I chose cinema4D as my tool to continue exploring 2d and 3d. For the first week’s iteration, I experimented with various ways of creating typeface in the three-dimensional world, both in Chinese and English.
2D effectusing the basic shapes to creatpixel in 3Dtexture experimentusing letters to create shapes
As I changed the components and materials of the typeface, the question arose as: What does it mean when a text exists in a three-dimensional world? While thinking about this, I realised that everything around me can become a three-dimensional typeface because the real world is a three-dimensional world. So my answer for this question is: The x and y axes formed the two-dimensional world and the three-dimensional world added the z axis to the two-dimensional typeface, it means that the typeface became an “object” in the three-dimensional world.
In project of altering letters, Ryo Shimizu also explores the relationship between text and space. When texts are dismantled into completely new symbols, space creates an imagery with texts, i.e. the senses become more perceptually enriched and the focus is no longer on the textual information obtained directly from the words. In McLuhan’s terms, these symbolised words become a new medium and the message it carries changes. This led me to think about the transformation between text-object-text. When words become objects, this means that texts can carry things like objects, for example a glass of water can be placed on a text. So what if the glass of water was turned into words? Would it become an overlap of words or an overlap of objects? Or perhaps an overlap of objects and texts? What kind of image is created when the relationship between objects, such as carrying, containing, juxtaposing, is represented in type?
“And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances, the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something” —Immanuel Kant
With these 3d texts, I have composed Kant’s description of the thing in itself. Kant divides the world into appearances and the thing in itself; our perceptions exist only in appearances, the thing in itself is unknowable. I assume texts as the embodiment of appearances, and as the concept of texts and objects continue to merge, breaking down the perception of texts. It’s an exploration of the thing in itself.
As this is the last project, I really want to challenge myself by choosing an unfamiliar topic and trying different methods. The text that I’m going to translate is a sci-fi from Arthur.C.Clarke, who is one of my favorite writers. In this novel, he is talking about his Christian belief. While in the country where I was born-China-most people do not have a religious belief and we believe in science. In this context, it’s really hard for me to understand the meaning of religious words and what author is going to express.
It’s not about language, but more about culture behind. So I came up with the question-how people without any religious background can understand these religious words?
sentences with religious words
Experiment 1-time&space
I made a coordinate system to rearrange all the religious words.
Experiment 2-intonation
By applying the four tone in Chinese to English text and Chinese text, I made music to find the flow of these two texts-as another try of translation.
Experiment 3-text
I put these words into google and Baidu, the main search engine used in China, to see what kind of result I can get. I believe search engines can be a way to show the difference and similarity of western/eastern thought.
by translating them into emoji-a language without barrier, I’m looking for a method to represent the original text
I chose the third experiment as a way to deep in, and I tried to analysis the layout or the results on the search engine.
As we can see here, the price takes a large part, so I decided to find more connections between price and religion.
– Insufficient research on the relationship between money and currency
– No change in content obtained by changing the form
– Lack of logic
3. To develop further
– Finding good entry points about religion
– More research on the relationship between money and currency and their meaning
For this two-week project, I chose an overly large topic which contains a lot to explore. For example, interpreting time and space from the sci-fi text, or exploring the differences between East and West from a religious perspective. As I picked the relationship between religion and currency to explore, I was suggested to go into more detail about the background of the religion as told by the author, as well as author’s attitude towards it, which would give me more relevance in my study of the religion.
Religion and currency are similar from a developmental point of view, for example they both move from the abstract to the tangible, and this can be a source of inspiration for linking the two. When it comes to the meaning of currency in religious area, money sometimes represents the forgiveness and the hope for wishes to come true.
On the other hand, it extends from the idea of religion and money to think about the commodification of religion and the process of materialization by people of such sacred things as technology develops.
I experimented with different mediums to express religious vocabulary in this project, and although the result achieved can only be called a very superficial translation between religion and money, with many directions to be explored, it has given me a more mature reflection on how to choose the theme of the project within the given time frame. When confronted with a topic that has a wealth of information, it is important to try to take a small perspective and to detail the object of research so that the project can go smoothly and in depth rather than just scratching the surface of the topic.
