artistic creations. These depths of nature are hard to reach for people living in the middle of big cities, and they lack the ability to discern their authenticity. But in his way, the photographer makes the public aware of the problems facing those inaccessible places and what changes should be made to improve them. This is something that cannot be done in the non-digital age.

Besides photography, there are many other ways for humans to capture reality, such as text, video, audio screens, etc. Photography shows a visual picture, unlike words, which leaves us with infinite room for imagination. Photography visually shows us what an object or person or animal really looks like. In the digital age, photographs can be simply tampered with and collaged. This makes the photograph no longer a frozen moment, but a complete story that can be told in the same way as words. In this way, photography not only presents a true representation of all or part of the subject but also allows people to connect their worldviews to the real world.

For my Father     —-Chasing Mirror

By Kiki Zhang

You can enjoy my work in conjunction with the song in the video 😉

Concept and Design

The song I chose is For my Father, the title track of Chasing Mirror’s album For my Father. There is very little information available on the internet, almost nothing, so the design and interpretation of the song all came from me. Obviously, it is a piece of electronic music with dynamics and drums. When I first listened to the song, I felt that the pitch of the song went from low to high, which reminded me of a tricky thing that keeps charging forward, with different things colliding with it all around. But because it was hard enough, all the little things were reduced to pieces after the impact.

The most prominent “A” in the piece stands for this hard thing. It can withstand the attacks of all things without being hurt. The rhythm of the song is very consistent, so I decided that these little things are in order, but they are very sharp, so I used the letters “V” and “I” to form a spiral. I used the letter “O” for the impacted pieces because the letter “O” is very elastic and gives us a sense of squeezing. The whole picture conveys a dynamic feeling, a sense of impact. Perhaps you can feel that the background of the whole set is the universe.

One Black Square really inspires me a lot. In One Black Square, I cut a square into lots of little flecks and spread them all over the frame, using the figure/ground separation from Gestalt theory. But this resulted in a very bland image for me. Too many tiny things are put together so that it could not create a visual impact. Therefore, in this sound visualization project, I tried to use a large area of black and white, using closure from Gestalt theory, so that the upper left and lower right parts blend with each other while creating a strong black-and-white contrast.

Process

In the first draft, I wanted to present the scene of the Big Bang, and I tried to use many repeating circles to form two vortexes, each from different directions, rushing against each other. However, the image proved to be very messy and lacked a sense of three-dimensionality.

So, I wanted to try the minimalist style, using fewer circles to create a sense of three-dimensionality, while making the picture less cluttered and making the expression clear.

The picture lacks layers due to the lack of size distinction of the letters. But in mid-critique, I realized that a picture, what makes it attractive, is there must be a subject in the picture, that is very prominent and attracts the eye.

This is my mid-term work, and although I have the main subject, I still feel it is slightly plain. The top left and bottom right parts don’t feel intertwined, while the image doesn’t give a visual impact. So in my final work, I tried to add elements from the spiral below to the “A” and added many “O”s to the spiral to make the two blends. At the same time, I used a very large “B” as a backdrop to set off the “A”, showing that it is still very resilient in the face of adversity.

Conclusion

From the first draft to the final draft, I think I made a leap. But if I had more time, I think I should have added gray to the work as a transition color. Right now there are only two colors in the picture, black and white, and the large area of black and white makes this picture not three-dimensional. There is a momentary impact, but it is very short.

Eyeblinguage

Team： Kiki & Maelyn

Contact lens, one of humanity’s greatest inventions, is a lens worn on the eye’s cornea to correct vision or protect human eyes. They have greatly improved the appearance and convenience of myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism, and other refractive errors, which bring massive comfort to human beings. 

Ted Chiang described in his scientific novel The Story of Your Life that heptapods are aliens with “seven lidless eyes on top of their bodies.” As both of us are creatures with eyes, introducing contact lenses to them seems intriguing. Obviously, heptapods don’t have the capacity to read human written language. However, the world we see through our eyes is the same. Taking advantage of this feature, we plan to use illustrations consistent with heptapods’ logic to show them the unique technique.

The whole instructions could be regarded as “eyeblinguage.” We firstly used arrows to connect the eyes on the face of a base person with the eyeballs, so that heptapods could easily understand and have a conception of the inner structure of the human eyeballs. Then we drew how the human eyes with myopia, hyperopia, and routine vision received light and were imaged at different positions in the eye. The information in the picture also explained that due to the extra thickness of the lens, the imaging position of the light in the eyes of the three groups of people was also different, leading to the different degrees of blurring of things seen by them. Finally, we not only showed the specific style of contact lenses but also composed the changes of objects seen by these three groups of people after wearing contact lenses, which was reflected by the clarity of the things painted.

The “eyeblinguage” consists of many images, arrows, and even dots with different colors referring to other conditions. Although this diagram is a bit messy for humans, these unique small designs benefit heptapods. The writing language of heptapods is chaotic and without punctuation. They combine the semagrams by modifying and rotating logograms, just like graphic design. At the same time, because they have the ability to predict the future, their sentences are treated as a whole. It is possible to start reading from any part of the sentence without affecting understanding. Therefore, our instructions used illustrations to fit the characteristics of heptapods’ written language. You must read it as a whole, or you may be confused and incompletely understand the contact lens function.

Additionally, after careful consideration, we didn’t choose to include the causes of myopia and hyperopia, such as excessive use of electronic devices. That’s because heptapods are all goal oriented. They don’t have a cause-and-effect mindset. They will not investigate the causes and consequences because the past and future are directly displayed in front of them.

We don’t know whether many people in Heptapods are also troubled by myopia and hyperopia, but we can understand that a particular technology can be spread to aliens through “eyelinguage.”

Using perfect pictures from different movies as a reference, I created ten groups of color discs, each group representing a movie picture. 

It is worth mentioning that the film directors I selected are very good at using color to create an atmosphere.

For example, in the movie La la Land, The actor and actress danced under the starry sky, which impressed us deeply. Here, the director mainly used purple and yellow. These two colors complement each other. If they are put together, they will form a strong contrast and give a visual impact.

In the film The Fall（坠入)， the director uses color to express feelings, red represents hatred, yellow represents patience, and all the colors he uses are highly saturated to render emotions.

Different from the previous colors, in the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson used a very similar low saturation tone, and the whole picture became very soft and warm.