This week’s reading and audio seemed really spastic. There seemed to be a discontinuity between each subsequent thought and idea. However, I did receive, especially from the reading, that media is a very influential means of expressing ideas. All aspects of our lives, more so today, in the post-modern world, are affected by the use of media, but not only that, the medium also affects how we perceive the information. The audio seemed to be a bit less pleasing than the reading. The reading provided pictures that helped me to stay attentive and alert. I suppose if I feel lost or confused, I rather see confusion rather than hear confusion. I also picked up that through the changing world, we can recreate narratives by deconstruction and reconstruction of different elements.

Ruslan Khasanov is a Russian born designer (1987-). The basis of his work involves motion, color, and melody. I am very intrigued by harmony of those elements combined with various structured and organic shapes, movements, and patterns. There seems to be duality between structure and organicity. At first, I thought about man and his constructs and how man opposes nature when looking at his video art, “Warm up”, but then I thought about how nature is structured and how man’s constructs mimc nature. Telephone posts tower like trees, slanted rooftops work like leaves when deflecting rain, and the Village Hall on campus looks like a geode. The harmonious relationship betwixt the elements used in this video remind me that nature is strong yet supple.

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I suppose I’m semi-productive when it comes to school. I get a bit of work done here and there but it does seem that dancing is a huge part of my day.

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High school I took a graphic design class, my artwork became based around a few projects I did in high school. One can definitely see my appreciation for shape and texture. I suppose that statement describes my dancing as well. I really appreciate body shapes and form when dancing. Old school voguing interests me. Magazines, models, and how models communicate mood and emotion intrigues me. I think a good dancer has various textures in his movements. Contrast causes visual interest.

I find this podcast to be very relevant to the ideas that we are discussing in class. The Gestalt ideas are not unique to visual but also auditory forms of expression and I’m glad that this was appointed to me. These musicians are discussing the make up of “Inside Out” and there are different parts that make a whole. The drums, the melody, the sampling are all components of the songs. They may or may not sound pleasing when listened to separately, but when they are together, the sound is one and each component functions properly in order to create an entire song in the same way different visual components make up the arrangement of a photograph or painting. I think this idea is pretty cool.

The name Stellar reminds me of space. I definitely saw that when I watched the video. There was an array of flashing blotches of color, which was really interesting. The colors were dim but saturated. There were a consistency of white circles that kept appearing that resembled stars in the night sky. The flashes of color create dynamism. I also noticed that the video was silent. I thought about the voidness of space and its loneliness. However, the quick changing images seem to create a rhythm and in my mind it creates a sort of artificial sound.

But I’m not completely sure why anyone would find any great interest in this piece.

Amy Tan really related to me, and I bet with a vast number of other artisans, when she spoke of the connection between a natural predisposition for mental illness and creativity. I have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety along with BPD (borderline personality disorder). One thing that is really typical of people with BPD is that they daydream a lot, and when there is a high level of stress fantasy becomes real and our perception of reality of distorted. In extreme cases, a person with BPD seems psychotic but really isn’t. These untypical perspectives while in a crisis state, I think, contributes to creativity. Art, when it’s expressed clearly and well, communicates and convinces the audience of the existence of almost a different realm. This typically makes people with mental illness more equipped for that specific since they’re perception of reality is obliviously different than someone without mental illness.

She also speaks that creativity is derived from past experience. Inspiration and drive come from the key factors of one’s life. Each person’s experience as a human is different. This equips an artist with a unique perspective, thus adding towards his creativity.

Hara seems to be driven by design and its entirety in this reading. The author goes over the history of design and speaks about its evolution from primitive objects, the vessel and the stick, to a network of more advanced weapons and useful tools. I however chuckled when the writer made the instant connection to anthropoids and spaceships, but I do suppose that when one looks that the spectrum of design, man has hiked a pretty far journey very quickly to be able to accomplish what he has accomplished.

As a beginning graphic design major, my mind to tend leap towards pure aesthetics, and I don’t really think about practicality when I hear the word ‘design’, but Hara disagrees and vindicates the practically of design and its usefulness and necessity. The simple stick and vessel lead to great designs: the hoe, the cup, the sword, and then eventually cranes, tanks, and missiles (Hara 413).

This piece also goes into the inspiration of design and the meanings behind elements of design and how we feel about them. Hara seems to introduce that design is inspired by what we conceive from our own imagination; things that will be or can be (the future). Hara also explores that design is made up of familiar elements, which things that we have seen before (the past). Future thinking and conception births innovation while nostalgia and familiar elements inspire relationship among the audience is allows them to relate to the design.

