and so, the end has come...

This has been nuts.

I never thought I would get this thing done let alone be as happy with it as I am. From conception to execution, it seemed like a big string of problems, and problems I didn't know how to solve.

First, there was the esoteric and deeply abstract nature of the text. I'm not saying I didn't thoroughly enjoy what Ron Burnett had to say, it just took some time to get my head around it. I'd be very interested in doing more work in this field, I think its important and the discourse for it isn't as developed as it should be.

Second, my concept for the site began as something far more complex and very intimidating because I thought I would have to use entirely javascript, which by the way, I have absolutely no experience with. Not that I am unwilling or afraid to learn it, I just didn't think I'd have enough experience with it at this point to make my site work effectively. Thus I scoured the internet looking for other forms of code that would work for me, and I found an elegant and simple CSS layout that worked well beyond my expectations.

Third, and this is the step that caused the delay in production, and why I haven't posted in over three weeks. I was having trouble with the content. Because the concept is so, well, nebulous, I had a hard time putting it in words and then translating those into images. I struggled for weeks on different layouts, and directions (see post on de Stijl, what the frak was I thinking...) to no avail. I finally gave up and focused on my other projects for my production class and patiently waited for inspiration to hit.

If there is one theme of my time at the U and of this semester in particular, it has been patience. I left the Graphic Design program in the Art Department because the faculty there believed I didn't have the patience to be a good designer. I didn't think that is true then, and I certainly don't think it's true now. For both my projects in my classes this semester, I was willing to wait and refine my ideas until the very last minute if need be. I just didn't want to do something half-assed or not well thought out, because they were my projects, I was responsible. Of course I had a great deal of stress about it, but when the inspiration did come, it was as if the sun had come out and I think my projects are that much better for it.

So this last weekend was when I began production on the text and the imagery that accompanied them. I realized that I was writing the text to the imagery, and that was where I was getting stuck on actually creating them. So I shifted gears and thought about this as a kind of glorified research paper. That is when I really started producing the elements of the site.

I'm not going to discuss my process or interpretations of my imagery, because it would be contrary to the purpose of this project. If I tell you what they mean to me, it would taint your interpretations, cloud your meaning, thus contaminating your imagescape. Of course, part of building imagescapes is experiencing sight with others, so I'd be happy to talk to anyone that asks, just reply to my post and we'll chat. But for now, I leave you to make your own interpretations.

A few technical notes before I call it a day-
Viewership has been good with few having trouble. I've had about 40 people visit the site, most coming from the posts I made on Facebook. The only problem I've encountered aside from a brief .png issue is the Safari float issue, which I haven't resolved because frankly, no one is looking at it in Safari. I do have some fixes in mind for it involving javascript, but I'd really need more time to make sure it works correctly.

This endeth my trek through this amazing material and my sphere of knowledge has increased quite a bit. I feel like this process has been a good one, both intellectually and personally. This project taught me a lot about my own imagescape, how much it means to me not only personally, but also for my occupation. I learned more about my self-discipline, patience, and where the boundaries of those qualities lie (further out and nigh unbreakable thanks to this semester I am happy to report). So farewell happy viewer, and thanks for coming to the show.

Cheers!
~Rachel

Okay... (Update)

Fixed the problem with the Representation image, stupid png errors, it took me like an hour to figure out that the image was bad and not the code. Oh well. Also added the credits page with links to everything I used for this project and I fixed up the text a bit. Oh, and I finally learned how to spell "Independent."

Out of curiosity, is anyone viewing in Safari or Opera? I didn't test in those browsers, but I know Safari has an issue with a:hover so one needs to remain hovering over the thumbnail in order to view the full image and text. Not sure about errors in Opera.

As promised, a lengthier, more detailed post will come a little later, probably tonight.

Finally

Finally finally finally. 99.5% done. I just need to get my credits page completed, which I think I'll just do from here. That hurt my brain, longer post later I promise about why I was so damn late in getting this thing up and running. Yeah, and Google Analytics is giving me crap, I don't know if it's because it's a campus server or what, but I'll try to get it fixed so I can get some usage stats. For now, Beta begins! To Facebook to tell all my friends to look at it!
Cheers!

