Commlab

The Final Piece (Sorry it’s in MP3 format because the website doesn’t allow .wav due to “safety reasons” and the quality is contracted. ):

 

A longer version:

 

Introduction:

Overview of the soundtracks:

In this project, I want to represent a piece of memory I felt during working: dullness, repetitiveness, boredom, and finally, a doomed failure of all the attempts to escape. At the beginning, I used a gradual layering-up of sound to build up the workplace atmosphere.

Then, the sound of the crowd gradually came in from the background to the foreground with the beep sound imitating the tinnitus:

With unbearable discomfort, the main character turned around to look outside the window, where he saw the busy road and a plane flying across the sky (imitated by the engine’s sound).

 

To refresh himself, he decided to go to the bathroom to wash his face. In the quiet bathroom, he finally got some relief from the constant tinnitus and the clamor of the crowd.

However, when he comes back, the crowd sounds even more absurd to him, and the typing sound sounds like a non-stop echo in an abyss. Combined with a hollow drumbeat imitating a sound from a faraway land, the whole sound culminated in an attempt to escape from the dullness and the alienation from the workplace.

Eventually, the whole sound returns to a simple typing sound of daily life. When the autoplay returns back to the beginning of the sound, the audience may find it is actually a loop. I utilized this concept to depict the nonstop workday in daily life.

 

 

 

Yanlin Zhu, “WorkingPalace”

Brief View of the Work:

Yanlin Zhu, WorkingPalace, 2022

 

 

 

Description:

        In this project, I try to recreate the depressive feeling people feel in their everyday life. The subject of the first photo is an office building.

        I want to create a sense of contradiction by decolorizing most of the parts of the building and leaving out the highly saturated orange lights provided by the light from people working inside. Through highlighting the sharp contrast between colors and grayscale, I intend to highlight the contrast between the liveliness of human beings and the dullness of work. To push the connotation of the work further, the contrast could be considered as a criticism against the alienation of labor from capitalism: the black and white blocks from the windows of the building suggest the monotonicity in the working place, and the scattering lights suggest the remaining humanity in this boredom from a capitalistic way of production. Also, in the stagnant composition, my intention is to create an out-of-breath feeling from the depressive working place.

       The second piece, it is a collage of different buildings and objects inside them: other working places, working places under construction, corridors, escalators, windows, and most importantly,  a desperate figure of a human being. For the colors, I referenced Piet Mondrian’s works. (See Fig.3) 

I appropriated his ideas of abstracting buildings into different blocks from a birds-eye-view and utilising colors to create a sense of differentiation. However, I altered his way of only using vertical black lines. In fact, in my composition, there are only declining lines. I used this gesture to create a spiral feeling in the middle and create a relative visual focus. Also, through this attempt, I want to depict the instability of the seemingly stable office building presented in figure 1, and further illustrate the rooted instability of the capitalist society. Moreover, I use highly saturated colors to mask the different objects. I want to represent the scene that people in the orange windows from figure 1 see: the palace-like objects covered by vivid colors, but they are nothing more than pure dullness of black and white. What makes the picture more ironic is that the human in the orange light is originally a photo of a commercial advertisement rather than a photo of a genuine person (see fig.4) 

        Therefore, through juxtaposing these two figures, I want to create a variety of contradictions: between colors, between compositions, between inside and outside, between dullness and excitement, and most importantly, between subjects and objects.

 

Process:

        For the photo one, here’s one of the numerous photos I took:

 

In order to make the composition looks full and depressive, I zoomed in for more details, and here’s another photo I’ve taken.

        For the collage work, I twisted the pictures to fit them into the frames, and masked them with color blocks. Here’s one of the color block attempts. You can see the editing process from my psd file.

Conclusion:

         If I had more time, I would definitely try a composition that follows the original Piet Mondrian. Here’s a great example provided by Professor Wuwei  during our discussion(see below). 

 

Past Drafts:

Draft on Oct.28, 2022

This one appears to be too dark for a printed version, so I lighted it up in the final work.

 

Possible Concepts:

The unphotoshopped one is the studio shot of a cotton swab, the photoshopped one is the collage of wide-open mouths. 

