Designblog

Feeling over-saturated by images is something that everyone seems to experience and acknowledge but few choose to address. When being confronted with a new image, it is difficult to distinguish how it strikes you inside, if it strikes you at all. Having the access to infinite images and being used to face images you didn’t even agree to see, as well as having to process so many images daily is a process that eventually numbs one’s sense of perception. Over-stimulation leading to a loss of sensibility and impressionability. Extreme images of war or violence are perceived to have the same “weight” as an image of something mundane. Through images, we have had the opportunity to see nearly everything you can imagine. It seems the numbness and muted responses to visual stimuli developed as a coping mechanism to protect oneself from images. People are naturally impressionable and receptive to visual stimuli that can trigger emotions or actions. On a primal level, that is how we understand our surroundings. We are faced with events or visual qualities that we react to — this nearly automatic and intuitive reaction then enables one to better understand their surroundings and how to navigate them.

A world over-saturated by images makes seeing no longer important when everything has been seen. It turns blind those who could previously see. It’s a paradox that as we have gotten increasingly desensitized, our society still revolves around the act of seeing and considers sight to be the most important sense, creating a hierarchy of senses where seeing is the most valued. Images depicting a drastic range of content all have a different weight, depending on the relevance/extremity of the content. This glitch in perception is specifically enforced by images because of their two dimensionality. This quality allows them to be endlessly distributed and circulated, especially on the internet where it is free to do so. Digital images circulate extremely quickly and reach a much broader audience than printed ones do, and it seems this coping mechanism of numbness developed as a reaction to our increased use of technology. On a screen, you can scroll and encounter hundreds of images in close proximity to each other in a matter of minutes. The over-abundance and unlimited access to endless images lowers the value of each image. No image is truly valuable anymore because there are too many, one cannot give undivided attention to every single image they encounter, nor do they want to because everything has already been seen, and it feels that nothing is ever “new” or exciting. Images become interchangeable and meaningless, everything becomes everything, anything can be anything.

A single image, when payed attention to, conveys countless narratives and meanings and is open to a range of interpretations depending on who the viewer is, but with the notion of over-saturation, paying attention to and absorbing the meaning of a single independent image shows itself to be quite a task. When viewed in relation to another image, one that in one way or another conjures a similar feeling, visuality, or dialogue, the context and content of each extend out of the individual image and create a wider dialogue, one that makes underlying connections and systems of universality more apparent. When images are visually similar in terms of form, arrangement, and color, even if the literal content or subject is completely different, the viewer recognizes some form of universality and interchangeability. Even when visual similarities are not present, it is always possible to form connections and new understandings through their juxtaposition. It does reinforce the idea that everything is everything, and anything can be anything, and that no content is absolute or meaningful on it’s own, but when paired with a single other image, I recognize it to be relevant to enhance a deeper understanding of certain content, and it plays exactly in the terms of what I was pointing out earlier, meaninglessness and loss of attention and value. The viewer then has two points of reference, contrasting histories and content, which I believe stimulates them to realize that indeed, images are communicative tools, but they can only fully realize that potential when they are in relation to one another. In daily life, nothing is seen or experienced singularly in isolation from other things. Perception and understanding results from an interconnected processing of stimuli through a web of the physical senses, one sense and stimuli feeds the other and together, things can be understood.

When I began to write this short essay, I had a critical view of our desensitization to content, and I still do, but as I wrote this I began to realize that we do indeed understand and perceive through inter-relation of content. We cannot prevent being constantly bombarded by images in daily life, as well as on the internet — it is no surprise that we have developed “coping” mechanisms to prevent ourselves from being completely overwhelmed by external influences. Instead of surrendering to this inevitable numbness and passively allowing these coping mechanisms to grow, one could slightly redefine the act of seeing and perceiving images by paying attention to the connections that can be made between all images. As I paired images to highlight the interconnection, universality, and interchangeability of everything, I was astounded by how no matter how slight a similarity or link between two images is, it is possible to see underlying systems of life and matter — which we consistently deny…

lost

coin

ideogram

engraved

deep

intimate

threesome

magnet

ashes

lay

play

chaos

eradicate

thrill

seems

mask

presence

nothing

whisper

hiding

transparent

dizzy

image

smog

antagonist

cry

precede

beat

emergence

swallow

moon

side

calm

reject

shocking

abject

wall

ballad

amateur

ill

why

why?

