Line Drawing Artist Statement
DeCerteau talks about the voyeuristic “pleasure of ‘seeing the whole’” and compares it to the flight of Icarus, an event that can inspire both feelings of freedom and fleeting comparisons to a god. He notes that to be above, to see the varied texture and totality of the city, allows one to “see,” or, more specifically, to escape from the uniform blindness that plagues those walking the urban streets below. However, a city does not exist without its people, who, despite looking down in perpetual blindness, are unable to read the “urban text” in which they write. Later, the author also mentions that if you were to follow people walking on the street and recorded their paths on a map you would eventually get lines that are not only representative of the paths that these people have taken but also erases the map itself, depriving the viewer of the initial base that is key to their understanding of the piece. This is interesting especially because of the idea that by converting data into a medium such as lines essentially erases the intricacies and smaller parts of a data set while also providing the broader context of the information as a whole. This perspective allows one to view the entirety of the details where they were not able to before. This immediately makes me think of representing DNA as a data set in my line drawings, as the nucleotide bases that make up our genetics are small bits that can have huge influences over the whole. Looking at a person, much like looking down on a city from above, allows us to view the culmination of all of these tiny pieces in one whole which simultaneously expresses our genetic details while also keeping the exact specifics, and the smallest pieces of atoms and quarks a secret.
Another subject that was featured in this piece caught my eye, however I will not be incorporating it into my line drawings. Turning the subject away from the “walkers”, DeCerteau explains how the perception of change is nuanced by underlying motives of those who pretend to understand it. Change, which here is exemplified by the disintegration of the idealized city, is often vilified by those whose ambitions would be damaged by the shift. Therefore what may be a necessary and otherwise welcome development is wrongfully pushed back against, and therefore societal progress is slowed and limited.
World Wide Web vs. The Library of Babel
The World-Wide Web discusses the early creation, intention, and function of the internet. Specifically it discusses the basic mechanics of “client programs,” servers, object addresses, hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), and hypertext markup language. The article also notes that one of the things that makes W3 so impressive is the ability to not only access information from a server halfway around the world in a matter of seconds, but also the ability to do so in a uniform, easy-to-use format without ”knowledge of many different access ‘recipes’ for different systems.” This allows for both easy navigation of available material as well as, due to the invention of HTML (a relatively simple system for inputting information into a webpage), the possibility of easily creating and uploading new information to the web. Furthermore, with the introduction of HTML, servers and machines are able to generate code as well as interpret code written by humans. This therefore constitutes a part of the web’s goal of creating a boundless, infinitely “extendable system for introducing new formats for multimedia data.” These principles are akin to those explored in Borges’ The Library of Babel, an infinite universe of knowledge with books containing every possible combination of “twenty-five natural symbols” which can be compared to HTML. The W3 servers are like Borges’ librarians; those beings that keep and retrieve the books contained within their hexagon. The similarities continue, as both the internet and the library exist in a timeless state; one can go through time by searching an old webpage or walking up or down one of the Library’s many staircases. Furthermore, because each object has an unique address on the W3, then making a “copy” of a document would still be producing another unique page through its own specific metadata and address. This is the same for each book in Borges’ Library; each book is unique, even if the only difference between stories is a single comma or period mark. Both the World-Wide Web and the Library have the potential of possessing infinite knowledge and, within that collection, containing the secrets to the universe, human life, and other great mysteries. However, because both are so cavernously large, it is nearly impossible to find exactly these answers and if you were to find that piece of data or volume you were looking for it is almost nearly entirely by chance. But, if the Library’s travellers and the internet users are in search of a complete knowledge, and the theory of God is essentially an entity which has such wisdom, then God is the Library, and by association, God is, in a way, the World-Wide Web.
