Line Project Artist Statement
In my drawings, I attempted to map out and interpret protest songs of the past eighty years. For each song, I listened through the recording, and drew a series of lines of different colors, directions, or weights, according to the different themes mentioned at each point of the song, as well as including linear indications of things like swearing or use of the second person. In Michel De Certeau’s “The Practice of Everyday Life: Walking in the City”, he writes of being at the top of the World Trade Center. He ponders that one’s “elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god.” In my diagrams of the protest music I wanted to map the variety of emotions put on display in a protest song, in a more standardized way than the art’s original form. Protest music takes many forms, and I chose a variety of songs to draw, which while different stylistically in many ways, would allow me to show their thematic (and other) similarities and differences. I recognize that the drawings I created, like any possible drawing, could never truly and accurately represent each song, because they are not in the same medium, and because it seems impossible to perfectly portray a work of art through another work of art. I wanted to create something that would stand alone from the songs themselves. De Certeau denounces pedestrians in a city as living “an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it.” Listening to music is not the only way to consume or interpret it. By focusing on the lyrics to each song, I attempted to find another way to “read” the music, as opposed to the typical way of experiencing a song. The drawings almost separate themselves from what inspired them, and without the key, are unrecognizable as music. But when viewed, I wanted the lines to evoke a similar jumbled mix as any one of the songs I used would provoke when listened to. Both are sensory experiences. De Certeau argued that “by means of a semantic rarefaction,” one could gain “the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.” In the drawings, I created a visual language to express what was initially meant to be expressed auditorily, which I hoped would allow a viewer to see and compare this music in a new way.
WWW Response
In Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, he creates and develops a deeply emotional and fantastical metaphor for the landscape and history of human thought. Borges poses a problem: how is any person supposed to comprehend the vastness of human history, philosophy, and experience? Conversely, what Tim Berners-Lee proposes is a solution, however convoluted in its own way. According to The World Wide Web, W3 represents, among several implications, “the idea of a boundless information world in which all items have a reference by which they can be retrieved.” While this contrasts Borges’s invention of a library where it is impossible to find any specific volume of knowledge, it parallels the fictional library’s characteristic of containing all human knowledge. Unlike W3, the Library is presented as a divine mystery: “The universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only represent the work of a god.” It is something created not by humans, but to be discovered and watched over by them. But like W3, the Library has no true center. In both the Library and in W3, there are numerous languages present, which are not necessarily understood by all users. The idea of a mysterious and nearly incomprehensible language calls to mind the opacity of the internet and its coding to the average internet user, as well as to the average person who was aware of W3’s existence at the time of or soon after its conception. Borges writes, “All the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet.” Just as there must be some language or instructions informing most web pages in order for them to be accessible by a server, all the books of the fictional Library are composed of one alphabet. Borges’s narrator opines that “the methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men.” Whether or not this is true for the modern internet is quite subjective. While the endeavors of much of the W3 are attempts to catalog and organize human thought and knowledge, it would seem that the present use of this technology is inextricable from the present state of society, even providing a window into its very essence.
News Project Artist Statement
During the interview “The Last Newspaper Artists in Conversation”, the artists mention the role of their reaction to news stories. Nate Lowman claims that the newspaper is one of the last public spheres, and not only that – it is the calmest, most quiet one. My project focused on my reactions to headlines I saw, and in it I attempted to underscore the importance of direction and intention in this public sphere. While flipping through copies of the New York Times, I was struck by the sheer absurdity of some of the articles. In a recent daily paper, the front page story detailed Donald Trump’s speech soon after his acquittal, in which he lambasted House and Senate Democrats as “evil” and “crooked” rivals. I was frustrated by the emphasis on something of seemingly no consequence, that was being needlessly put on a pedestal over more important stories. I was also inspired by the famous photos of Truman, holding up a Chicago Daily Tribune with an incorrect headline, stating that Republican challenger Thomas Dewey had won the presidential election. I wanted to make something that engaged with the idea evoked by those photos of the unreliability, absurdity, and ridiculousness that the news can embody. I made cutouts of Truman, and placed them over headlines or stories that I felt were almost inane in their misguidedness, and symptomatic of a media outlet that is overly devoted to covering “both sides”, sometimes at the expense of a clear-eyed perspective on what is actually happening. I also wanted to incorporate and interpret the part of the interview where the artists discuss the phenomenon of dark and often upsetting world news stories being placed next to advertisements for luxury goods. I used a page that I thought was fascinating, which had an article about religious-based activism, where the imagery and headline came off particularly strong. I felt like the wording and the photo seemed almost out of place and alone amongst the other content in the newspaper. I incorporated clippings and small embellishments with marker to each page, in order to emphasize what I thought was strange or infuriating about each page, as well as to subvert its message, somewhat like “filling in the blank”, as it was called by Alexandra Mir.
