VISU1311: Creativity Blog #1

IMG_5031As a artist, I’ve always been fascinated by the play between black and white. I’ve found that working inversely, with white medium on a black surface is a challenging and enriching practice. I’ve coined the term “drawing the light” for this unique method of mark making. Often in art, we focus on finding the shadows in a subject and using them to form the shape of our work. When creating with white, you get the opportunity to focus on the light in the image.

The most striking part of the passage for me was the description of black and white and how they relate to society. According to Flusser, black is the complete absence of light and white is the complete presence. I think it’s very interesting that black and white are two ends of the spectrum of light. Flusser equates this theory to the white and black of religious and political ideologies. These ideologies state that actions are either black or white – entirely bad or entirely good. However, this isn’t how actions work. There is a wide spectrum of morals that aren’t accounted for in black and white. The true actions are different from the expectations of the ideology, but the ideology works as a representation of the actions. In the passage, Flusser describes a similar relationship between photos and the concepts they record. Photographs take concepts and code them into a representation that is remarkably similar to the concept, but is still not the actual concept. However, as viewers, we accept the representation as truth and often do not work to decode the photograph to find the differences between the concept and the representation.

Leave a Reply