Fleuron. ,

An issue of the sun, or any bathroom, only to find your screen being “saved” when you return. It grabs your attention, you might ask yourself.

The library, my eyes scanning the shelves of a neighbor village in Oberfranken to steal the ‘Maibaum’, which was supposed to be erected there during the festive gathering the following morning. It drawn me to it. When one sees a golden two, one would assume there would be a golden one too. Hesitating to grab a book, I kept strolling through. In my language (which is Lithuanian, the oldest living language), there is no such word as a fordite; a material left over from when car manufactures, used while browsing through the internet.

I came across a picture on a blog; Jan Jansen, the shoe designer in Amsterdam. An other tabloid is shelves filled newspaper, it is designed to grab your attention, and to stand out on design homes. My eyes fell on a piece of pottery by an English artist. Most living spaces use textiles as membranes and interfaces.

Instantly. 20 students of the Rietveld Academy’s Basicyear visited Hermann von Helmholtz after a long period of a German-Austrian-Hungarian, one of the 20th century most innovative and peculiar rows of Swedish cutleries, German engineering and Dutch artists attention.

The Fordite had walked around the nail polish stand. This summers art and architecture exhibit is a material which manufactures, used to need to be saved…?

Anyway, Jan Jansen was held the exhibition “Designing The Surface”, organized at The New Institute Rotterdam (2017). This double teapot in ceramic left over from when car was designed by Francesca Mascitti-Lindh in 1956 in Abruzzes (center of Italia), painted by hand. Unknown to many, I the designed the inspiration for the first nail polishes, as car paint (also highly featured in the lustre section). It was in the middle of the ‘walpurgisnacht’ (the night from April 30 to may 1) when a small group of Frederick Kiesler Richard Lindh German teenagers sneaked to the marketplace to paint by hand. -Sofia design week

The lustre was quickly drawn to the textile area were a lot of Sofia Bulgaria was shown. Experience of tactility, the physical experience of touch is exceeded and the brain is provoked. How does it work?

Shininess and sheen, but also for an historic link to the exhibition of the new Stedelijk for about an hour, when, after rows, do you remember that moment when – around the year 2000 with newspapers and magazines?  Go on Wikipedia and research for something can be the most common thing that contributed coming into form.

Does my screen this kettle and sparkle? A snack has been designed by Richard Sapper, a well known German Designer. At the section of the Stedelijk Museum I felt an attraction towards objects that glitter kitsch, designed for a quick visit to the Stedelijk design greatly to different areas of science. A strong effect can be produced with simple actions. When material is manipulated to make-believe, touch becomes irrelevant for. Hello there dear reader, –why the fleuron.

COLORBLIND PHOTOSHOP

To a lesson of color

from the German Zur Farbenlehre

Goethe focused his notion of colour on the spontaneous sensory experience. His theory is based on how colors are perceived by human brain. He’s not looking for a material definition as Newton did.

He did a lot of experiment, describing phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction and chromatic aberration.

After some observation, he deducted that Newton’s theory was missing something about colours. He didn’t see darkness as an absence of light but rather at polar to and interacting to the light; colour is a result of interactions between light and darkness.

Goethe’s studies began with the experiments which examined the effects of turbid media such as air, dust, and moisture on the perception of light. He observed that light seen through a turbid medium appears to us yellow. He took the example of the sun seen through the atmosphere: when you look at the sun rising it appears yellow red, the particles there are, the more the sun is red. Otherwise, when we look at the sky we actually look at the darkness of the space. The blue of the space are the particles from the atmosphere reflecting the sunlight, so we have light on obscurity ( more the layer of particles is thin more the sky is dark blue).

From this starting point, Goethe developed his theory on the polarity of colors: real close from the light there is yellow then red, and real close from the darkness there is blue then green. He also concluded that colour is a dynamic process from his experience with a moving prism. He founded a spectra different from Newton, adding: cyan, yellow and magenta.