All the News That's Fit to Print
This project takes inspiration from both the childish nostalgia and the adult maturity mythos that surrounds newspapers. Growing up, the content of newspapers was reserved for my parents and other older people, reading the news with your morning coffee was the epitome of “adult,” an ideal glorified in my mundane fantasies. However, newspapers also are objects deeply rooted in nostalgia, objects of the past that entertain a variety of contradictions. In the New Museum’s “The Last Newspaper” three of the featured artists, Aleksandra Mir, Nate Lowman, and Sarah Charlesworth, are interviewed by co-curator Benjamin Godsill. Lowman addresses the strange “contradiction of morals” presented in mainstream newspapers when ads for luxury jewelry are juxtaposed with stories detailing terrible tragedies. However, newspapers were and continue to occupy a space in our culture’s shared psyche. According to Lowman, the daily news used to be “one of the few quiet shared things” serving as a common topic through which people could come together and have discussions. It is also common for people to think of childhood when imagining the newspaper, there was always the daily crossword puzzle, comic strip, and the occasional feel-good fluff stories. The pages are made of the same paper as the coloring books that my grandparents would keep for us kids during holidays, and we would often color on the newspapers themselves. For many other people, such as Aleksandra Mir, delivering the news was also their first job, conjuring up memories of biking between houses in their youth. During the interview, Mir was all about capturing the nostalgia hidden in newspapers and tabloids, loving to see the materials fade and the information becoming instantly outdated. Newsprint is often discarded immediately after use, and those pieces that escape the trash are used in paper mache, table coverings when painting, or scrap paper. In this way, print is still not completely dead, as Lowman may suggest, it has always had some form of an afterlife that keeps newspapers on our mind.
I tried to embody this juxtaposition of comics, games, ads, tragedies, and the political by choosing intense stories that would generally be deemed “too mature” for a younger audience and reacting to them using red colored pencil drawings that resemble my younger self’s art style. I also wanted to draw attention to the fact that negative and graphic news stories are widely available to be consumed by young children, and wanted to explore the effects that this exposure might have on a young person’s perception of the world. Then, in another newspaper that features positive or neutral stories, I have repeated the process of drawing my reactions using a blue colored pencil. Then, I cut these newspapers into the shape of a child’s teddy bear and then combined the two sides and sewed them together using string. Lastly, I stuffed the newspaper sleeve to make it resemble a child’s plushie even more.
Shapes and Patterns
In order to create these patterns, I used shapes taken from my own images. Mainly, I gravitated towards unusual silhouettes generated from items as varied as discarded gloves, a sculpture at the Whitney, a Cherokee Booger Dance mask, part of a toilet, two cats sitting on a ledge, an earring, a bundle of oranges precariously hanging on a grocery store sink, and even more discarded gloves. The shapes' transformation into a pattern is a sort of trash-to-treasure moment for me and I wanted to make three patterns that were distinctly different in color, mood, and construction. Pattern 1 is an origional shape made from one of the glove shapes, pattern 2 was constructed from a combination of the oranges and two of the gloves, while the third is made from a butter-fly-like shape which was manipulated from a palm leaf extending from the Whitney sculpture.
Color Essays
In Claire Lehmann’s visual and written essay “Color Goes Electric” she discusses the efforts of film and digital photography providers to produce products that accurately portray the colors of the world. When studying what kinds of colors were most liked among a variety of test subjects, scientists found that “the most consistent finding among all subjects was a strong preference for bright, snappy versions of well-known colors, with saturations far exceeding their actual colorimetric values.” This is because, Lehmann reveals, our memory recall records scenes that have much more saturated colors than they actually appear in life. It is all about perception. She brings up an interesting point, however, by bringing up that there is no way of measuring the consistencies between each of our color perceptions. How can we know that my perception of “red” is the same as another persons? Regardless of these color perceptions, one thing that is generally uniform is our ability to distinguish a “wrong” color from a “right” color, especially where skin tones are concerned, “slight hue shifts toward green or purple in the familiar color of flesh are immediately detectable to the human eye.” So, color scientists were tasked with creating images that showed color as saturated as possible while maintaining their believability. They tried to base their colors off of how we imagined the colors should look, the idea of them, as opposed to how they would actually look. But what appears to be the “right” shade of any color heavily depends on a standardization set by innate biology coupled with a consumer preference shaped by saturation desensitization and social conditioning through industry pressure. Furthermore, the photos used to test these tastes were constructions heavily influenced by “societal codes” and showed subjects such as young women in heavy makeup and domestic kitchen situations. The author writes that “in their aesthetic banality, reference images perhaps point to the triteness of what we want to reproduce, both in industry [...] and as consumers [...].”In addition to laying out the “how” of producing the trademark colors of Kodak and Fujifilm color films among others, Lehmann also discusses the effects of these highly saturated colors on “fine art” photography. Namely, these color profiles had an initially negative reception from critics that associated such colors with the lower artforms of print magazines, advertisements, and amateur snapshots. “Critics lamented either a realism that seemed too automatic or a chromatic intensity that seemed too coarse,” writes Lehmann, “On the one hand, it was too real; on the other, too fake.” In a world so saturated, both literally and figuratively, with color in advertising that we have begun to associate the bright colors of film photography with the bright colors that we also see in cheap clothes, fast food ads, and all other things “fast, cheap and bright.”