Success!

HA HA! It works! Sort of... it's the bare bones right now, and I'm still experimenting with the images, but this is, in essence, my site! I'm just happy the code works out all ok, though IE has some trouble. Nevermind that you IE users, it will be corrected in the final version. More updates to come. =)

de Stijl and New Media

Less than four weeks till the end of the semester. Whew. I'm working on getting the imagery just right for this project. I had to stop and think about it for a while actually. I had an image in my head, but it didn't quite feel right at the time. So I waited, patiently, for inspiration to come. It came in the form of a reading from the book Screen that I mentioned in an earlier post. The author was talking about de Stijl as an outline for New Media.

"... an effort to resolve the relationships between structural form and transient content, between cyclical time and infinite space, and between a message transmitted and a message received."


















Jessica Helfand explains that de Stijl is "controllable precision" because of it's geometric nature, the purity of the x/y axis, and it's focus on the simple form of line and color.

The philosophies of the de Stijl movement can be applied to new media to bring together the "static and kinetic, variable and constant, and the universal and unique."

This was an absolute revelation for this project, as I was struggling to find a structure for the whole thing. I have the things I learned from the reading, but they can be hard to apply to an image and even harder to relay to a viewer. Having the structure of the de Stijl movement has given me an excellent outline to further apply what I've learned without compromising the viewer's ability to actually understand what I'm talking about.

I have a rough outline for how my page is going to layout:The whole size is 600 x 1600px, side scrolling. The black parts are where the images will go when I build them. I have some really excellent ones via Dave Morris on Flickr, I'm just not quite sure what I want to do with them yet. One of the things I'm contemplating is starting out the image library with some rigid architectural imagery and moving to more organic free flowing imagery that I'll "break out" of the rigidity of the grid. Too pretentious and contrived? Maybe. But it makes for good visuals. I'll play with that and see how it goes. I'm planning on having the website in some shape or form up this weekend, even if its just a rough working model.

Production production

So after looking at endless code examples and tutorials, I think I've determined the layout and functionality of my page. Going from this example, I'll produce a large format image map that will be clickable. Once clicked, the image will display a bit of text from the Burnett book, my own interpretations, or just general musings on the image. A menu will hover over the image map, with items that include home, credits, contact and other pages as I build or find them. I plan on aquiring the images from my own collection, morguefile.com and Flickr Creative Commons. These are all royalty-free images, most only requiring attribution, which I'll put in the credits page.

Some things I will focus on:

• The relationship between the viewer and the image
• Visualization and Creativity
• Viewer as passive observer and image as origin of meaning
• Image as a representation
• The relationship between "reverie" and meaning
• Depiction and interaction

Some questions I will ask of the viewer when an image is selected:

• What drew you to this image?
• What was the first thing you thought when you viewed it? The second? The third?
• What experiences does the image remind you of?
• What experiences shaped how you feel/think about the image?

So now I have a road map of what I want to accomplish, and some real significant amounts of time to devote to it. More updates later!

And So Begins Production

After many long weeks of extra hours, tiny deadlines, and a stress level unknown to me, I can happily say the hard part is over. The Jane Goodall lecture went out without a hitch and we have received nothing but praise for it. Now that that is out of the way, I can now refocus to the task at hand. Now that my research phase is (long) over, production on my website must begin. But before I get into that, I came across this wonderful video:

It mixes two of my absolute favorite things- Star Wars and Saul Bass. It contrasts Star Wars' "lived-in" science fiction aestetic, with the sleek energetic style of the 50's and 60's movie titles. I could wax poetic about Star Wars and Saul Bass forever, but I'll skip that for now.

On to production! I have a (very) rough idea of how I want my page to layout, and some idea of the visual look of the site. First, the functionality. There are two directions I can go with this. The first is a site that is essentially one big image that the user can can click and drag their way through. I saw this once a while ago from one of the design blogs I frequent, and I fell in love with it.

