Line
Our ancestors created shapes and lines based on their observation of the world around them, and they further constructed and designed the written languages into “characters”, using them to pass on information that the later generations could continue adding on. Therefore, it is fair to say that every single character reflects the development of generations’ creativities, and it is also a new platform for the future generation to cultivate more exciting unknown.
Chinese characters, for example, contain the ancestries’ wisdom of mastering in abstraction and concretization. Each character is the result of observation, “inversions, displacements, accumulations” over the thousands of years(94). The operation done to each letter has been repeatedly revised and transformed to today’s version that is seen as “the most perfect, but yet far from perfect”. As the people’s general understanding and common sense shift and change from time to time, each development is unique on its own, playing as an agent that connect the discreteness that occurred between generations. Therefore, the characters, act as signifiers, connections(98), reference to history, and many more. They are the reflection of past, platform for creativity of the present, and the potentiality and representation of the future.
This project of mine is to demonstrate all the existed results of the chinese characters’ development, comparing and presenting the intriguing thinking style that was put into making those characters. In my project, I will put different versions of one character together, showing them as a whole to illustrate the evolution of that single character. The style of the drawing is based on the history of each character, and it is also presented in a chronological order.
W3 Response
W3 was originally inspired by the positive personal hypertext system used for keeping track of personal information. With the idea that every piece of information can be retrieved and traced, “links” are created as the agent to find out any displayed knowledge, even the search result lists.
It is hard to solely define W3 with only one concept. It seems to stand for a “space” for information to be stored and found, but at the same time, it consists so many details to assist us to understand how W3 works.
First and the foremost, the address system, Universal Resource Identifiers(URI)can encode the members of the universal set of the network addresses. It is almost like a framework, a world, a space, or an area of creation that one can form almost any object as the set of protocol parameters.
HTTP is also irreplaceable in W3. It is an internet protocol that can transfer files; however, the amazing thing is that it is stateless. What does this mean? It means that it can travel and acquire information from either the same servers, or a different server. It also returns results based on the URI but irrelevant of any previous operation performed by the client, which is the opposite from the email operation--it does not require mutual agreement from the both sides.
Last, but not the least, HTML a make up language which every w3 client is required to understand. This common and basic language of interchange for hypertext does not have to be only used in http, as it can be used in everywhere that requires hypertext. For example, we can use it ranging from the simple structure elements, such as headings, bulleted lists, etc., or the more sophisticated online documentation, such as the templates for the entry of data by users, tables and mathematical formulae.
These three concepts of W3 might sound hard to understand, but Jorge Luis Borges, gives us a really useful simile to help us to be more familiar with these concepts through his article The Library of Babel. In his article, he sees the symbols in the library as html, the shelves as uri, and the book as http, and he uses these interesting comparison to demonstrate the relationship between each concept in W3. one interesting example that he uses to demonstrate the concept of locating information is through locating books. For example, to locate book A, consult first a book B which indicates A’s position, to locate book B, consult first a Book c, and so on to infinity. Borges also strongly emphasizes the vastness of the “library”, and how it is unlimited no matter what happens inside of the “library” or the people who use them. Even when everything vanishes, the library will remain.
Newspaper Project & News Audio
This project is created to demonstrated the features of modern newspaper. Pretend that there is someone who is reading the newspaper in the 21 century, his/her style of flipping the actual paper print would be turned into swiping the phone to acquire information. This is one of the most significant changes happened, but it is not the only one.
Nowadays’ newspaper has a trend or a structure that every single print follows. It is fair to say that there is always a male figure presented as the main figure of the print, and there is always a fewer female presentation throughout. In addition to this, there are always random luxury advertisement placed right after some serious world news, creating a great deal of disparity.
This idea of looking at a newspaper's structure is inspired typically by Sarah Charlesworth's words regarding the issues about representation, which she believes that “the use of photography and newspaper is closely related to shape our perception and even history.” Charlesworth further explained that how a newspaper could shape our perception by using a specific structure where “president, pope, and some male figures make statements.”I have found this exceptionally true in worldwide newspaper. For example, in Chinese newspaper, there is always the leaders give out the speeches concerned with their prospect with the country’s future, but sadly enough is that those people are all male. It is true that the structure that Charlesworth mentioned was true: “A structure is always there: a male figure dominant.”
