Line Project Writing
I decided rather than have four separate sketches that are independent of each other, to instead have each drawing represent a different part of the city. When laid out with two on top and two on the bottom, the pieces form a rough map of the city with a circle in the middle connecting the four pieces. The top left represents my observations from the Cooper Union triangle, the top right comes from my observations at Union Square, the bottom left comes from my observations sitting outside my apartment on seventh street and the bottom right sketch comes from my observations at Washington Square Park.
Each line stemming from the quarter circle, or full circle when presented besides each other, represents a person’s age based on appearance out of ten random people. A longer line means an older guessed age.
The lines coming directly from the top down or bottom up represent the amount of people I counted within a two minute period. One line represents one person.
The two shapes connected to each other in each individual drawing represent a random characteristic I tracked out of ten people I saw in that area.
In the top left drawing, each line in the left circle represents someone wearing a jacket and each line in the right circle represents someone without a jacket. In the top right, each line in the top rectangle represents someone wearing jeans while each line in the bottom rectangle represents someone wearing something other than jeans. In the bottom left drawing, each line in the left rectangle represents someone with short hair and the bottom rectangle indicates the amount of people with long hair. Finally, in the bottom right drawing, each line in the top circle represents someone with white shoes, while the bottom represents the amount of people with other colored shoes.
World Wide Web Reading
The world wide web (W3) was developed by physicists and engineers at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, to be a “pool of human knowledge.” W3 is defined by its address system (URL), network protocol (HTTP), and markup language (HTML). HTML is the common basic language of the world wide web. URLs are universal resource identifiers. Each site has its own universal address which is the URL. HTTP is the hypertext transfer protocol. HTTP is the security protocol between clients and servers.
Newspaper Project Writing
Inspired by Sarah Charlesworth on “The Last Newspaper,” I decided that rather than reinterpreting old newspaper front pages or creating brand new ones, to show the conditions of historical events on the front pages of past newspapers. Sarah says that, “when you take away the text you see it’s not about who but what,” and with this in mind I went in a similar direction by covering up parts of the newspaper with red paper to draw attention to the events that took place without distraction by the newspaper outlet or political party affiliated. Each cover is an old newspaper cover from a historical event.The color red was used to represent the tradgedy of the event.
MoMa PS1 New York Art Book Fair
Roma Publications is an independent Dutch art publisher founded by Roger Willems, Mark Manders and Marc Nagtzaam in 1998. At the art book fair they had a table and were signing books. Roger Willems is a graphic designer and the other two are artists. As someone who's done a lot of graphic design and who loves minimalism, I was especially interested in Roger Willems' work. A lot of the work in the books on their table reminded me of the line project and the pattern project we're working on with illustrator. I also found some interesting books on the first floor in completely different spots, that are somewhat related to each other and that I thought were interesting. One was a book showcasing black and white prints of old LSD blotters. I'm always interested in weird and unique ways of documenting history so I really liked this.
Color in Digital Photography
Claire Lehmann’s “Color Goes Electric” looks back at the history of color in digital photography, and how our preferences and memory shaped the standards of digital color. Before color photography became a norm in our daily lives, it was was first used for commercial purposes in advertising, fashion and magazines. Kodak then began producing color films using reference images to generate standards for each color. They found that people tended to have a strong preference for “bright, snappy versions of well-known colors, with saturations far exceeding their actual colorimetric values.” This is due to photogenic color reproduction relying on our memories and not reality. So in actuality, colors that are “synthetic, exaggerated or natural” in color photography are really just reflections of our preferences of color.
The Color Black
I spend a lot of time shooting in low light situations so the color black dominates most of my photos. Black is technically not a color. It’s instead the lack of color, the voidness of light. We see color when photoreceptors in our retinas respond to photons of light, and we see black in the areas of the retina where the photoreceptors are relatively inactive. “Even when we are not seeing, it is by sight that we discriminate darkness from light” - Aristotle.