I've done some research on various sites, and I've even picked up some code from (and I really, really hate to say this) the Thomas Kinkade website:

< type="text/javascript">

var server = 'http://www.thomaskinkade.com/newzoom';

var fif ='moumem';
var credit = 'Copyright © www.thomaskinkade.com';
var zoomtype = 'le';
iip = new IIP( "targetframe", server, fif, credit, zoomtype );



<>
< id="targetframe" style="border: none; width: 730px; height: 450px; background: #000000">
< id="morenavwin" style="border: none; background-color: white; display: block;">
< id="myScrollerMoo" class="scrollerMoo">
< border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
< id="scrollRow">
<>

< valign="middle" align="left">

< id="vloading" src="/htmlroot/zoom/images/loading.gif">
< /div>
<>

< /tr>
< /table>
< /div>
< /div>

Here is what it looks like.

So this is really what I want for the site, the problem I have is that I know next to nothing about javascript. The good thing is, I know people who know javascript, and I'm a fast learner.

If I can't get the click and drag to scroll functionality just right, then my plan B is to simply have a side scrolling site.

As far as how I'd like my site to look, I have a few ideas:

**Warning! Nerdy content to follow!!**

LCARS is the computer system used in Star Trek. I always liked how it looked, and for my menu system and some elements of the image I might make it look similar to the LCARS style.

My next inspiration is from the film adaptation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The animations for the guide are great.

So there are two things that I'll be working on developing in the very near future. I'll be posting more frequently about my production progress as well. Stay Tuned!

Mid-term Blues

Wow. Long time, no posting. As usual, my excuse for not doing my homework is I was busy at the job. I won't bore you with the details, but between the editing, designing, coordinating, calling, talking, planning, and running all over downtown, I somehow managed not to pull out my eyebrows and I went to the library. I wanted to pick up a leisurely read, and I came out with a lovely supplement to my readings for this class. Screen is a collection of essays written by Jessica Helfand about things ranging from New Media to personal observations of Paul Rand. It's a fairly light read, and she makes some interesting points. My particular favorite was her essay "Me, the Undersigned." Here are my favorites from a set of 10:
02: Empowerment is not the same as entitlement.
Helfand explains:
It is easy to see how quickly (and inappropriately) empowerment contributes to our sense of entitlement. But while both share a certain quality of warped fetishism (one is fed by illusions of digitally enhanced grandeur; the other by distorted perceptions of privilege) they are not interchangeable.
This struck a chord with me because it made me think about certain software programs. Just because some people can use Microsoft Publisher, doesn't mean they should. The empowerment being able to use the software brings the user doesn't entitle them to call themselves designers. Because someone may feel empowered by a blog, doesn't entitle them to an audience. And just because I am empowered by studying and understanding imagery, doesn't mean I'm entitled to have an opinion that matters to someone. It takes work, diligence, and a strong stomach for failure to have all those things.

05. The proliferation of mysterious acronyms is inversely proportionate to the number of original ideas in the world.
LOL.

09. Faster is not the same as better.
In a previous essay, Helfand explores the detrimental impact that the term "Real Time" has on us and our perceptions of the world. That term is almost always referring to something done by or through a computer, thus equating the "Real" with the digital. What about the time we are experiencing right now then? Suddenly seems not so fast, not so productive, not so instantaneous. We suffer the blowback of that by expecting everything to happen in "real time" and when it doesn't we are disappointed. I often spend most of my day completing tasks in real time, and then wondering where the time went. It seems to me that things just happen faster, but I hardly get anything done. Is this some skewed perception that my experience with "real time" has cultivated? Perhaps.

I'm going to continue with the book for the next couple of days, it's a quick read, then report back at the end of the week with a full analysis.

On a side note, the thing that made my excrutiating time a little mroe tolerable last week was the lecture by Wade Davis. he spoke about his mentor, a man he called "the model for Indiana Jones." He spoke about some very interesting things about images and how they are captured and later perceived. It's definitely worth a listen.

More from the field later this week, perhaps without the constant brain puddle and something more substantive.