Re-present In Defense of the Poor Image with the structure of Exercises in Style
In Exercises in Style, the author keeps telling the same thing repeatedly, the only difference being the style of the story. In this case, to “re-present” In Defense of the Poor Image, in which Hito Steyerl mainly talks about the disappearance and resurrection of the poor image, I decided to repeat the process of the poor image with three factors – technology, economy, and political system. From a translation point of view, it is not only the various ideas in the text that are rearranged but also the information they contain about time, place, and culture. If I use this prompt to reflect on my project, what I have done so far is just to translate the text into another medium through some very random elements, and in the process of translation, a lot of the hidden information behind the text is lost, and such a translation is no different from putting the text in translation software. Changing mediums is a reasonable way to translate, but an inappropriate medium only translates a one-sided message.
Technology
The hierarchy of images is distinguished by sharpness and resolution, which means that images in cinemas are images in flagship stores, while the images circulating on DVDs, broadcast television or online are poor images. During the period when poor images were developing underground, they were copied via VHS and circulated secretly in the form of tapes. However, with the advent of stream video online, the poor images that once disappeared have reappeared. People have access to download, re-edit and upload them, and the results circulate on the P2P platform.
Economy
The focus becomes a new economic element. As high-resolution images look more brilliant and impressive, consumers insist on 35mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. Moreover, because of neoliberal policies which include the concept of culture as a commodity, experimental and essayistic films have no place to live. The cost of them being seen in cinemas is very high and therefore poor images lose visibility and are denied the right to be distributed in the public sphere.
However, as more and more audiences become producers by editing and posting poor images again, the value of the image is not limited to the material dimension, an immaterial state that is compatible with the semioticization of capitalism and, this also adapts the poor image to the conceptual turn of capitalism.
Political system
One of the reasons for the marginalization of the poor image is its mismatch with social values. And this condition relates to post-socialist and postcolonial restricting of nation-states, this means that the original archives lose the support of the national cultural framework. And in certain countries, monopolies of audiovisual are established, those experimental images have to survive underground, spread among specific organizations or individuals.
Nonetheless, because the production of culture is seen as a national task, this allows the poor image to spread in the void, as it is extremely difficult to go about maintaining the distribution infrastructure.
Bibliography
Queneau, R. (1998) Exercises in Style. Richmond: John Calder. Extract pp.17-26.
Steyerl, H. (2012) ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, in The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 31-45.
– Trying to deconstruct these models on both skeletal and skin levels, but only completed the first stage
3.To develop further
– Deeper development of the project from a coding perspective, more technological
– Bring in a different or opposite theory to Darwin and compare
– Replacing the skin of a model, e.g., putting the texture of a pear on a wine bottle
– To be more digital, change the medium as what I did in the first project
During this project, I gained a deeper understanding of catalogue, or rather, began to think about various things that I had taken for granted. While working on the project, I was more daring in combining two seemingly unrelated things and got unexpected results. There is clearly more there for me to explore, such as the combination of materials in a pictorial way. These experimental methods, which I had thought could only be done on a physical level, have opened my understanding of images and broadened my mind. Moreover, I have learnt to reflect on and question my choices along the way, for example by looking at Darwin’s theory in a more dialectical way, which makes my projects more informative and meaningful.
Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Topic
In the preface, Michel Foucault questions and analyses the rules of classification inherent in human society from a linguistic perspective through the classification of the animals of Borges. At the same time, the author explores the position of objects classified by humans in the space created by language, as well as the use of episteme to delineate the different eras and explain the relationship between “words and things” implied by the different knowledge types.
Argument
Michel Foucault begins by introducing the way in which animals are classified in Borges’ fictional Chinese encyclopedia. Although this is a haphazard classification that seems to transcend the boundaries of the mind, it is in fact a careful distinction between the real and the imagined. Moreover, the sense of confusion brought about by this categorization is not brought about by the order of things.
Foucault introduced the idea of a common locus created by language, where the animals listed are made up of alphabetical order of A to M. This linguistic non-place is called by Foucault heterotopias. In contrast to the warmth of utopia, there is no complete grammar in heterotopia, only broken language, and in this way, Foucault questions the rationality of the rules of language and the human habit of distinguishing between similarities and differences. At the same time, Foucault likens the discomfort one feels at seeing Borges’ categories to atopia and aphasia, to displacement, the loss of the commonality of place and name for things.
