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[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Critique on Final Project

When my classmates tried to guess the meaning of my works before I explained the meaning and purpose, they seemed to be confused. I believe that most of the confusion came from their attempts to find a correlation among each images; someone even believed that it must have a progressing story. While it is true that they are a works of a series in a sense that they all explore the idea of loneliness, they are actually loosely related to each other and should really be looked at as an individual pieces to better understand the purposes of them. 

I am pretty satisfied with this work because when I explained the purpose of the works, it made sense to the audience, and I think I have done a great job in editing despite the fact that it was almost my first time using the editing tools in the program. 

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Final Project

After the last project, I was interested in exploring more on loneliness. I was an international student who came abroad without my family since I was in fourth grade, so loneliness is something that always followed me. I decided to recreate  an image of myself to depict when and how I feel lonely.

The first image represents a type of loneliness when you feel like you do not really belong in the place. This is something that I repeatedly felt, and feel, as I am studying in the foreign country. When I feel that I do not belong there, I feel like everything will be “right” only if I was not there. So, I edited myself to look like I am being glitched out.  The second image represents a type of loneliness that comes shortly after missing my home and wanting what I do not have. Stable home and family was something that I could never have not only because I was abroad but also because my parents have divorced when I was in 6th grade. So, I wanted to illustrate my kind of loneliness that comes after wanting for home and family.  For the last image, I wanted to give some nostalgic feelings. Another time that I often feel lonely is when I reflect on the past and realize I was much happier back then.

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Reflection on Critique for Image and Sound Project

To be honest, I was a bit upset after the critique for two reason. The first reason was that my lack of English speaking skills did not allow me to fully explain my idea behind the project. Secondly, some people were commenting that I should have put in more effort for the project. Whether they believe it or not, I put great amount of effort in this project, and I don't necessarily think that other people -- who just took their pictures from the past or just took several pictures with their phones and put them basically as a slideshow with minimum editing on their pictures -- put as much effort as I did. I really didn't understand why I had to be the one to be criticized for “lack of effort.”  Jason’s work was great, though. His idea of reinterpreting the children’s stories with creepy images was very clever and his paintings he put in for the video was drawn in an matching styles. 

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Image and Sound Project

https://vimeo.com/412367919 For this project, I found a poem about loneliness and made an animation accordingly. I sketched each frames on Photoshop, saved each images, and worked on the Adobe Premier to edit the video.  In the animation, I made a metaphor and illustrated loneliness as thorns. This metaphor is something that stayed in my mind since I was very young. When someone is lonely, they initially look for someone to rely on. However, with such unstable state of emotions and mind, it is easy to stress your neighbors. Then, the lonely person believes that they have been “betrayed” and purposefully make themselves isolated to not be hurt by other people again. In that sense, I thought such lonely people are similar to roses. They have their thorns to protect delicate yet beautiful flowers.  Are roses necessarily lonely, though? No. Each branch often have dozens roses, and they have sunlight and soil that allow them to blossom. Like that, people who may believe they are alone simply just don't realize who are around them. There are people who goes through similar hardships who would understand their situation and there are parents and family that will always stand by their sides.

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Artist Presentation: Omer Fast

He is a film artist who was born in Jerusalem, Israel, and is now based in NYC. His works mostly focuses on retelling historical events through film. I do not have much things to say about him, though, because I really wasn't interested in his works. Not only is film not one of my preferred form of art, but also I just thought that his works were like documentaries. 

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Artist Presentation: Camille Henrot

I had an artist presentation on Camille Henrot with Jason. She is a French artist who studed in France and is now based in NYC. One thing that was really memorable about her was that she really employs variety of materials for her works. Some of the mediums used are ethnographic film, zoetrope, telephone hotlines, and Ikebana, which is Japanese art of flower arrangement. This variety and unique use of mediums made it hard for me to choose 3 works, as they were all so different in style and purposes. However, this was exactly what has drawn my attention and interest in her. Among the three pieces that I included in the presentation, my favorite one was Sphynx. For this piece, Henrot draws a sphynx for dozens of times with oil pastels on A4 papers. Then, she exhibited them on a metal board and magnets. Through this project, she explores at which point does each drawings lose its purpose of representing a specific figure and simply becomes a part of a larger pattern.

Those who have seen my post about the translation project may know that I am really interested in studying what role the brain plays in our action of “perceiving.” This work explores similar concept: it tests if our brain will see each drawings as a drawings or catch the repetition of a pattern and simply “guess” the collection of drawings as a huge series of patterns. 

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Mapping Project

This project is about showing colonialism of Japan during WWII. I was mainly inspired by the map with Octopus we saw from the trip to Kroch library. The character in the middle is Taotien, which is known to be one of the 4 evils from the Chinese myth and represents greed. I drew everything on the Adobe illustrator and moved it to Photoshop and applied distort filter effect to make it seem like Taotien is devouring the whole East Asia. 

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Translation Project

For this project, I was interested to explore how much our brain plays to make sense of what we see. More specifically, I was interested to explore the idea of “Intentionality”. This is an idea that when we observe something, our brain immediately attempts to “guess” what the object is. So, for this project, I revealed very minimum parts of the image and blurred rest of them.

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Editing Wikipedia Article

After publishing an article about Michael Joo with Jason, I was asked to edit an article with Lauren. Lauren and I first decided to take a look at all sources that are cited and get rid of non-credible sources. As we were working on it, though, we were really shocked. Out of 32 sources, less than 5 sources were legit, and rest of them were non-credible or even not related sources. One of the links even lead to some sort of pornography site. I don't think I will edit any Wikipedia articles ever again. 

