[Spencer Art Museum Visit]

If I am being perfectly honest, I was exausted when I went to the Spencer. I spent the morning pumping myself with caffein and blasting Kanye West to stay awake. However, three objects stuck out to me during my visit.

The first was the Chinese sculpture of all the broken pots glued together. This technically wasn't apart of the official tour, but this piece made me rethink the definition of collage, expanding it beyond just the basics perhaps.

The second was the image of all the movie screens. The amount of emotion displayed through the repetition of blank space shocked me. I was filled by the overwhelming sense of the passing of time, and that while things are growing, we are leaving behind so much beauty.

The third photo that stuck out to me was of the man in the museum, standing in the crosshairs of cupid's arrow (or rather a statue of cupid). This to me was first of all funny, but secondly showed me about implied line, a theme I would like to apply to my artwork, seeing as my current piece is based on relationship and division.

Also, the fact that the guy in the arctic picture wasn't actually wearing any pants was really funny.

[PHOTOGRAPHY IS EVERYWHERE. HIDE YOUR CHILDREN & FAMILIES.]

Photography, as I said in my past essay, is everywhere. What we need to realize is that it does not just exist, but rather is active. Photography shapes your interest in the world around you. For instance, advertisements are meant to make you want something by showing you why you should want it. Photographs are constantly changing our perception of the world.

There are three main ways in which we interact with photos: we take them, we view them, and we use them. In taking them, we are deeming a moment to be memorable. This changes our understanding of a moment in  time. Whether the moments before were leading up to the taking of the picture (like in food advertising or a family picture), or the photographer simply snapped a picture of an event, the moment was deemed necessary to be remembered.

That moment then is defined by the photo. The reality of that moment is the photograph, captured forever. We view photo's as reality, which is not always the case. Family photos come under my particular scrutiny, showing the "happy family". Are those memories actually happy? There are times we view an image and are not fooled by this perceived reality. For instance, a McDonalds ad of a big, juicy hamburger on the side of a truck. Firstly, we know burgers are never as big as the side of the truck. Secondly, we know a McDonalds burger won't ever look that good. However, we still get hungry sometimes.

The third way we interact with a photo is for use. Whether an advertiser uses the picture of the hamburger to make us hungry, or an old woman uses a picture of her younger self to relive her old days, we use photos to draw up the past or the present and rearrange it to suit us better. We rely on photos to reafirm the truth, remind us of a loved one, restore our faith in humanity, and so on.

[Vivian Maire]

[Sontag's World of Photography]

Photography has been encroaching on our world for the past 200 years, finding it's way into the pockets of American all over, slowly at first, and now at a dizzying rate. It's hard to imagine that when I was first born, cameras took pictures on film, and no one had even imagined putting a camera in a cell phone. By the time I had my first phone, however, it already had a camera put in it, which I pretty much used to try and get selfies with girls I had crushes on. Now, at the age of twenty, I'm using a professional-grade digital DSLR, with more RAM than an 80's computer to take photo's like this:

(Completely shameless plug for the summer project I'm working on)

Photography has taken over. It has saturated every area of our modern world: art, music, surveillance, teaching, training, etc. 

When one steps back and looks at this from a sort of "cosmic view", it becomes rather disturbing. The idea that we take snapshots of time, like this one:

(another shameless plug for my summer project)

and it becomes a sort of reality to us is strange. And when we look at the scope of what is photographed, which at this point (thanks to Google Earth) is everything, photography can suddenly seem like a rather scary subject. 

This seems to the Sontag's tone (besides her pretentious verbage); a wariness of the effect of photography on humanity. But I believe her scope is muddled; she is not clear on her intentions from the beginning, and thus her voice becomes lost in the mix. Is she against photography, like it seems at the beginning of her paragraph? ("Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth." -Sontag, 1). Or does she just wish photography would stay an art. Perhaps I'm just bad at reading (a probability), but it seems Sontag has mixed feelings about the use of photography. 

This is, of course, understandable. Because of the depths to which photography has permeated our world, it is hard to get a conclusive read on it's effects. Photography is used in every field; there are no control groups available. So photography becomes muddled and confusing.

Ultimately, this makes me feel uneasy. What is photography doing to us, as a society, as individuals, as people in relationship, etc. It's difficult to see the effects, because we swim in the water. 

So, in conclusion to this rambling, I guess I'll just quote Phillip Greenspun; "Anyway, People take Pictures."

[A Viewer's Guide to Photography]

I would be a liar if I told you that at the beginning of reading this essay, I felt like Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society, urging the students to rip from their textbooks the analysis section of poetry. But then again that's just me.

The difficulty of art, whether it be photography or painting or sculpture or performance, is that there really is no way to put a worthy number on it. Or perhaps, there are too many ways of seeing it to put a value on it. There are rules in art; guidelines of aesthetics to help us know what is most pleasing to the eye, what draws us most inward. Sometimes, the artist wants to do the opposite of that, their intention to show repugnance and hatred. This is where art becomes difficult to give worth to: in that it has both objective and subjective elements.

Objectively, it is made up of forms. We can objectively describe the medium, shape, color, line, render quality, etc. We can also objectively show objects (or at least their representation). Subjectively, however, art is made up of ideas, feelings, intentions, the artist's perspective, etc.

Things get more difficult when the benefits of art are subjective. Some look at a Mark Rothko painting and can walk away unfazed, even bored. Others are moved to tears, and are filled with great emotion.

This is where learning to analyze art is important. Learning to approach it in such a manner that you reserve all judgement till after you complete the process of examination. Then, and only then can you examine a picture for what it is.

