« September 2006 | Main | November 2006 »
October 16, 2006
A Native Community and its Life-Style
After I finished this reading, I looked up Claude Lévi-Strauss on wikipedia. As I suspected, he is an anthropologist, not an artist. To be honest, I could never imagine describing this amerindian tribe’s features and understanding the tribe’s behavior . but, It was very interesting to watch the shape they drew and the way they expressed their angle of observation. It was too bad that I could not feel the vivid color they used and the exotic color sense. Even though I felt like his book focused more on the anthropological aspect rather than artistic view, it was still worth the read.
In my experience, when I have done artistic work, I have always found it difficult to find concept or building idea . Usually I want to use a unique design, color, or story. But my view and creation has been limited. In this kind of situation, I have come to the conclusion that the problem of lack of creative power comes from lack of experience for something valuable or new. Or ignorance of other views of art.
Even though I am not an artist yet, so I might be out of place in saying this, I think artists should be ready to learn and experience things. To learn the point of view or the observation methods of someone from another field like anthropology is one of the best ways to get artistic inspiration. I will get his book and finish it!
Posted by Jung Jung at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)
culture reading
I find the reading to be really interesting, and at times to be dumbfounding. This is by far one of the most eccentric cultures I've read of. That fact that a certain tribe's sole function is to rule and exploit other seems really odd to me, but not far-fetched. Yet I wonder if they have always been control, and if other tribes have tried to overthrow their over lords. Their infancide practice was a real shock to me as well. I think all living beings, and people included, have a natural tendency to want children of their own. That fact that they carry on their lineage through adoption is extremely odd. Besides that, I really enjoyed looking at their paintings. Their patterns reminds me of drawing on chinese porcelain.
Posted by Benjamin Chao at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
Strange Culture
I found the reading about the Mbaya people to be interesting, but I also found it to be a bit difficult to read The author jumped around quite a bit between describing the tribes' behavior and their art, and I thought some of the conclusions drawn were far-fetched. In particular, I was not convinced of the importance of duality to the Mbaya tribe members. I think every culture or activity on earth can be broken down into a duality of one tries hard enough. I would, however, be interested to see some photos of the people with the paintings actually on their faces as it's often hard to convey in writing how impressive decoration can be.
The most interesting behavior was certainly the practice of infanticide and subsequent adoption and raising of captured children to carry on the lineage. It seems so completely unintuitive that it's hard to understand how such a practice could have ever developed. Are the captured children so alike in appearance that there are no noticable racial differences? I would imagine the community would look like a marketplace.
Posted by Bryan Wall at 02:14 PM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2006
Community and Life-Style
Several days ago, I went to “The Metropolitan Museum of Art”. It is an interesting museum tour. I saw a lot of works depends on different period and culture. Especially, “Arts of Africa, Oceania, And the Americas”, there represent a rich diversity of cultural traditions for three continents, and many islands. It’s relating to “A Native Community and its Life-Style”. All native tribes have their own motifs in the shape of spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs. They own their castes or social hierarchy and displayed their rank by body paintings, or tattooed designs on both arms. As years passed, style, technique and inspiration had remained unchanged. They were practicing and empirical skill from generation to generation. Those paintings or tattoos had a much deeper significance influence by castes. For example, the nobles just wore paint only on the forehead, but common people wore paint on the whole face. In civilization, most people don’t wear paint on their face or body. However, the female present their beauty with their make-up and the male also show their power with tattoo on their arm or body. On the whole, we know that different natives have similar characteristic in their art works to present their community and their life-style, even though they locate at different areas, for instance, the north-west coast of Canada and archaic China.
Posted by Ya-Hui Fan at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2006
A Native Community and its Life-Style
Like all native tribes or communities, the Indians has their own pattern of art and this kind of art is deeply influenced by castes or social hierarchy. These styles can be seen on body painting, face painting, sculptures and so on. Most of these styles comes in symmetric or half symmetric style of curves, stripes, circles. They like these abstract figures than those already exists in nature. That was their so-called "civilization"---evolution from a beast to human being.
As a whole, they are much different. Unlike archaic Chinese people, or many other tribes on Africa or South America, they adore nature. So you can see their style of art have many "components" of natural figures, even their gods.
Posted by Chen-Yeou Yu at 06:44 PM | Comments (0)
October 06, 2006
Video Black---The Mortality of the Image
With great advancement in science and technology, people changed their way of capturing flickering moment of image. From primitive polaroid camera to digital camera, form negative to flash memory, we have experienced these great changes. However, we still missed something out.
It is interesting. When we see an old picture. All we can do is to recollect its old memories. Memories or feelings are generated by human beings. These cannot be replaced by fancy digital camera. How to capture a flickering moment of feeling instead of image leaves great space for improvement.
Posted by Chen-Yeou Yu at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)
October 02, 2006
Video Black
The section of reading which I found particularly interesting was the discussion about the "icon". The icon "refers more to a process or a condition than to the physical characteristics of the objects." The icon was created to please God as opposed to pleasing the art world. An icon is identified by its timelessness in that it maintains relevance "to Now".