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Working on Edit-a-thons

Creating templates and organizing the article was not as easy as I expected. It was hard for me to figure out how to make some texts bigger fonts or how to add citations at certain locations. I wrote an article about Michael Joo with Jason, and because he had a better sense of how to work with Wikipedia, we decided that we would first finish writing the article on Google Drive and then move them to the Wikipedia. As we were working, it was difficult to figure out which sources were primary and which were secondary. Also, it was hard to figure out how we should differentiate subjective statements from objective facts. For example, we thought that purpose and analysis of the works could also be considered as an objective facts, but the professor asked us to remove such details because they are subjective.

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

How to Create a Wikipedia Article

We have discussed how to create and edit Wikipedia articles. While it was interesting to learn how to do so, I really did not understand how it is related to my “art”. I get that some artists are not as well recognized as they should be but I still wasn't really feeling motivated about this project. 

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Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013

To be honest, when I first watched this film during class, I had no idea what this work was about and thought it was quite weird. When we had a class discussion about the work after, I thought it was genius.  The film “educates” an audience how to disappear. Among many “lessons”, my favorite part was the fourth one. On the fourth lesson on “How to be invisible by disappearing” she implies that people would rather have to live in very restricted areas such as “gated community” or “military zone” or would need supernatural powers such as hiding with invisibility cloak or being a superhero. By mentioning how difficult it is for us to disappear in a current society, she criticizes how current society constantly generate and share new informations to the level that it threatens our freedom and privacy. 

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Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikda is a Japanese sound artist who now lives in Kyoto, Japan and Paris, France. Researching about this artist was quite interesting for me as I was really not familiar with sound art. When I observed some of the works by Ikeda by myself, I felt that the piece was slowly dragging me into unexperienced world by introducing me a new visual and sound experiences. It is really amazing how we really depend on visual and sound perceptions to make sense of our surroundings and how it can be manipulated to make the audience feel like they are standing in a whole different world. 

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Reflection on our Tour to the Olin Map Room

I was really amazed to look at the variety of collection of maps that Cornell has, and also was impressed by the fact that such collections are open to any students. Hundreds of thousands of maps were preserved at the map room, and I had a privilege to take a look at them.  As noted in the prior post, I was already aware that all maps are not very accurate, but I was truly shocked by how each maps were created to serve very specific purposes. Some maps included wide landscape of a region to advertise people to move in to the district, some had caricatures that illustrates what is famous in the region, and some even excluded certain islands and regions because they were not considered important. Among numerous maps that I took a look at, the most memorable map was the one that had a cartoon-ish illustration of Kraken over the territories of a Soviet Union, almost depicting them as a harmful, greedy, and evil creature. This tour made me realize how small details in maps can greatly impact our perception about certain groups of people, the region, and even social issues. Then, I was reminded how Korea and Japan had been battling for decades whether to label a certain island as a Dok-do, a name given by Koreans, or Takeshima, a name given by Japanese. Japan has been arguing that the island belongs to Korea for decades although it really does not. It made me realize that such small details like the name labeled name of the island on the map could influence irrelevant foreigner’s perception about this on-going issue, as people tend to take most of the information from thee map as an objective truth. 

[iamtoolazytothinkoftheusername]

Response to the Readings and Class Discussion (Feb 12)

For this class, we were asked to read or watch some texts and videos that introduces how maps are produced and how they are biased. There are religious, historical, and technical reasons why certain maps are preferred over the other. However, there are some instances where people purposefully manipulate divisions of districts; the most common example is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is a process of redividing districts in order to benefit a certain party over the other. Unlike my response to the prior readings or videos, most of this contents were the ones that I was already aware of. I really did not feel like I was introduced to something new this time. 

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Response to the Movie, Arrival

I truly loved watching the film. The movie really explores how language could influence not only how we communicate with each other but also are able to shift the way we think and perceive the world. In the movie, an alien approached humans and suggests to share their weapon. Although initially confused and somewhat scared, Louise, the main character of the movie who works as a professor teaching linguistics, figure out that they were referring to their language. After mastering their language, the main character become able to perceive the world in a perspective that is not limited by time. That is, she was able to observe the present incidences and simultaneously perceive related events that would occur in the future.

As a bilingual student myself, I could definitely relate to the theory that the movie suggests: language could change the way that people perceive events. America, where I learned English from, and Korea have quite different culture. For example, Korea has a different style of language, called “jondaemal”, that we use when we are speaking to adults or in a formal or public spaces. Thus, when I converse with adults in Korean, I find myself not only speaking but also acting more politely and with manners. In contrary, when I speak with figures like professors, I find myself speaking and acting more friendly and with comfort. 

The only questions that I had about this movie was that the main character did not actually learn the alien language. She was able to master the letters and writing systems that they employ, but that does not really mean that she mastered their language. “Learning language” is not a simple action of understanding what other people are saying. When one learns a new language, they use learn their cultures as well. For example, if an American were to learn Korean, he or she cannot claim to have mastered Korean without learning when and when not to use “jondaemal,” even if he or she has no problem in understanding what the other people are trying to say.

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Response to Class Discussion Regarding AI

We have discussed about the AI bias article in class. During the discussion, we were asked if we believe that the engineers should take responsibilities as they develop new technologies like AI. My answer is Yes and No. 

Saying “the engineers should be responsible when they develop new technologies” may carry some misleading connotations that there must be some sort of policies or responsibilities solely put on them. Engineers’ job is to develop innovative and efficient technologies. However, there are other people who are responsible to consider ethical development and use of technologies, such as politicians or technology advisors. 

Does that mean engineers can neglect such moral issues? No. Everyone should be responsible and considerate for any moral issues as the members of the society. Without it, rectification for malpractices or culture would never go away. Engineers also, as an individual citizens, should also be considerate about such issues.