Layout
The preface devotes an entire sequential narrative to the introduction of Borges’ classification of animals, which is interpreted, questioned, and agreed upon in order to draw out the language and order inherent in human society, and in doing so to delve into archaeological ways of classification.
Meaning
The point of this preface is to break down the old perceptions that people are used to, to remove humans from the subject of the world by deconstructing language and order, and to prompt people to think about other ways of arranging the world. The relationship between language and things that Foucault refers to is enough to make people start reflecting on the most basic, underlying logic of everyday life, how we are to perceive the world when the language that people are used to is broken and disintegrated. When applying this thinking to the catalog that exists on a 3d model website, I began to think about what makes up the grid that it presents in this catalog, so I tried to analyze the commonalities of these 3d models under the category of food and drinks in terms of brands, colors, materials, placement relationships, and quantities. But as Foucault questioned about classification, things can be placed in different divisions at the same time, and this made me start to rethink the categories I had listed, including their relationship and the context.
Bibliorgaphy
Foucault, M. (1966). ‘Preface’, in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, pp. xvi-xxvi.
For the first week, I classified the category by analyzing the similarities and differences of these 3d models in different ways.
After discussing in my group, I decided to choose the topic of virtual and reality.
-Find the purpose of this website: why people buy theses fake models?
-Zoom in details of the texture, to compare or to generate.
-Add some true profiles, and make a true or fake catalogue
Week 2
But when I saw the supermarket flyer, I realized the picture on it wasn’t as real as I thought it would be.
the first law of Darwin‘s theoryBy putting each image on a website that could derive similar values, I obtained a sequence similar to the constant evolution of the images
References for writing
Foucault, Michel. “Preface.” In Order of Things, An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books, 1994.
Page 5
“No gaze is stable, or rather, in the neutral furrow of the gaze piercing at a right angle through the canvas, subject and object, the spectator and the model reverse their roles to infinity.”
“Seen or seeing? The painter is observing a place which, from moment to moment, never ceases to change its content, its form, its face, its identity.”
Page 9
“The mirror provides a metathesis of visibility that affects both the space represented in the picture and its nature as representation; it allows us to see, in the centre if the canvas, what in the painting is of necessity doubly invisible.”
“The image should stand out of the frame.”
Page xvii
“We are all familiar with the disconcerting effect of the proximity of extremes, or, quite simply, with the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other; the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together has a power of enchantment all its own.”
Page xviii
“The central category of animals “included in the present classification”, with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of contained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all: if all the animals divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of this list, then aren’t all the other divisions to be found in that one division too? ”
Page xix
“Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.”
Page xx
“So the sick mind continues to infinity, creating groups then dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety.”
Page xxi
“On what “table”, according to what grid of identities, similitudes, analogies, have we become accustomed to sort out so many different and similar things? What is this coherence — which, as is immediately apparent, is neither determined by an a priori and necessary concatenation, nor imposed on us by immediately perceptible contents?”
“Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they confront one another, and also that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.”
The library of bible
Page 114
“The will acknowledge that investors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but contend that that adoption was fortuitous, coincidental, and that books in themselves have no meaning.”
“The philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet.”
Page 118
“While a library-the thing-is a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the six words that define it themselves have other definitions.”
“The library is unlimited but periodical. If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would fins after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder-which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope ”
Library as Infrastructure 2014
“At every stage, the contexts — spatial, political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so they are continuously reinventing themselves and the means by which they provide those vital information services.”
Shannon Matter, ‘Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban
Margins’, Places Journal, 2012
“To these students, a library is simply an interface. Why not a doghouse full of books, too? We need to seriously consider how these little libraries might constructively partner with the big, bulky, bureaucratic institutions. And academic and public librarians need to consider that there are things they might learn from their pop-up counterparts.”
One was what could be called a “cosmography,” a formal, symbolic representation of the three worlds of traditional buddhist cosmology. The cosmography was not organized horizontally, like our own maps; rather a series of supraterrestrial heavens and sub terrestrial hells wedged on the visible world along a single vertical axis.