Posted by Yasmine Syed at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)
Quotes + Poetry
To be honest, I had trouble concentrating on the reading and instead constantly got stuck on the quotes and poems. I think I got the jist of most of the ideas just from lingering on the poetry. One in particular that stuck with me was:
"For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them" - Rainer Marie Rilke
I feel that this describes a really interesting notion that I never really thought about much until I saw it written down on paper. The act of assimilating a thought, idea, concept, or piece of media and absorbing it into yourself. Soon after its been absorbed, it becomes a part of you and the way you act, interact, and simply live your life. It happens every day. We rarely even think about it and I feel Rainer Marie Rilke describes this seemingly mundane process so beautifully.
I know it's really off topic. Sorry. Hah...
Posted by Rory Nugent at 02:56 PM | Comments (0)
video black
The author goes into great detail discussing the value of an image and video. He states that video can not be "processed as whole" because it is a sequence of moving frames. While this is true, I think he is missing the emotional value attached to film. I think all images, whether still or not, have emotiona value attached to them. It doesn't matter if they are religious symbols or not, because we all notice different thing based on previous experiences. I don't think you can value an image simply by looking at what it conveys. You have to examine the entire process of how/where/why it was viewed.
Posted by Benjamin Chao at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)
Video Black comments
The part on the discovery of the Laws of Linear Perspective was illuminating. I would love to study those laws as my marker-on-velum drawings seem very flat. I think it's because I never learned to draw things like boxes or cups in 3-D, so I don't know how to set up vanishing points, sight lines etc. that give a deep sense of depth.
"Duration is the medium that makes thought possible, therefore duration is to consciousness as light is to eye" struck me. Is this so? I need more here...
The still image being the "root of the cinematic process" which is a "mental process" I found very important to reconsider, especially as we are creating still environment scenes that could become animated environments in a movie or game.
if the "whole does not exist" of a video, except in a storage state, then digital files of videos are like camping food waiting for a cup of water to reconsitiute them into food.
This seems to not fit with people's memories of video or film being a flowing additional "edit" to the piece. We do not remember every frame. We all remember different parks of different scenes. The author speaks of "The concreteness of individual experience," but I see no concrete in indivisual's experience. They are all a wet, organic mass of endless shifting, changing, sets of observations that can be changed by time, other people's observations, etc.
The concrete to me is in the original file, reel, or tape.
Posted by Caleb Clark at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)
RE: Video Black- The Mortality of the Image
I'm not sure what to take from the reading. It seemed like a basic summarization of all forms of art from the early middle ages to now. I do think that the comparison of the 3 stages of darkness on video to the three stages of darkness in life is pretty interesting. I certainly have experienced many nights when I'm half-conscious or half-dreaming, and it's hard to tell what is reality and whether I am alive. It happened last night, actually. Usually after events like that I lie in bed and try to stay awake for 20 minutes or so. It never works and 2 hours later I'm back to being half-conscious and very confused.
Memory, history, and collective existence are subjects too grand to be adequately described on paper. Whenever I read essays written on those subjects, they always seem to be scratching the surface of the understanding I have in my head, but without ever adequately conveying that knowledge on paper. I'm not sure if that made any sense.
Posted by Bryan Wall at 10:05 AM | Comments (0)
Image and its value
I re-think the definition of image after reading "The Mortality of the image". We can't just define image as image only but information, spirit and even energy. Our brain and thought are instantly effected by image after we glance it because eyes is closely connect to our brain and vision is most important platform we exchange information.
However, image sometimes seals huge information just with simple drawing. We can exactly understand whole story just take a look on a image for a sec instead reading a long paragraph of article, that’s why image designer become more important recently because the more important you know image, the more value the image has.
I am interesting in the point about black color also. In my point of view, black is the start of color and also end of color. It can represent various meaning like high-tech, stately and solemn way. That why I agree the point of this article.
Posted by Hung Glenn at 03:19 AM | Comments (0)
October 01, 2006
Reflection of "THE LAWS OF SIMPLICITY"
I agree that John Maeda’s thoughts. I am very like to play digital camera to record any interesting things. I am not a professional photographer and just want to record what happened around my life. However, beauty is fleeting. If digital camera has too many buttons on it appearance, maybe I can’t find function what I want to capture those beauty or important moment. Otherwise, I don’t want a “big” digital camera. Therefore, a “small” digital camera impossible has too many buttons. Although I want reduce redundant buttons, I still want many functions to choose what effect I want. So, today many companies or designers will tend to design products have fewer buttons, hide many advance functions under buttons to provide uses to choose what they want, and easy to use it, for example, MP3 Player. It is including functions of clock, radio, record, play, picture, and so on. Therefore, users also can edit their favorite music list, play music with random, repeat, or sequence, or set a period for the function of repeat. Users can choose and setup functions what they need easily.
Posted by Ya-Hui Fan at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)