Author: Yue Yao

There’s no such place with a single story. When we deny the single story, heaven will come to us. Otherwise, stereotypes and disrespect will be inevitably caused. It deprives our rights to have an equal conversation with others.

In many peoples’ eyes, Africa is a place with beautiful landscapes, beautiful wildlife, and at the same time a land of poverty, famine, AIDS and other disasters. People think Africa is an underdeveloped country. The reason for this impression is that we only explain an unfamiliar continent through a single story. In addition to being influenced by the information transmitted by various media, we tend to interpret a person or a country in a one-sided and simplified way. The danger of a single story is that it can lead to stereotypes that lead us to make bad judgments about our values. Every dark-skinned African is poor, and every African needs compassion and help. This is why many Europeans were inspired by the greedy desire to plunder the east after reading the record of Marco Polo.

The danger of a single story lies in the rigidity of our thinking. A single story simplifies the complexity of the world. Although it is convenient for people to understand the world, it is not comprehensive and objective enough. In the movie “Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story”, the professor asks the heroine Liz why they use many authors’ photocopies to study instead of textbooks. Liz’s answer: “one author can only give you one view of the world, and multiple authors can give you more views of the world and a wider world of thinking.” The danger of a single story is overgeneralized, and we tend to see a point rather than a multidimensional body. Similarly, to understand a person is not just to interpret a story that happens to him, but to understand that it is the many stories that bind together that shape him.

Link:
http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~yy2552/audio/

Description:
Basically, we want to present a boat trip along the river in Italy and show different scenes by scrolling the page horizontally. You may feel the boat is going slowly when the images on two sides coming to sight. There is a series of audios constantly showing up and fading away. I did most of the visual part and coding and Tenielle drew the comic person, collected and edited all the audios needed.

Process:
The main idea is to play the sound when a certain scroll position hits the border of some image. So I need to record the scroll position first. And when the position comes to a certain range some audio will be played and some will be stopped or faded. I put two buttons to create a little interaction like changing the direction of the boat. I tried to change the opacity of the images with the buttons so that the right or left button should either show the left side when you press the left button or the right side when you press the right button. But somehow it didn’t work.
I came across some challenges when coding and learned a lot. For example, we need to set the property “flex: 0 0 auto;” or give the width a large number for the flex-box so that the boxes won’t be limited to the window. That’s also the reason why we could scroll the page horizontally. Before we set the z-index, we should define the position first. Also, it’s suggested that we’d better give the div the class name.

Post-mortem:
It almost reached our expectation. Because of the time limit, we didn’t focus too much on visual art. Sometimes we may have to pause and do something again due to the lack of communication. It would be better if we make clear what we’re going to do first and begin our work then.

PS:  Big thanks to Moon, Cindy, and my partner Tenielle :)))

The typical story in this short essay touches on various ideas like originality, intellectual property and the legitimacy of work borrowing. Meiselas took the photograph which is later used in a painting made by Garnett. So Garnett is sued of violating the right of intellectual property of Meisela. They actually take different attitudes toward this matter. Meisela believes she “owns” the photo because she embedded meanings to it. She is the original creator of that photo. While on the other hand, Garnett insists that the specific content of artwork belongs to no one. Different people can have different understandings. So we should spare room for creativity and freedom.

It has just been discussed in the other essay that language may be just a continuous work of repetition and recycling. But is that possible if we create more music or paintings rather than get inspiration from others’ work? All kinds of artwork may be of high flexibility and we may have more opportunities to always add novel elements to them. Therefore, it’s necessary to protect the intellectual property of the creator of artworks and give credit to their brilliant ideas.

It seems that a lot of great achievements made in the text, image, and music have something to do with “plagiarism” because even some great artists say that they are actually “borrowing others work” and combine them with their own ideas. The idea of Plagiarism in post-modern times is quite common. And we can see “famous plagiarists” like Shakespeare, Helen Keller or Martin Luther King as far as I know. When we admit all kinds of language ( no matter it’s art or anything else ) we use are constantly being repeated, cycled and recycled, we tend to feel like plagiarism is not a big deal anymore.

The most paradoxical thing comes to the relationship between plagiarism and originality. When the author nowadays wants to write a book or compose a song, they want to promote their own distinctive ideas with high creativity. But at the same time, they want to give credit to previous work or their “ancestors”. It’s still hard to keep a balance between them.

But now let’s take an insight into it. What should be considered as originality? When art making is merely a process of repetition, who may probably own the originality? Or should we really care about the originality of a piece of work? Maybe we can switch our attention to the meaning of the artworks. An artist can make reference to others’ work but he or she will never get the original intention of the previous artist contained in that work. What he or she could do is to embed them with new meanings. And this might be a better attitude towards plagiarism.

The podcast I chose was Homecoming, Season One: Episode One – fictional, podcast series.

This is the first time that I’ve listened to the podcast, especially for this kind of psychological thriller scenario. I was amazed by the multi-dimensional, detailed, and impressed style of its unique narration.

Although I didn’t understand what’s actually going on, I do feel like I’m navigating in the whole storyline by recognizing the intro, the outro, and its transitions. For example, I heard classical music and sirens in the beginning. A loud beeping noise always appears in the transition to imply the scene change.
Then there are some detailed things. From the tone of the characters, I may manage to figure out the relationship between them and how the attitudes may change from time to time. When the background sound covers the conversation, the audience may have a feeling of isolation and distance.

In a podcast, visual art is totally unnecessary. We only need to pay attention to the audio. However, we may find that even if we can not watch the various scenes or special effects like what we often do when watching an exciting movie, the audio Itself can be as captivating and engaging as the visual art. Generally speaking, the audio plays a really important role in helping us get the information as much as possible by showing its transitions, the strong and weak switches and the relationship between the subject and the environment etc. Audio is an enjoyable art.