Goethe also include aesthetic qualities in his colour wheel under the title “allegorical, symbolic, mystic use of colour”:

red is beautiful,orange is noble, violet is unnecessary, yellow is good, green id useful and blue is common. These six qualities were assigned to four categories of human cognition: the rational (red/orange), the intellectual (yellow/green), the sensual (green/blue) and the imagination (red/ violet).

Goethe also made the “rose of temperaments”, an earlier study (1798/99) by him and Schiller, matching twelve colours to human occupations or their character traits (tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers), grouped in the four temperaments: melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic.

Should your glance on mornings lovely

Lift to drink the heaven’s blue

Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,

Royal red sinks out of view –

Give to Nature praise and honor.

Blithe of heart and sound of eye,

Knowing for the world of colour

Where its broad foundations lie.

—Goethe

watch this movie about light, darknes and colours

A little story about Daltonism
Early in the 18th century, Isaac Newton discovered color spectrum through his experience with a prism.

During his experiences, he discovered that human eye is not capable to distinguish the combination of colors: thus at the intersection of a green and a blue light beams, the human eye perceive cyan.
Then in 1801, the doctor and physician, Thomas Young expose his theory of the trichromatic vision: three colors must be enough to recreate all the colors. In addition, when those colors are mixed in the same proportion, it gives white. Thereby he explains human color perception by the action of three retinal nerves which are excited respectively by red, green and purple. Disorders of the colored vision result from the malfunction of one of these nerves. He also shows that accommodation is ensured by the deformation of the crystalline.

This theory is confirmed by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). He publishes a series of research on color perception and color blindness.
The scientific name of the anomaly is “dyschromatopsia“, but it is generally known as “Daltonism“, a term created by the physicist Pierre Prévost after the name of its discoverer: the English chemist John Dalton. The latter published the first scientific article on this subject in 1798, “Special Facts About the Vision of Colors” in a communication to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, following the realization of his own disability at perceive colors. He had also noticed that his brother had the same abnormalities, without concluding as to a possible genetic origin. It is only two centuries later, in 1986, that Jeremy Nathans locates the genes responsible for color vision and publishes this discovery in his treatise “Nathans, J., Thomas, D., Hogness, DS Molecular genetics of the human vision of colors: the genes coding for blue, green and red pigments, Science 232: 193-202, 1986 »

Thus humanity with the apparition of electronic devices searched for a color system for screens based on his owm perception of colors. The RGB system appears for electronic devices. Indeed, RGB is a device-dependent color model: different devices detect or reproduce a given RGB value differently, since the color elements (such as phosphors or dyes) and their response to the individual R, G, and B levels vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, or even in the same device over time. But still, even if RGB is based on human perception, computer are not working the same as the human eyes.
From this research, I asked myself: what if Photoshop was colorblind? My starting point for the project was photos of colorful flower, that I modified on Photoshop with different mechanism. I based my project on the six differences types of colorblindness depending on which sensors (cones) red, green or blue is touched by the illness and if it’s missing or just dysfunctional.
Applied to the RVB system, if a cone is missing I deleted all the layer corresponding to the color missing cone on Photoshop and if it was only dysfunctional I was only playing with the value of the layer. As if it was “more or less colorblind”. All the experience was a game with the different RVB layers, showing how different a computer and a brain with a missing or dysfunctional sensor or not going to recreate or perceive the same colors even if RVB is a color system based on human perception. It appears to me that the computer was more powerful in a way because it was capable to make up a lot more of colors than humans with different type of colorblindness.

 originals

final works

« The Faux Series » by Chris Kabel is a serie of small boxes with a very particular 3d-like texture. Through water-transfer printing, photos have been printed on the small boxes’ surfaces. Shadows and bright spots are emphasizing the shape of these boxes. These prints match the objects and succeed at giving more depth to the visual aspect of the boxes.

I chose « The Faux Series » because I have been very interested by photography lately. The work made me think about several references, the first one is the book « The concept of Non-Photography » by François Laruelle. The author mentions the interesting relationship that is established between the image and the real object. The image is a way of perceiving the object almost like formulating a point of view on that object. Chris Kabel’s work challenges Mr. Laruelle statement: « photography is a process that excludes the object-form » by using the technique of photographic prints directly on an originally neutral object.

