Month: October 2022

By “fluidity of the digital”, Ritchin means that with the advancement of technology, the mechanical age is now being replaced by the development of digital photography. In the mechanical age, there was no such thing as manipulation software. In the digital age, however, according to Ritchin, “the reader, unable to detect the alterations, can be deceived most of all.” Essentially, people become unsure if photographs are reliable when it comes to a method to document public and private events with all the genetic modifications whereas in the past, the photographs often count as historical evidence with reliability. Retouches in the photos can be done to pursue a certain intent, leading the viewer away from what may have been the reality. Ritchin gave an example of this using the Time’s magazine’s manipulation of O.J. Simpson’s mugshot, photographed by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1994. Time’s magazine manipulated his mugshot and lifted it to the level of art, “with no sacrifice to truth”, according to Ritchin. Not only the issues of reality and the altering of history have made the Time’s magazine’s action problematic, but the act of manipulating a photograph with a particular intent beneficial to themselves is a problem that lies in the digital age. 

Photography is capable of capturing reality to a great extent, in comparison to texts and books, but in my opinion, digital media in the format of videos is more capable of capturing reality than photography. Photographs can be easily manipulated by people because they’re 2-dimensional still images. However, there are movements in videos so it’s more obvious to tell when it has been manipulated, such as when people cut the clips and merge them together into one video. Whereas in texts and books, it’s more so up to the interpretation of the individual who is reading it to brainstorm the image that the texts/books create for them, whereas images are clear evidence to look upon instead of on one’s own imagination.

 

 

 

The overall concept for my Diptych will be based on uniformity and similarity.

For the contact sheet, I plan on taking photos of different things that has the same movements or the same arrangements. They are either objects that are the same sizes or people that have the same movements. I want to focus on colors in my photographs and emulate cinema/film-style photographs. 

As for the second image, I plan to manipulate it by collaging the different colors from the uniforms into one figure. I plan on extracting unexpected colors from the first image and manipulate it using the colors so that some elements of the image has like a blurry mosaic effect.

Overall, the two images create a quirky and funny effect because for the photograph, I hope to capture funny coincident snapshots. The two images will complement each other to convey the concept of coincidence.

 

Title of the Music: Don’t Leave Me This Way  

Artist: Tomppabeats 

A Little Reflection

For this project, I began my inspiration by re-listening to the music over and over and imagining multiple scenes that I imagined when I listened to the rhythm. From the rhythm, I imagined water flowing, birds flying and chirping, bell ringing occasionally, and last but not least, door slamming. For the piece I submitted for mid-critique, I submitted a piece with some general ideas of what I hope to achieve through principles of similarity and continuity. In my Black Square Assignment, the elements were built on one another instead of planned all at once and all flowed together and connected. For my final design, I added more elements to create a closure in my design and make all the elements flow together instead of having them be too apart to achieve a concept of different sizes of elements flowing together at the same time, like how it appeared in the rhythm. Also, for the design, I chose to use light strokes for the majority of my design to pursue because the rhythm in the song is very light and soft.

During the design process, the most significant steps that I have taken would be creating an effect of something cohesive that falls apart to pieces with the upside-down letter “v”. This was the first idea I thought of for this sound visualization when I first heard the door slamming noise near the end of the music. I find this design to be successful because it expresses my feeling of door slamming and everything falling apart perfectly. Although this idea remains the same throughout the mid-critique and my final design, I decided to switch it up a little after the mid-critique to make the composition more interesting. I also find that the continuation of the letter “t” on the upper-left corner of the design getting smaller and smaller is very successful in shaping my design because it conveys a relaxing and chill feeling to my composition. As for failure, during the mid-critique, my design was mainly composed of three separate major elements that all use similar Gestalt theory principles without each of them connecting to each other much. So, for my final design, I connected the two elements on the upper-left corner and upper-right corners with the letter “B” and different directions and amounts to emulate the continuous up-and-down effect reflected in the rhythm. Upon making the flow more smooth from top to bottom, I realized that the top part of my composition is too heavy compared to the bottom part of the composition because of the differences in stroke sizes. I then added black dots in different orientations and sizes made of the letter “o” to fill out the negative space towards the bottom half of the composition and make the flow of the different elements more natural.

If I had more time, I would improve my project by incorporating more Gestalt theory principles. I recall that Professor Ian commented on my design not being coherent enough from the top and the bottom of the composition and perhaps I can choose to incorporate letters I used from the top of the composition in the bottom of my composition and vice versa. I think that’s a great idea that I can do to improve the overall flow of my composition.  

Here’s my design for the mid-critique:

Here’s my final design for this project!

 

 

What we choose to explain to the heptapods is how the bicycle-sharing system works. It is a commonly used means of transportation in our daily life, which the heptapods may never experience. Generally speaking, it’s a shared transport service where bicycles are available for shared use by individuals for a short-term at low or zero cost. It’s getting popular in the human world mainly because it provides a sustainable alternative for short-distance trips and a solution to “last mile problem”. This is somehow difficult for heptapods to understand as they may have their unique means of transportation. 

    So above we collect a few images to make it clearer for heptapods so that they can get a basic understanding of our bicycle-sharing system. From the reading “Story of Your Life”, Ted Chiang mentions that in heptapods’ language system, a noun is identified as subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to that of the verb(13) and sentences are not in fixed pattern but actually seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together(16). In our image, we communicate this by creating the verb “start” in one orientation and nouns such as “here” and “destination” in another orientation. In the bottom of the image where the stick figure speaks, the sentences are written with no spaces between the words and opposite orientations. On the right side of the image, we expressed our understanding of the intent of bike sharing, which is the “last mile problem”. By making a comparison between walking and riding an easily accessible shared bike, we are trying to show that bikes help us move faster in short distances. Meanwhile, we try to imitate the heptapods’ writing system so we write continuous characters in different orientations to show the movement in a sensible way. In the middle image, by contrast, we have different bicycle spots on the whole earth. The first image introduces the use of bikes and when it comes to the middle image, we try to show the special point of sharing by exhibiting the bike symbol in different parts of the earth. An image of earth may be easier for them to understand as they come to earth from somewhere in outer space so they should have a glimpse of the whole earth before landing. These different spots on earth show the common application of the bike sharing system in different countries of earth. On the left corner we have another image to explain how we can access a shared bike. It’s clear to see that someone is using a phone, which would be possibly considered as a man made tool by heptapods, to scan the QR code on that bike. This action differs from using our own bikes so it can be better for heptapods to understand the concept of bike sharing. In general, we want to exhibit the great invention of this bicycle-sharing system to heptapods and give them a general idea of how we humans travel between different spots, through which they can understand more about our daily life.