Vicky's Documentation Blog

Project description: a black and white visual representation of a piece of music of their choice using typographic symbols and characters. How can the musical  elements within the song (tone, timbre, rhythm, speed, etc.) be interpreted into visual graphics? Additionally, music evokes emotions. How can your visual graphics convey emotion?

I chose June: Barcarole (The Seasons, op.37a, no.6) by Russian composer Tchaikovsky.

Sound track:

Appr

eciation:

The song is depicting the scene of a peaceful summer night.  I can imagine rolling a boat on a glistening river under the moonshine. The sentences really make me feel like I am paddling, and the boat is swaying. 

The characteristic of barcarole is that the same section of melody with repeat for two times. The overall atmosphere is slightly grieve with a sense of solitude. I think there are great thinking between the piece. Starting from 1:33, the tune gets more lively. It’s like suddenly have some inspiration. It reaches to the climax at 2:14 (asking a profound question). Afterwards , it goes down and go back to echo with the beginning ( get no answer, find solution impossible). The great theme may be concerning with death, the meaning of time, whatever, the feeling of the piece by no means should be limited to a plain surface, but many more dimensions.

Design elements:

I found a Russian font called moon that is often used in children’s storybooks, since it is a Russian piece, and the name fits the song. Also the characters are cute and have many elements that I can make use of.

I want create a picture of dreamland. I pieced four “r” together to form a swirl. indicating that it is in dream. Then I found that the loop by “s” is beautiful, so I rearrange and adjust them to get a tunnel. 

Final work:

Reflection: I didn’t manage to quite get across what I feel about the piece through my presentation on class. Maybe I should rehearsal a little beforehand. Also about the documentation, it is better to record more processes and drafts on the blog, meanwhile I complete my design.

Source: ted-chiang-story-of-your-life-2000.pdf – Google Drive

This is a really interesting science fiction concerning about language. Firstly, it takes a kind of double-line narrative that intersect together, one is coherent in time, but the other is more like fragments of the past time. And the two story line have some some crossing or connecting parts like “non-zero-sum game” “salad bowl”, giving a sense of the writer reading through a projection of her memory.

So this pattern has similarity with the “simultaneous mode of consciousness”(Chiang, 25), which is the thinking mode of the heptapods. The whole book is the whole picture of her life demonstrated in front of us. And the overlapping points of her description are the shared stroke of the pictographic language.

Their language is not a linear language. B seems to be more significant or represents them better compared to A. And their is no connection between their two language, differing from humans’ communication of talking that generates thoughts from an invisible mouth spitting words out to express. But about that mute person’s pattern of communication?? So our language have many forms…

I think the so-called free will and determinism is still proposed from humans perception of the world. There could be other ways that beyond our recognition

Project Description: Use Gestalt principles of design described in the lecture (similarity, closure, proximity, continuity and symmetry) to subdivide and re-group the parts to suggest new shapes and to create a puzzle for the viewer to imagine how the pieces were derived from the original square.

I did some research and learned that one important idea of Gestalt Theory is that “Parts are defined by the whole.” It is about regrouping the elements and make them serve the unified theme. Accordingly, it occurs to me that there are similar concepts in Traditional Chinese Scenery painting. Also to compose with ink and rice paper is really about the contrast between black and white. So I decided to depict the four Chinese “junzi” or gentlemen–plum blossom, orchid, bamboo and chrysanthemum.

I immediately got the composition plan for bamboo from my observation. Basically it is utilizing rectangles for branches and leaves.

Next, I thought about chrysanthemum. I was inspired by the logo of my favorite basketball player Derek Rose. But petals of chrysanthemum are denser and longer, also more outward. So I tried to create an impression that the flowers have many layers.

As for the orchid, I did random cutting as the feature of the orchid is kind of organic and causal. Lastly I use the similar strategy with bamboo for plum blossom, excerpt for the thicker and stronger branches that embodied its tenacity.

Final work:

Reflection:  As the first project of this course, It is challenging in terms of time limitation and its high requirements of execution. The core of the project is to understand and learn how to incorporate these principle into the design. So creating a more conceptual image rather than depicting real objects will be a better choice. Also, try to expand the dimension and beyond the frame if possible.  

 

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