Patterns Artist Statement
My designs revolved around animals and people-based symbols. I was also inspired by patterns such as those on baroque wallpaper, as well as the motif of a god with multiple heads or hands. While doing this project, I realized that I was interested in the combination of organic imagery and an ornate decorative arts tradition. I think the contrast of shapes created by nature and elaborate designs created by man is interesting, but that their combination is even more powerful. In my patterns, I wanted to elevate these shapes of nature in a playful way.
WWW Response
In Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, he creates and develops a deeply emotional and fantastical metaphor for the landscape and history of human thought. Borges poses a problem: how is any person supposed to comprehend the vastness of human history, philosophy, and experience? Conversely, what Tim Berners-Lee proposes is a solution, however convoluted in its own way. According to The World Wide Web, W3 represents, among several implications, “the idea of a boundless information world in which all items have a reference by which they can be retrieved.” While this contrasts Borges’s invention of a library where it is impossible to find any specific volume of knowledge, it parallels the fictional library’s characteristic of containing all human knowledge. Unlike W3, the Library is presented as a divine mystery: “The universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatical volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only represent the work of a god.” It is something created not by humans, but to be discovered and watched over by them. But like W3, the Library has no true center. In both the Library and in W3, there are numerous languages present, which are not necessarily understood by all users. The idea of a mysterious and nearly incomprehensible language calls to mind the opacity of the internet and its coding to the average internet user, as well as to the average person who was aware of W3’s existence at the time of or soon after its conception. Borges writes, “All the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet.” Just as there must be some language or instructions informing most web pages in order for them to be accessible by a server, all the books of the fictional Library are composed of one alphabet. Borges’s narrator opines that “the methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men.” Whether or not this is true for the modern internet is quite subjective. While the endeavors of much of the W3 are attempts to catalog and organize human thought and knowledge, it would seem that the present use of this technology is inextricable from the present state of society, even providing a window into its very essence.
Color Analysis
In this photo of the vent tower at the entrance to Boston’s Chinatown, I was struck by the way the evening light hit the mural. This vent tower is an epicenter of the community in the neighborhood, where elderly people and young children typically spend a lot of time. The tower is a big emitter of toxic coal dust and exhaust from Boston’s tunnel system, which has lead to a disproportionate number of people in Chinatown who have respiratory problems. Throughout this pandemic, it has been impossible to ignore the incredibly racial nature of the approach taken by not only Americans, but people in many affected countries. I was drawn to this mural as a symbol of Asian American resilience and culture in an area that was affected by prejudice and racism before any other neighborhood was affected by stay-at-home advisories. Red is traditionally a color symbolic of joy in Chinese culture. The tomato-y red on the mural is bright and assertive. Fruits and vegetables are bred to have this color, which denotes life, rigor, and power. Like a matador’s cloak, the living thing cannot help but be drawn to it.
The dark prussian blue has its root in strength and military might. In this photo, where it falls in the shadows, exists as an acknowledgement of the pain and darkness of racism, violent in rhetoric and in manifested action. It is the color of the sky when nobody is out on the streets (and of water at about the same time), or when you close your eyes in a dark room. This blue happens when you go deep inside yourself, when you are alone with yourself, It signifies to me the simmering anger of those who face relentless racism from various sources, even those they thought were friends, and the strength that it will take to hold onto our sense of identity and the intention with which we need to love ourselves and others.
