Line
According to Michel de Certeau, it is not the city itself but the walkers and wanderers that are able to mold, manipulate and create the space in which they inhabit. The consistency of the multitude of pedestrians allows space to be permanently changing and never at a static. With de Certeau’s perspective of urban space, I attempted first not to view but to walk and finally record my steps moving from downtown to uptown. While creating my first line drawing, I found that it was difficult to incorporate all the elements on my journey uptown that the final product, to me, does not look cohesive. For this assignment, I decided to represent more simple situations; recording the movements of a waiter at a restaurant, moving from table to table; the people that I observed from my apartment window, waiting for or hanging by the elevator at Bloomingdales; my daily routine on Tuesdays, travelling from home to Starbucks to school etc; my movements at home on Sunday, getting out of bed, moving to the couch and making breakfast etc; travelling back and forth from Hong Kong to New York. It was interesting to turn movement into something that is visible to better conceptualize these situations.
WWW Response
In Jorge Luis Borges’s story of “The Library of Babel”, the writer goes on to describe the physical appearance of his imaginative library in which he says, “I prefer to dream that its polished surface represent and promise the infinite…” The perception that Borges has of a library is that it is a place of a plethora of information, a never-ending space much like how the World-Wide Web can be viewed. As Borges describes the structures of the Library of Babel, “each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format…”, it sounds as if Borges is envisioning the World-Wide Web if it were ever to be a tangible place, imagining codes that build the web as the structure that complete a library. Borges talks of the books within the library that spark confusion, “This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherence.” This description draws uncanny similarity on the formation of the web, for information to become literate or to simply exist, codes must first be written and deciphered, these codes are often made of symbols or letters that cannot be understood alone. As Borges tells the story of a book “which had nearly two pages of homogeneous lines.”, he explains that the book was in “a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, which classical Arabian Arabian inflections.”, just as the codes of the World-Wide Web are a combination of multiple languages emerging as one, taking past information to create something new. Finally, Borges writes, “but I suspect that the human species, the unique species is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure,” put into context of the present day can be associated with the fact that the Web’s intangible form will live on even when humans cease to exist. Ahead of his time, The Library of Babel can almost act as Borges’ premonition of the World-Wide Web.
"The Last Newspaper" notes and artist statement
In our day and age, it becomes difficult for me to remember the existence of newspapers. As millenials, we receive our information mostly through the internet and have neglected the origins of the news. In the talk with the three artists who exhibited their work at "The Last Newspaper", it was interesting to hear Sarah Charlesworth discuss the different interpretations of stories by various newspapers. While every newspaper had the same storyline, they decided on individual strategies and images to present the news at hand, putting into perspective the interpreation of history. Artist Aleksandra Mir discussed how the news platform was restructured in New York City after the event of 911, and how before the tragedy, the news of New York seemed like smalltown gossip. It is interesting to think of the change in news after such an event and how that impacted the stories that were published. Artist Nate Lowman discussed his interest in Newspaper as a tangible source of information, a used to be common ground for the community. All three artists spoke on the issue of contradictions on newspapers, how one page can present an intense story while placing a mundane one adjacent to it, does it diminish the importance of the news that needs to be acknowledged? As someone who never reads newspapers, I found it challenging to decide what my project would be about. After closely examining newspaper from The New York Times to the Wall Street journal, I quickly noticed a pattern of men dominating most pages. Because of this, I decided to create a spread that was dedicated to the women of our society. The structure of the news can often be confusing, stories that have no relevance to each other are put adjacent on the news. Morbid cases can often be found paired next to a photograph of a model walking down the runway. For my project, I wanted to highlight the women of our society and accentuate their voices that have so often been overlooked. Moreover, I collected pieces that spoke of sexual assault on women to show the hardships that they have endured. In the Trump era that America is living in today, it is becoming increasingly necessary to credit the women that are making a positive change in our society.