After looking at the actual structure of the newspaper, we will be looking at the actual newspaper( the online or the print), and we will notice that our perception of each news is also shaped by the editors’ instigating languages and photos. Both aspects are not taking the objective point of view, but some obvious biased comments and storytelling method. Nate Lowman made a comment on this method,saying that because of those choices of words and sentences, "the newspaper makes your view smaller." as we are all subjected to only read the subjective point of view.
Museum Response
The exhibition Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 shows two strands of artwork that are created with sets of instructions, rules and code, demonstrating the their interesting existence rendered by the principle of programming. One strand presents the idea of programming with the focus of conceptual art practice, and the artwork that could represent this concept are Untitled, 1965 by Donald Judd and Five Towers, 1986 by Sol Lewitt.
Untitled, 1965 by Donald Judd is another conceptual artwork that demonstrates the principle of programming. This artwork contains a sequence of ten small but different rectangular solids placed under a larger rectangle form, and each small rectangle’s length is corresponding to the interval of the boxes on the right hand side. Looking more closely, the audience would notice the shadow underneath each small rectangle is unique and unrepeatable for they are the only “output” of the “input”, which are those ten rectangles. This matching effect of the input and output presents the core feature of programming, which, in this case, is about using the same finite rules and code to produce and create infinite possibilities.
Five Towers is a conceptual artwork that is entirely designed and completed with the open structure of a solid cube piled up together. According to Lewitt, this artwork has the intention to show the basic structure, or “skeleton”, when there is no decorative “skin” to go on top. This idea of only displaying the underlying part of the object draws the audience eyes to very basic and fundamental rules of constructing a figure as now we see more patterns and even notice the rules of the object when there is no decoration to distract our attention. In addition to this, although this artwork is constructed under the same rule of using the open cube, it shows multiple aspects of itself when the audience try to look from different perspectives. It is amazing to see an finite object created infinite ways of looking and possibilities.
The other strand of artwork is also using the principle of rules and instruction to construct, and the product of it is usually manipulated images or TV program. Here, Structure #003 B by Casey Reas shows how drawing can be executed through programming, turning into software art. In this artwork, numerous moving circles with different sizes and directions are displayed on the same dimension. They intersect, overlap, constantly changing randomly and unexpectedly. Those moving circles might end up transforming in similar paths, but no matter how similar they are and the paths they take, they never repeat one another nor themselves. This is another example of how finite number of figures can create infinite number of possibilities.
Color Reading
Color Goes Electric presents an interesting debate about color photography: color photography can be too true or too fake. People who argue that its quality of being “too true” strongly limits the creativity of photography because the camera here is just “automatically recording the ‘nature colors’”, according to German art historian Willi Wolfradt. On the other hand, many argue that opposite about color photography as the “true automatic recording”, which is that color photography sometimes can be too fake. What is the meaning behind it? In fact, many people suggest that people render colors in color photography too personally that the colors will change into what they preference. In other words, “color photography had an unfortunate inclination ‘to alter rather than duplicate the worlds’ colors’”. This can be resulted from several possibilities, and one of them is the subjective human memory. For example, when we think that we are truthly documenting a blue sky and green grasses, the camera record our memories, which is subjective and will result in subtle alterations when we render the color pictures. In addition to this, colors vary from one another. For example, the “red” in another person’s perspective might be utterly different from my view of “red”, and there is no way for use to unify what we say in term of what we think. Therefore, it is rather important to have a “standard observer”, or an idealized viewer to help us measure the “perception of color” mathematically.
With this interesting background information in mind, I have chosen my image “The Eye” as an example to illustrate its color aspect. I personally think that this image is visually appealing due to its interesting color combination of abalone(a type of white) and cyan. While the background of abalone gives people a warm and soothing feeling, the color cyran is delicately spread out on top of it. As cyan is the color that is generally used to represent the clean blue sky and the calm sea, it undoubtedly add some soothing feeling to the overall image. In addition to this, the sense of relaxation is also directly shown through the dark-skin man who is drinking in the background. His relatively relaxing action corresponds to the soothing color combination in the foreground, which makes up the calming and easing theme of this image.