Photography in my point of view is putting up a boundary between itself and the real object, as Martha Sandweiss said: « The capacity of photographs to evoke rather than tell, to suggest rather than explain ». Photography is i think the attempt to materialize each human beings’ perception of things. It is as if Chris Kabel decided to glue the perception of an object on that object itself to create a new « alien-object ».

The Chris Kabel « Faux Series » relate to the Act III of the booklet. « Faux » in french means false. Act III is made of little humoristic and theatrical dialogues that mainly personify materials such as wood and marble. This short play also gives a voice to objects, an animal and a product (a dress). It displays the following ideas of looking like and ressemblance. It is also about pointing out the complexity of a visual system that deals with notions like authenticity vs camouflage, imitation vs sincerity and all the changes and transformations happening in between.

Chris Kabel is experimenting how two different medium could cooperate together, in that sense the work of Chris Label is interesting.

Faux Series 2017, 3D printed polyamide, water transfer printed. exh.cat.no36-faux

Irene Vonck / From Rhythms of Space series 1995

When material is manipulated to make-believe, touch becomes irrelevant for the experience of tactility, the physical experience of touch is exceeded and the brain is provoked. “From the rhythms of space” touches upon the idea that when contact between bodily surface and the object displayed is censored the viewer perception is (mis)leaded into dissonance with reality. This visual contradiction appears when the associations between the artwork as a whole and the material used in brut is not coherent.

Soft

Malleable

Comforting

Pretend

Fake

Play

The art piece appears to be made of cloth but instead it is made of airbrushed stoneware. None of this adjectives mentioned prior seems to describe the properties of cooked stoneware; this is because construction of tactility is build upon the pillars of experience and imagination since we cannot come in contact with it. Due to this I believe this work of art belongs to FAUX (in which nothing is as it seems) and AGENCY (in which paint takes the power back). Colour and subtitle sinuosity trick the viewer, the black colour gives the piece a sense of heaviness whilst the red interior an association with felt fabric. Paint definitely becomes an important element; it gives the object a sense of elegance and mystery and of course exhilarates the desire of touch. There will always be something very special and curious in tactility, in objects that seem ambiguous, objects that lure the viewer into doing what it is highly prohibited – TOUCH. When exploring an art gallery/museum/space etc., objects can be quite novel to us and thus, as young children do, we might feel the urge to touch, touch to understand, touch to explore, to grasp on the full experience of wonder. But … when we cannot touch ( and this is what fascinated me this time)it becomes pure mental construction and sense of touch is replaced by sense of sight.

Neutrality. Growing up in Sweden, the term has been a part of me since I was born, and a part of my country since before any of the world wars. It is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the quality or state of not supporting either side in an argument”. It is used throughout society in everything from neutral tasting yoghurt to neutral states in politics. But what does it mean? And is it even possible? I chose to explore and discuss a part of this which is dear to me as an art student, image making.

I started exploring neutrality through a work of Swiss designers Müller + Hess called The Impossibility of Neutrality, which is a commission by the English graphic design magazine Eye. It is an attempt to create an alphabet consisting of imagery instead of typography. Each letter in the alphabet has been replaced by multiple images. They chose multiple images because different people have different perceptions of what an image could represent. So to make this more precise, the viewer can look at multiple images to understand which letter the sender is trying to convey. The work deals with typography, text and photography, and how it is impossible to be neutral in imagery.

The Impossibility of Neutrality ©1999 by Müller + Hess, first published as Max Bruinsma's article Reduced to the Max in Eye-mag #32

From this work I went onward to The Photographic Dictionary by Lindley Warren. The Photographic Dictionary is a website with photographs representing words. Each word in the dictionary is represented by a photograph. The word that is represented by the photograph below is the word embrace. What happens in this work, just as in Müller + Hess’s work, is that the impossibility of neutrality becomes very apparent. The representation of the word becomes very personal, and in every image there are many messages that the viewer can read into, and every image can be interpreted in many different ways. An image can not show something neutral, as text can. Or can it?