The color difference might provide a visual shock. For example, the black background and the white swab and the colorful (maybe appropriating some of the Andy Warhol ideas here, see below) portraits.

The main concept is to use the color difference between the dull PCR test cotton swab and the vivid portrait of regular people to show the sharp contract. If possible, I want the work can be interpreted as a criticism of the current Chinese Covid policy. 

 

Another idea is to use geometrical blocks in skyscrapers (see below) juxtaposed with color blocks (with contradicting colors, highly saturated). 

 To highlight the contradiction between the dull industrial products and the vivid lives that reside inside.

1. What does Ritchin mean with the “fluidity of the digital”? Give an example of digital imaging/digital photography that exemplifies this.

        The “fluidity of the digital” means the demise of the objectivity of the photograph once it becomes pixels on the screen. Because after the photos are digitalized, they can be easily modified, which eventually results in the alternation of the information the original image tried to express. An example of this would be the digital counterfeit of documents. Forgers use created seals to give authenticity and authority to unauthorized documents.  In this case, an original worthless paper becomes authentic because of the existence of a digital seal.

       2. Reflect on the extent to which photography is capable of capturing reality; and compare it to other media (technology)

         I find there’s a contradiction when reflecting on the extent of photography capturing reality. On the one hand, photography is capable of capturing the most exact image from the perspective of the camera. While on the other hand, after entering the digital age, photographs can be easily modified for the purpose of the photographer. Here, the phrase “capturing reality” in the question becomes vague because reality can no longer be “captured”: fluidity resides in the action of capturing. 

De Heem, Jan Davidsz. Vase of Flowers. 1660, Oil on Canvas

        When comparing photography with paintings, the contradiction becomes more salient. In a realistic still-life, we tend to believe the painter can capture reality. Taking the oil on canvas above as an example, at first sight, we will believe the painter successfully captured reality, just like how we believe in photographs. However, the painting is completely painted out of the artist’s imagination: the flowers in the vase could not blossom at the same time. Thus, the vase couldn’t have appeared as how we see it today. Instead, the artist’s imagination is blended into the painting.

 

The pioneer plaque is designed to illustrate pens, which has been an essential writing tool throughout human history. We designed the image in the shape of radiation, considering the way that the hetapods are described in Chiang’s Stories of Your Life. Instead of giving a clear and linear history or disassembly of pens, we tried to mix different parts of the pen, the way we use pens and different aspects of a pen together to show a possible plaque that the hetapods might understand. On the top of the circle, there’s the converter of a pen, which provides the ink and support continuous writing. The second graph on the clockwise side, there is a hand holding a pen, signifying the way human beings use a pen. Since the hetapods or other aliens might does not have a similar “hand” organ as human being, the illustration of a hand can be also be considered as the way human hold the pen. In this sense, the concept of “hand” can be interpreted further as a more abstract concept of utilizing. The third one is the feed part of a fountain pen, which is the part that allows ink to flow when the pen is being put to paper but ensures ink does not flow when the pen is not in use. Next, is the side graph of the nib, mainly to show the curve and the thickness of a nib. Following, is a close-up of a nib, giving a more detailed graph to show the aliens how the writing part of pen looks like. The last is the cap of a pen. Since it relatively participates less in the process of writing and works mainly as the protector of the nib, we made it a bit farther to the middle of the whole image. 

Bowie, David. “Space Oddity.”  Space Oddity, 1969.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[The blank is deliberately left for you to appreciate the great piece of music without my intrusion. ]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final:

 

Scanned Version:

Introduction:

        I try to depict the infinity and vastness of space that was delivered in David Bowie’s Space Oddity. The work can be interpreted in multiple ways: the “O” in the dead center, it could be either considered as an eye observing the whole universe as the lonely astronaut floating in the sky in the song, or, it could be recognized as a visualization for the tension delivered in the music: an open mouth shouting to the whole universe. On the side of the O, there are “l”s in different typefaces, shapes, and thicknesses. I used them to give motion to the general composition. Also, based on the different interpretations of the work, it could be either contacting to the middle or radiating out. Moving closer, there are some “C”s crossing with each other and “O”s to show the image of planets, stars, and galaxies in the milky way. The difference in size provides depth and visual impact. For Gestalt Theory, the concepts of continuation, closure, and symmetry are used.

