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!