Week Five

I finally finished the book. It took a turn for the strange on chapter seven... Instead of talking about imagescapes, Burnett went off on a tangent and did several chapters on humans and technology and where it will all potentially go in the future. There wasn't anything particularly insightful in those chapters, nothing that I hadn't been exposed to in my own study of human/machine interaction (and a fair bit of science fiction), and plenty that I very much disagreed with. But more on that later.

So how do images think? Well it seems to be a matter of perspective according to Burnett. Not just the artist's perspective, but your own. What makes the image able to think (if such a statement can be made) is the internal process of what Burnett calls "visualization." Basically, seeing an image starts up this whole process in one's brain of taking the image and applying personal experience, knowledge, and expertise to it to create a whole new environ for the image to live. It's a process that is instant, yet languorous, contained, yet limitless, and is constantly being broken down and reassembled in the mind. In this way, meaning is created and interpreted differently by everyone. Especially now, when we are just saturated with images, we've become exceptionally adept at building and maintaining these visualizations in the media landscape. They meld into the bigger, global (meaning mind-wide, not the actual world) visualization that makes up in essence how we see the world.

So I guess, it's not so much how the images themselves think, it's really how we think the image thinks (whoa).

To put it more succinctly, and in a really really nerdy way, here is the cute bald kid from The Matrix:

Consider the spoon to be an image (of a spoon?). Really, there is no spoon, just your perception of a spoon. To make an image more or less significant, one must change their perception of it, to visualize it in Burnett's sense of the word. This is how images think.

Burnett had some interesting things to say about image cognition and interpretation, but he lost me when he began saying we can only consider "cyberspace" as it relates to pop culture and video games. I have to give him some leeway however, the book was published in 2005, we've come a long way since then, especially with peer networks and open source technology.

Now begins phase two, the preparatory stage! I'll be researching and building infrastructure to the future web goodness in this phase (to be completed in three weeks). There will probably be more blog posts so I can think out loud and experiment a bit. Stay tuned!

Speaking of images, here is a cute puppy! Visualize that!

Of course I'm doing my homework!

No I'm not. No excuses, it's entirely my fault. I get wrapped up in making images that have to mean something to everyone, I miss out on learning how to make them think. On that note, I'd like to apply some of Burnett's theories to my own work, since that is all I did this week.

As is my custom around this time of year, I am doing the marketing material for this year's Confutati conference. For those not in the know, and how could you not be, Confutati is the graduate conference in Languages and Literature at the U. It's pretty esoteric, but some of the stuff that comes out of it is very interesting. Happily enough, the theme this year lends itself to a hightened sense of the abstract, my specialty. What you see at the left is a rough of the poster I'm working up for them (clickie for a larger view). The them vox populi/vox politica translates to voice of the people, voice of the poet. As it was described to me by the current student director of the conference, it's a melding of the written word and the spoken word. He wanted that represented as a kind of waveform-meets-letterform imagery. Fascinating, I think doing my best Spock impression, where the verbal meets the visual. It is in essence what designers strive to do. Meld the nebulous concept with the austere use of an object. It's great because now my poster moves beyond relaying information of the "what" and "when" to portraying the concept of the conference in action. Man, I love it. Not only do I get to push myself creatively and conceptually (always a pleasure), I get to create something that people can see and really have a moment with, something Burnett talks about frequently.

Among the other not-so-cognitive projects I participated in this week were the Lyceum II lecture web material. This was very taxing because I had to make something completely new from something old and outdated. Since UCOMM (campus marketing) is producing the material, I'm essentially at their mercy for content. They miss me very occasionally (no malice on thier part, I'm sure, they are busy people) and I'm left to make gold from lead as it were.

This image that is currently on the homepage has actually been photoshopped five times already to accommodate the changing needs of the marketing materials. It leaves me with a sort of feeling of sadness for the image, because even though those looking at it would never be able to tell, it feels to me like I've taken the soul out of it to make it more functional. The image in and of itself is just so wonderful, it seems a damn shame to put words over it. Then to alter it further almost feels like a crime. Why? I can't really say. It just feels like a lie to me.