[Masters of Illusion]

One of the aspects of art is the attempt to mirror reality; to take a a flat surface and create the illusion of space. One way to create the illusion of space is through the use of perspective, a method pioneered during the Renaissance. The masters discovered through mathematical formulas and careful measurements, our views of reality could be mimicked and placed upon a three dimensional surface. This allowed the masters to literally paint doorways into another world, opening up a portal to lands of Biblical proportion through the use of simple line a spacing.

Today, however, Illusion is not so easily mastered. With the now everyday use of photography, a realistic snapshot on a two dimensional plane is common to man. And with special effects and digital paintings breaking past any sense of illusion (in animation's treacherous trek across the uncanny valley), perspective is no longer an illusion; it is expected.

Why is this change important? Because the purpose of illusion is to bring about wonder and amazement. Illusion, in the days before digital technology, was magic. It helped humans healthily interact with the mystery of the world around them. It allowed us to be reminded that there are things we cannot understand, and that this should bring us joy rather than despair.

In todays world, where illusion has lost it's mystic powers, we have almost lost our ability to be mystified. In the world where everything is calculated, quantified, and scrutinized, we so easily forget that there is so much we actually don't know. 

Art and design must continually attempt to mystify. We must move to places still a mystery to remind us that to be human means to be curious. We must understand that reality is not as simple as we sometimes thing (look at the internet-is it real?) Today there is more mystery than there ever has been in the world, with technology unlocking the depth of a cell, and the ability of the human to interact in worlds that exist outside of matter, and yet the awareness of mystery is beyond low. Art must continue to mystify, engaging the viewers to help people remember what it means to be a human. 

[Ways of Seeing]

Sight is our most dominant sense. Rather, sight has become, or perhaps been trained to be, the most dominant of our senses. Everything in our culture is based off of seeing unless it is being specifically designed for someone who cannot see. In our world seeing has literally become believing.

And yet sight might be one of the least objective of the senses, the sense that tricks us most. Perhaps this trickery comes about not by sight itself, but rather what we pull out of what was seen, the perception of the seen. What we see is a woman; what we perceive may be a variety of things, such as beauty, cruelty, confusion, or any other number of emotions that arise. With sight being the dominant sense, we attach far more of our own personalities to it than we might touch. (This of course, is generalizing; each sense does have a subjective bend in it due to our experiences, i.e. a lover's touch, the smell of a house, etc. However, these senses are far less likely to vary beyond the exact triggers than sight)

Sight is also easily manipulated by the other senses. Take the example from John Berger; if we view the same painting in two different ways with two different pieces of music in the background, we see that our perception is changed forever. The sound effects how we perceive what we are hearing. Take for instance, someone who once tasted or was sick on a certain food. The mere sight of that food could make them convulse. 

When we take all this into account, our view of design will change greatly. Aesthetics suddenly goes beyond our dominant sense, and must now cater to all five of them. We must consider the touch and sound of an object just as much as the sight, even considering how touch and sound might manipulate what we see. It also becomes clear that the setting that our object will be in will effect a persons understanding of it; taking this into consideration becomes important as well. 

[Collages]

Idea one: Places of Rest

My location for this piece is the inside of an old silo, a place I often go when I'm needing quiet. On the inside of the silo is a dead tree. With this piece I want to focus on a different ideas. One is the importance of closeness in saftey in how the walls of the silo almost wrap you up. However, I also want to show the silo as a symbol in itself for our state when we are in need of rest, often trapped within ourselves, unable to escape towards the sky.

Idea two: Places of worship

Places of worship have always interested me, in that they mean different things to different people. With this piece, I would like to show how perhaps our multiple perspectives on religion might just be what makes it beautiful... if we don't kill each other in the process.

Idea Three: Father/Son

Relationships between father's and son's are tricky at best. In this piece, I'd hope to show some points of connection and at the same time disconnect between my dad and I. How time has made us different, and how we have chosen to try and remain close. 

[The Process Book]

Wow! I haven't been uploading stuff recently. So, here's a post chronicling my past project!

Firstly, we have the three objects:

The bow tie

the pipe

and the pencil

I chose the pipe!

Here are my drawings of ideas

Here are some band-saw box experiments...

And Here's the final thing!

[The Worth of What is Worthless]

Design, in essence, is the act of relieving pain by the producing or modifying objects or systems. Doctors fix the human body. Designers are the doctors of the world around us, making where something is needed, modifying where a joint could move more smoothly. Why do we relieve pain? In the hopes that happiness can fill the void. 

This is where design begins to lose steam. We cannot fill the gap with objects of temporal value. We tried that in the fifties, at the height of consumerist culture. While happiness is a universal desire, it is far more complex than we would admit it to be. We think a certain action or objective will bring about happiness, but this is not always the case. Furthermore, happiness strikes us from the oddest places, from what we expect to produce pain. 

David Pye, in his essay The Nature of Aesthetics and Design says that it is only through the aesthetic nature of an object that we can fill this void in some way. I believe this to be true in some sense; beauty brings a certain wonder out of humans that allows us, in some sense, to transcend our day to day lives. However, there is one question I would like to pose: when we beautify an object for the purpose of bringing happiness, from where, according to the human mind, does the happiness come from? Do we look at the object and say, "This object is beautiful, and because it is beautiful, I will continue to search for the source of beauty and thus in hopes to find purpose for myself," or do we say "This object is beautiful, which makes me happy, and thus I will find more objects to make myself even more happy."? 

In one sense, a person could say that this distinction is inconsequential; in each case a person is made happy, so what does it matter where they see their happiness originating from? This would be true if happiness was static in nature; however, happiness is fleeting. It is not added, but disappears almost as soon as we have found it. Would it not then be better to send people searching for the source of happiness than to have them continually attempting to fill a metaphorical bottomless bucket, all the while consuming more objects?

Maybe this is just far too deep for design thinking, but it seems important to me.