Embrace by Brendan George Ko through The Photographic Dictionary

Stock photography is often used as an image that can just be interpreted in one way. It is a photograph showing something in a very non-personal and mostly objective way. It is used widely by, for example businesses, who in this way can acquire quality imagery for their business at a lower cost. When using a stock photography service, the user searches for a word or a phrase, and the matching photograph appears. For this to work, the image has to be non-personal and work for a specific use within many different contexts. Does this mean that the image is neutral? And does it apply to all types of images? Images showing people can hardly be neutral I think. Most of them show an accepted norm for the human being which they send as a message. But let’s take something else as an example. Let’s take this image of U.S. dollar bills. I believe it is more or less neutral. It portrays the dollar bills as they are, no more and no less. I feel it is not carrying any messages more than the concept of U.S. dollar bills. But then again the concept of U.S. dollar bills holds a lot of messages in itself, within everything from geography to economy and politics. And also, the bills are stacked irregularly and have creases on them, which makes me think of money that is earned in illegal ways, passed on in duffel bags.

Dollar bills by iStock

Another type of neutrality which I think is interesting is when an image or a message has been used so many times and in so many different contexts that it has lost its original meaning and doesn’t really say anything anymore. An example is the art sold at IKEA. It has been bought, sold and shown so many times in so many different contexts that the original context or message is completely lost, and it now doesn’t really represent much at all. Maybe this isn’t neutrality, but more some kind of visual confusion or loss of context. But just like the stock imagery, these images are often just used to replace one word, which in this case is decoration and/or art. This makes these images neutral in the way that most people don’t really experience or see anything when looking at these images, but instead just see a materialization of the word decoration or art.

Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany's by IKEA

Something that I think fits very well into this discussion is the word perception. Perception is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the way you think about or understand someone or something”. People will always have different ways of perceiving things, and when looking at an image, the image is always interpreted regarding to the perception of the viewer. Perception connects to what the viewer has seen, heard and experienced before. This is why the portrait of Audrey Hepburn from IKEA has lost it’s original context. Because it has been seen more often at IKEA or as a decorative art piece, than in its original context. This is also why we are able to find different messages and meanings in what at first glance appears to be a neutral image of dollar bills shown above. If the bills would have no marks and stacked in a perfect order, then the assumptions and the messages we are able to read into the image would still be there, just that they would be other messages and meanings. And because of perception, my conclusion in this essay is that it is impossible to be neutral. Whatever image is presented, the viewer or user will always be able to see one meaning or another in an image, and an image will always be able to be connected to something in the life of the viewer and therefore be interpreted through this experience.

On a side note I also believe it is a bit funny that Müller + Hess are Swiss, from the viewpoint that Switzerland is supposedly the oldest neutral country in the world. I wonder if any of their government officials read that issue of Eye Magazine.

When I heard about the powers of ten I thought it was some highly complicated scientific theory that you had to read really carefully and with much mathematical understanding to comprehend.
But in fact the ”Powers of Ten” is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray and Charles Eames, re-released in 1977.

The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten.
It illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery.

It presents the profound idea of orders of magnitude, with the subtitle of the film being:A Film Dealing With the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.

I want to show you one of the many remakes that have come up since 1968.

A little bit more cheesy, Americanized than the original with Morgan Freeman’s voice.

It shows the part of space we (humans) can see.
it’s stupendously big!!

Cosmic voyage – the power of ten HQ on YouTube

The theory of powers of ten tries to comprehend our world in numbers.
It fits everything from the atoms in our cells to the outer universe into a simple scheme of multipliing by ten.

By depicting this scheme the film gives a portrait of the various perspectives we can have on our world.

Our brain is capable to perceive the world on so many levels.
We can think a lot further than of what we actually know or have experienced, like the universe for example.

But we can as well think about the ungraspable development of thought .
Our brain can think about itself thinking.

There are many different levels of perceiving the world we live in.
Starting from ourselves I could think of the following levels:

The material level (what we consist of)
The personal level
The closer social level
The cultural (society level)
The global level (political/environmental)
The universal level ( seeing the world as a spot in the universe/ a world of constant change)

What matters to us changes violently depending on in which level we are thinking about things.

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