However Hara makes the impression that elements of design do not have the same effect on countries across the board. The West, especially England, had a stronghold on the world influence and thus influenced design across many different cultures. I always found this both interesting and distressing. I see England’s influence infused with many cultures. Women’s ‘Auana, a modern style of Hawaiian hula, is decorated with elegant, “ladylike” motions, western style music, and dresses with strong Victorian influence. I find this very interesting to see a mashup of culture but also am heartbroken about how much the Hawaiian people had to compromise. It shows that a huge part of a culture is how and what it designs.

Hara also argues that machines jeopardize with the integrity of genuine craftsmanship, but I disagree. Mass production does make things cheaper and easy to access which makes our society more sustainable and productive. Design is a reflection of society and ‘here and now’ is of popular demand. People have easy access to the things they worked for, but I do think that designers do have a place and can produce for a more genuine product. When the designer does the work himself.

In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink discusses the rapidly changing world that we as people must adapt to in order to become successful, arguing that the left-brained structure of the world is becoming more obsolete and there is a increasing demand for right-brained professionals.

According to Pink, the focus of the world went from agriculture to mass production to information and now concept. Indeed the shift has changed from information and fact to application of these foundings. Information is easily accessible due to the technological boom that our civilization produced, and even though these previous demands are needed to make our civilization productive and functional, concept and imagination are necessary to make our world prosper.

We have the information to support our world, and we have the technology to gather new information, but, the key component that will have our society thrive is innovation.

I was reading these articles for Visual Seminar I that made some compelling arguments. Amit Gupta’s “Are Artists Entrepreneur?” defends artists as business minded people, due to their investing in their own talents and developing their networks in order to display their work effectively and properly. When concerning this issue, Tim Leberecht’s “What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Artists” strongly supports that artists and right-minded thinkers are the demand for the world’s prosperity. Entrepreneurs need to appeal to an audience, predict trends, have grit, and be holistic with are all qualities that a great artist has (Leberecht).

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Both of these articles make significant connections between artists and entrepreneurship and contravene the social constructs that separate the business minded moguls and passion driven artisans.

Tim Leberecht’s “What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Artists” validates the artist by defining his qualities that makes him valuable as a businessman. Leberecht argues that in order to be a good entrepreneur, one must be creative and innovative like the artist. The artist is able to reinvent himself, appeal to an audience, and rely on intuition in order to predict trend, which all are attributes that leads the entrepreneur’s success.

In “Are Artists Entrepreneurs?”, Amit Gupta seems to conclude that artists have to be entrepreneurs. Gupta expresses that in order for an artist to be successful, he needs the proper resources and network that entrepreneurship helps create.

Artists are indeed entrepreneurs. They have to invest in themselves by practicing and learning skills that will help them communicate message or design to their audience. Artists need tough skin and must be prepared to hear the word ‘no’. They also must find the proper resources to help them broadcast their work effectively and properly. I think that artists are most defined by their humanist and story-telling attributes. In order to most effectively communicate to an audience, one must understand the audience’s drive and condition. An artist’s work appeals to the audience’s pathos and condition and relates to and pleases the audience in this manner. An additional characteristic that is essential for an artisan to have is grit. Art and communications is a very competitive and cutthroat field; an artist needs to keep pushing and be self-motivated in order to be successful.

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Apparently I’m very gritty with a score of 5. I do need to work on some things though. I think that I need to be more focused and manage my time a bit better. It is easy to get distracted, but so far I have been really good about that this whole week of school. Hopefully I am to stay motivated and keep myself humble enough to think of the big picture and a successful future.

          Flusser speaks about the dilemma of the modern man. He seems to think that the average man hesitates to ask the questions that would help him better and clearly define the world around him. I agreed with this standpoint. It seems that we, as a society, are wonderstruck by the glitters that we see online and on TV: Kim Kardashian, Instagram, Snapchat, or even trap music all loudly insinuate, “Look at my wonderful life!”, and many Americans channel their mind into these indulgences instead of looking past that and asking the bigger questions about life and the world we live in. I think that is unfortunate.

          However, when Flusser starts talking about the theory of color and black and white, he lost me for a bit. Black and white supposedly is only a theory and doesn’t really exist, but black and white photos exist. That idea in its entirety had my head going into overdrive, but as he continued to explain that the idea that many things that seem stark are not and that there are nuances and areas of uncertainty I began to understand a bit more. No person is completely a good nor bad in the same likeness that left and right are not definite but based on perspective. This reading makes me want to be more engaged and active in thinking from a third person perspective of what maybe be really happening in our world and not the latest crazes.

I started asking myself questions and thought about light. It’s amazing to think that without light there is no such thing as color. Then is started thinking about photography and how the camera is able to arrest these values of light in an image. The photographer is able to frame a scene from a set perspective and broadcast it to his viewers using his creativity and astonishment for his environment. The photographer creates a setting that is made up of many elements that composes the photo and gives it meaning using this play on light. A skilled photographer may have a message that has more value and morality than “look at my wonderful life”, but the blissfully ignorant man ignores this message.