        Still, it is not perfect work. As was discussed with Professor Chen, to strengthen the visual impact further, I could utilize the close-up of pupils to add more concentration in the middle. You can find the references and past versions of the work below.

Draft one. Oct.3

Draft 1.1 

The idea of cutting the O in the middle into two halves was inspired by the video: https://youtu.be/k70OczvX45k 

And the idea of the dotted lines was inspired by the video: https://youtu.be/g5NJAFkxUBs to show the light shoot out like beams.

I tried to give it a sense of motion through lines in the middle. But it presents more chaos in the composition rather than the motion. So I abandoned it and only tried the beam.

Draft 2

Draft 3I’m trying to give the image a sense of depth by using the bigger C in the front.

The sci-fi story is really fascinating for both its content and its form. The whole story is consisted of two parallel stories: the process of translating the alien’s language, and the past (or the future?) of the entire life of her daughter. The author gave a profound analysis on topics including linguistic relativity, free will, teleology, and ontology of beings. The author tended to presume a completely different language (the Heptapod A and B) to imagine a new way of thinking about the world. Rather than a linear mindset, the aliens followed an overlying and superimposed mindset that could create a script for communications. Through the way the author interacted with the aliens, the author tried to show us how deep down can the form of language can affect the content of it. The author used a formal transition in the storytelling to put this idea to an extreme: the juxtaposition of her daughter’s life and her own life, representing how the mindset of the main character in the story has changed by the different lingual systems. Generally speaking, the author managed to deliver his philosophical thoughts by uniting the form and the content while composing a really intriguing story.

• How do aliens in the story language and communication style different from the human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)

The aliens’ communication style is non-linear and is written by layering up different meanings to a similar structure. The way aliens express themselves is different from human communication mainly due to the difference in thinking and words. They do not have the concepts such as ending. In their oral language, they often integrate onomatopoeia, which is hard for humans to understand.

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

The human body is symmetric and has a clear distinguishment of forward and backward, making our belief in linear communication that has a start and an end. The Heptapod’s bodies are radial symmetry, indicating that they have no concept of direction, such as forward and backward. Therefore, they have no concept of start and end.

 

1. Introduction

         This is the first exercise that I got from the Communications Lab. The rules were simple: we each got two pieces of matt board with the size of 26.08cm*32.5cm and a black square with the size of 13cm*13cm. We must cut the square into pieces and glue all the pieces to the matt board.

2. General View

 

         This is how it looks sticking on the display board in our classroom. These two works were inspired by my personal experience during my internship. The theme for these two works is Modernity. The one on the left

3. Detail for Each

the Commute

        The first work is about what I see on the daily basis: people in suit and tie are always rushing and walking. I tried to add the concept of motion to the image to show the bustle-and-hustle feeling. To create the busy atmosphere, the concept of zoetrope and Edweard Muybridge mentioned during the class inspired me greatly. 

A man walking. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887.

        Mentioned Gestalt Theory: Closure, Similarity, Proximity, Good Figure.

the SkyScraper

        If the Commute is mainly what I see through from below, the Skyscraper is more likely to be the birds eye view looking on the whole. This work aims at presenting my general perception of my working space as well as the whole society. This work can be interpreted in several ways due to the flexibility provided by its components, random black blocks. My original intension for this work is the deconstruction of a skyscraper which is constantly collapsing from the very bottom. At the same time, the fallen pieces construct an individual who is looking down at a piece of the ruins and thinking. It can also be interpreted the other way around, which the individual donate itself and is voluntarily sucked into the skyscraper. Still, since it is a rather abstract work, it’s free to all interpretations. Another noticeable feature is the capitalized Scraper in the title. The construction workers use scrapers to flat the walls and bricks, which is similar to what I was doing last night, cutting and sticking these black blocks.

an image of a scraper

        Mentioned Gestalt Theory: Good Figure, Similarity, Proximity