Whitney Response
A collaborative piece by choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Phillip Glass, and artist Sol LeWitt, Dance is a multimedia representation of not only music but also the human expression of music. The three parts of the piece are a musically notated score, a video of dancing on the wall, and a mapping out of the dancer’s movements as colored designs on the floor. While separate and completely different from each other, the distinct parts show a connected progression through the idea of programmed rules. The choreography of the dancers is programmed and designed according to the music (or perhaps in harmony with it). The colored designs are dictated by the dancer’s movements. While it is difficult to find an aesthetic beauty in a set of instructions, these artists combine to show the visceral emotion that can be conveyed through coded commands. The piece remarks on how music or dance is rarely thought of as a robotic expression but at the same time can be rightfully conceived as nothing else but robotic and machined. For example, an instrumental performance is nothing but a defined set of movements played on a machine designed to project certain sounds. And while the piece distills human artistic expressions in to its programmed components, it also evokes how these coding’s are inherently human and connected to emotion. They show how the composer views a piece of written paper and hears a triumphant symphony; How the choreographer hears a song and imagines a graceful ballet with pirouettes and arabesques; How the dancer performs the routine and feels the arcs that her feet brush on the floor and the tension in the lines of her body. While Dance explores patterns that are tangible in our reality by incorporating music scores and choreography, artist Ian Cheng took on a different approach. His piece Baby feat Ikaria displayed on a vertical screen, examines the interaction between three online chatbots. Fragments of lines and a variety of shapes are seen floating on the screen while an audible conversation between the three plays, these fragments represent the behavioral patterns of each individual chatbot. While the fragments seem to move in an orderly manner, there are some that freely float on. The patterns that these fragments create are sometimes repetitive, compressed together on one corner of the screen to the other. The way that these fragments move together exhibits the mechanical aspects of the chatbots but as the audio plays, the language of the chatbots are eerily lifelike. This contradiction expresses that while machines are such an integral part of human life, it should be remembered that machines operate on patterns as opposed to the consciousness that run our lives. Artist Lynn Hershman’s piece, Lorna represents the destruction caused by the reliance on machines. An interactive piece that allows viewers to move around a model of a TV room offers a glimpse into Lorna’s life. Next to the cheetah printed chair is a remote that controls the television, navigating through the channels lead to three different outcomes, ‘death, escape, or the destruction of the TV’. Hershman’s decision to create 3 undesirable outcomes portrays the feeling of being bounded to the television, trapped. The television can be seen as symbolic to the age of the machine, taking over the perception of reality by dominating it.
Red
When I think about us, it makes me blue but most of all, red. That’s where we met anyway, in a space full of hidden secrets where 20 year olds go to cause debauchery, “The Red Room”. I looked up to a doe-eyed boy staring at me from across the table, “Holy shit”, I thought, two words I generally repeat over and over again in my head when I get nervous. When you walked over to me, it wasn’t just my abnormally fast-paced heart that made my palms sweat but the blood coursing through my veins that turned my cheeks bright red. That’s the first night we met.
2 months later, you woke me from my bed at the break of dawn when the sun had just reached the horizon, tinting the sky into a light crimson. I hadn’t been photographing much, “let’s go shoot” you said and so we did. I always photographed you or us, there were so many things that I was feeling that could have never been put into words so I had to capture it instead. I fell in love with you very quickly and I think you did too.
Sleepless nights spent drinking red wine, smoking cigarettes and talking about absolutely anything and sometimes nothing at all, I always felt like what we had was something out of a movie, that you’d be my person forever and I’d always feel that happy. Love makes you naïve, makes you see through rose-tinted glasses. I lost count of how many mistakes you had to make for me to finally realize that it was time to let things go.
I remember when we took this photograph, fresh out the bath and lying in bed next to each other at 2am. Red, I thought at the time, for love, for passion, for lust, for joy, for all the rebellious things we’d do together. Who knew that I was actually foreshadowing for the destruction to come. You went on to break my heart, piece it back together and break it again, a toxic cycle that we were stuck in. Crying till my eyes were bloodshot, too exhausted to be awake.
Looking back at this moment now, this red express far too much. It was an intoxicating type of love, maybe that’s why I could never properly express it with words, because it’s not something that can ever be explained. I remember learning about the red thread of fate growing up, a Chinese belief that the Gods have tied your feet with an invisible thread to the person you are destined to be with. Sometimes I think mine are tied to yours but I think the Gods played me or that they didn’t, that maybe you went down a path that no God ever saw coming. Red for rage, mostly at you for the lies you’d tell, for hurting my heart but at myself too, for believing them and for letting myself be deceived. Red for the dichotomy of loving you and hating you at the same time. It’s been a year since our ending and I look at this photograph of us now and vividly remember all of those emotions.
I will forever associate red with you, with your lips stained from Merlot and how perfectly they would fall on mine, with our first meeting, with the crimson sky. And in forever associating red with you, I will never forget the hurt I was put through. Red for love, for lust, for joy, for passion, for pain, for anger, for broken hearts and for the red thread of fate that I have yet to cut.