So there are two polar examples of what was consuming my time and concentration this week, if anything I was productive on that front, even if my studying suffered for it. I'll make an attempt to post again over the weekend, and expect a lengthy post on the media-savvy-but-saturated girl's take on this year's superbowl commercials. It promises to be a good year, I'm especially excited about the Eels' commerical. Novocaine for the soul indeed.

Week Three

Pablo Picasso is having tea one sunny afternoon at a corner cafe. A man walks up to him, takes a seat, and introduces himself. "I'm a big fan," the man says, "but one thing has always bothered me about your work."
"Oh?" replies Picasso, "what's that?"
"Well, why are all your works abstractions? Why not paint your subjects as they are in real life?"
Picasso replies "Because what is real? I could paint subjects as the appear to my eye, but they still wouldn't be as they are in reality. Can you think of anything that is an absolutely accurate depiction of something as it appears in real life?"
The man thinks on this a moment, then reaches into his pocket, and takes out from his wallet a photograph of his wife. Looking rather pleased with himself, he hands the photograph to Picasso. Picasso looks at it, then looks at the man and says "Awfully small, isn't she?"

Man, I love that joke. More reading this week. The next chapters in How Images Thinks are just as dense as the first few, and equally as fascinating. A couple of things that piqued my interest-

Burnett explains how he is attempting to "reverse the conventional notion (and cultural myth) that images have the power to overwhelm the viewer... I am arguing that this creative engagement with pictures begins the moment that images enter into relationship with views. I am making the claim that images are not outside of conventional perceptual activities, not the place where things happen that don't happen elsewhere. Rather, images are integral to, and are at the foundation of, visual, linguistic, and perceptual processes."

One way to think about this in not so abstract terms is that this picture of the flower would be considered by many to be beautiful. It culturally and aesthetically accepted that flowers are beautiful, but beauty is not in the photo of the flower, beauty is in the representation of the flower. Burnett argues that it's just the cultural norm that we accept images as reality. We see the flower, not really reconciling that it's just an image of a flower, and not even a true representation of the flower since it's two dimensional and it's really really small.

So Burnett is saying that the image itself isn't capable of overwhelming a person due to whatever exists in the image itself, but rather what exists in the viewer that the image is bring to the surface. "The image is not the experience, but can point to some of it's elements" Burnett says.

This thought made me a little uncomfortable, and for a really strange reason. I was greatly saddened by the loss of Heath Ledger this week, he's been one of my favorites for years. So seeing images of his body being taken out of the apartment against red carpet footage just kind of made me even sadder. But according to Burnett, I shouldn't be as emotional about seeing that kind of thing because the only experience I have with Heath Ledger is from watching him in films. I didn't know him personally and I have never known someone who died from sleeping pills, so technically, I don't have the personal experience to apply to those images to make the emotional experience of his death that much stronger.

Burnett has an explanation about that. Burnett talks about a "hybridization between the use and abuse of subject/object relations." In a nutshell, since we humans are capable of thinking the image is reality, we can then move beyond the image to create relationships that exist outside the image. It's never tangible, never fully realized, but can still feel "real" to the viewer. In my case, I established a relationship with the material that Heath Ledger produced, and in so doing, developed a kind of loyalty to the actor (people do it all the time, don't think I'm weird). By investing even a little emotion and thought into him as an actor (not as a person, that is important) a connection was made, even if it was just on my end. Hence why I feel bad he died, and the images of him in life and in death are emotional for me.

The more I read the more questions I have about the future of images, and along those lines, where our perception is going. But that is probably best saved for another post.

Theory is exhausting, but oh so much fun. This book is really straining my conceptions of how I perceive things, which is great. I just hope I can apply it to my project without making people run far far away out of sheer terror at all the theory that will be involved. More to come this weekend most likely, and I'll try to find some examples of where I want to go visually for the site.

First Post! (sort of)

I thought it might be prudent to actually use a real blog tool to keep a blog of my independent study. From now on, I'll be posting to this site, with the occasional link to the other page. COMMENT!!!

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