At the very beginning, the first difficulty I faced was how to move from the subjective to the objective. I tried to find objects that could represent the intricate relationships between neighbors from what I could gather in the corridor. But instead of looking at objects directly related to human activity, I looked at natural objects for metaphorical imagery. Obviously, this is a highly subjective approach, and everyone has a different interpretation of the images I arrive at. I then abandoned this way and sought a more direct method of expression. Confused and overwhelmed, I had no choice but to keep recording what I saw, and to record it stealthily with a video camera, trying to get something out of the video, but ultimately coming up empty-handed. I was stuck at this stage for a long time until I read The medium is the message by McLuhan, which gave me a lot of inspiration, why not try to switch mediums? I was skeptical throughout the process, not sure if this was the ‘right’ way to go. Fortunately, I finally made the unexpected discovery of converting video to audio and then to text. In addition to this, during discussions with my tutorial group, the relationship between machines and humans and various anthropological perspectives were mentioned, giving me more insight.
I found that my project had actually deviated from the public-private theme I had started with, and that it had become more about technology and humans. This all happened naturally and I began to reflect on whether it was right to look for or give a meaning to the project before it started. The public and private issues I raised were based on my imagination, or what I thought was common sense, in other words, I thought there should be public and private issues in such a place. The topic may indeed be able to unfold, but should it have been raised at the very beginning? Before starting my research, I should have held more of an unknown about future developments rather than predetermining a conclusion.
Apart from my own project, I also learned a lot from other people’s presentations. My classmates used a lot of graphic methods to explore, such as color and abstract lines, which showed me that there is still a lot of room for development and experimentation in the investigation phase of my own project. Secondly, every step of progress in a project can be progressed by learning from the work of artists or writers about the methodologies they use, especially when there is no progress, and more reading can greatly expand the mind.
Where are the boundaries of sounds? Especially in a collective living environment, sounds come through walls and drown people out from all sides. While the body is at home, the ear is forced to be the receiver of all sounds and the views and the emotions they convey from public places. The ear has no particular “point of view”. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, p.111)
The notion of “the medium is the message” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967) made me think about what is the medium and what is the message. Sound is the message when the recorder is the medium, and vocabulary and intonation are the messages when sound is the medium. Therefore, I tried to switch mediums and wondered what happens to the message itself when the bearer of the message changes from sound to text. Referring to the relationship between sound and text, McLuhan (1964) argues that the advent of the written word created privacy and that when only sound existed, everything was public. In other words, the change in medium leads to a change in the properties of the message. Beyond this, it is interesting to note that when I introduce different mediums – machines and humans – as the medium between message and text, the results are very different. Due to language and clarity issues, the machine was unable to translate accurate text and complete sentences, and there was a lot of repetition of meaningless letters and words. The machine is more concerned with the words it hears, whereas when the medium of translation is a human being, the focus becomes the environment beyond the words, and the message becomes a variety of physical objects in public and private spaces.
‘Death of the Author’ Image, Music, Text
Form
When the not-so-advanced, or rather basic, formatting machine started converting the audio, which is full of noise, I unexpectedly got letters that did not make sense, phrases that did not follow each other, and large blank spaces. While the machine was running to translate the audio, I noted down what I was listening to in parallel. The different conclusions reached by the objective machine and the subjective me about the same audio are symbolic of the fusion and conflict between the mechanical and the human in “a multi-dimensional space” created by words (Barthes, 1967, p.146). In this space, broken letters or words are synthesized into new narrative stories. When talking about the responsibility for a narrative, Roland Barthes (1967, p.143) proposes that “it is language which speaks, not author”. In the stories relayed by the different inhabitants, the characters and plots of the initial stories fade away and the text becomes fragmented again, barely held together by the connections created by the text itself. In this multi-dimensional space, it does not matter who made the story or who relayed it, the text is naturally reorganized and recreated.
Bibliography
Barthes, R. (1967) ‘Death of the author’ Image, Music, Text. London: Fontana Press.
McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. (1967) The medium is the massage. Berkeley: Gingko Press.