An image from my own archive that is heavily reliant on color to distinguish itself is one photo taken from the top of a hill overlooking Hawaii's Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve. The composition shows a large blue expanse, dotted with people swimming around the pods of tan coral deposits. The intensity of the photo’s blues are rich and the hues are mainly cyan and bice. From Cabinet Magazine’s color essays these two colors are detailed in very starkly opposite ways. The writer of the “Cyan” piece approaches the color from a scientific, research-oriented perspective, relaying all of cyan’s associations and off-shoots. Using it as a chemical term, the writer constructs their essay using cyan’s technical terminology as inspiration. They describe the color as one that “emanates from a calm sea not far offshore on a clear day as the blue of the sky is reflected in salt water awash over yellow sand” while also being the root of dangerous things such as Cyanide, cyanogen, hydrogen cyanide gas, and the Cyanea genus of jellyfishes that produce a strong sting. Other animals that remind me of cyan are bioluminescent bacteria that glow blue in the dark of select bodies of water, as well as the brilliant blue wings of the blue morpho butterfly. The author also includes the wikipedia definition of the color, “Cyan is a pure spectral color, but the same hue can also be generated by mixing equal amounts of green and blue light. As such, cyan is the complement of red: cyan pigments absorb red light.” In these relationships between red and cyan, and water and poison, the author seems to suggest that cyan is a color of strong contrasts, of life and death. Some of the cyanide compounds can be counteracted by a red compound. “A blue poison can be counteracted with a red compound which, however, can itself be a poison, which can then be counteracted with a blue compound,” they write, again drawing attention to cyan’s contradictions.
Besides cyan, the waters of Hanauma Bay also take on a gradient of bice. Cabinet’s bice essay, strikes a completely different note than the cyan piece. Despite both being relatively similar colors, both shades of blue that take greenish hues, the authors seem to think that they create an experience that is entirely opposite. This author seemed to identify bice with solitude and nostalgia, painting a whimsical tale of a childhood her picking her nose and wiping the “small treasures” onto her family’s copper lamp, causing bice discoloration. She talks of impulse, and childhood secrets, and mysteries, kids’ unusual perception, and their attachment to inanimate objects.
Looking at this photo I find all three of these sources can be referenced in its description. Mainly, this photo is very typical for the colors cyan and bice. It is of a body of water, more specifically a tropical cove taken during a family vacation. It has an air of nostalgia and an almost unrealistic wonder. I also edited the colors in the photograph, trying to match it to my own perception of how bright the blue water had looked to me on that day. I had to increase the saturation quite drastically, trying to make the digital color the same as my exaggerated memory of the Hawaiian blues.
To me, these blues are more than the calming waves, lapping brilliantly against the tan shores. Waters shifting between brown and mauve corals that house fish and crabs among other life. This blue is the color of my father's eyes, a blanket that my best friend gave me, and progresso soup cans. It is the paint that a five-year-old me splattered on my bird house and my dog's first collar. It is serenity, and calm, and inspiration, and vacation. It is capitalism, and brand-identities, and my old high school's Smart Cookie awards. It is nostalgia. It is blue, but it is also cyan, turquoise, bice, and aquamarine. It is a plastic cup, and wrapping paper, and a lawn chair, or a cat food bag. It is the color of life, intelligence, Erudite, and Ravenclaw, and Democracy. It is the color of death, and sorrow, and loss, and solitary means. But most importantly, it is going down the Shore. Everything about going down the shore used to be blue. My towel was blue tie-dye, my hair tie was blue. My eyes arent blue, but my flip-flops were, and my shorts. The sky was blue of course, but also the signs, and the lifeguard stands, and the recycling bins, and the big, fast roller coaster. I liked blue water-ice, and hermit crab shells, and sand shovels.