Week 03- Images and The Real
https://newhive.com/manopb/what-is-an-image?
Discussion homework
What is an image? What kind of reality is an image?
Representation
What does a painting depict?
Painting: relation with a visible reality- painting as rendering
Medieval paintings represent the “order” of the world
Renaissance perspective, baroque
Painting also implicitly depicts and communicate a particular relation/understanding of reality. Renaissance paintings conveyed powerful messages about the new place occupied by humans in the new world.
Photography- the pencil of nature. The notion that Photography could give us un-mediated access to a fragment of the real created the conditions for the advent of documentary and scientific photography
“Travelers, you will soon be able, perhaps, at the cost of some hundreds of francs, to acquire the apparatus invented by M. Daguerre, and you will be able to bring back to France the most beautiful monuments, the most beautiful scenes of the whole world. You will see how far from the truth of the Daguerreotype are your pencils and brushes.”
What is the image of today?
In class:
Love, hate, anger, envy, rage, happiness…
Homework
The image of the image
The representation of “something”–AKA “A”– for example, in this lecture the “something” was an “apple”, is actually focusing on the concept of this “apple” in all its extremities, and the representation– therefore the “B” is the concentrated abstraction or depiction of one side/phase/aspect of the “apple” concept. What “B” is, depends entirely on the individual experiences of the artist– how they’ve experienced this concept throughout their life, or how they’ve observed this concept being experienced in the environment or society the artist finds themselves in.
Is “A” real or imagined? In my opinion, it is never one or the other, it is somewhere in between. The “real” behind “A” must be traced back to nature or the natural in order for it to be “real” although “reality” is also a manifestation of our mind, and how it controls our perception of the world around us– but that could be another conversation entirely on its own. The imagined aspect of “A” is anything we have created around this “natural” thing. The “nature/natural” component must be rooted from/a product of the planet/land we live on, that which we can never truly control, that which we can only observe and learn, as it is a force of life in and of itself–existent before us and will continue to exist after us.
I believe in order to reach a deep and intricate emotional reaction from an audience as an artist, the artist must be fully comfortable and aware of the fact that nothing around us is “real” as we visually perceive it, the world is not at all how we think it is, yet in order to create something that can reach the audience one must find a balance– to be able to use the tools we have within our perceived “reality” and also be able to reach beyond this perception, reach beyond these limits, go beyond just the things our eyes tell our brain we are seeing, and create a new language to be able to communicate the extremities of our feelings. This is why I believe abstraction is so effective in doing this.
Today we discussed the relationship between a “thing” and something that is being used to represent it. We structured this in an “A -> B” relationship, where A is influencing B, but the two are separate entities. From this, we talked about whether or not there is such a thing as reality. I believe that there is a sort of global reality, but that indeed no one can truly experience it in its purest sense because everything we experience is filtered through our own personal view of the world, which transforms what we perceive into our own versions of it.
That said, it seems that there are enough aspects of our “personal realities” that overlap such that we can experience the same or similar things. For example, we might all see a picture of an apple and have different memories associated with an apple, but there will likely be shared aspects of our feelings towards such an experience as well. These differences, as well as similarities, are part of what make us human.
At the beginning of class, we looked at everyone’s “apple abstraction” images, where we were asked to represent the sensory feelings of an apple in a less representational and more abstract way. It was interesting to see a very vast range of approaches to this challenge. While some students still chose to use representational symbols in their pieces, others took a totally abstract approach. Some apples encouraged feelings of disgust (such as the .gif video of the rotting apple), while others looked both edible and tasty. Other images made students think of fruits other than apples, and some images focused more on the tech company, Apple, than the apple fruit. Overall, there was an interesting range in interpretations which illustrates how we can experience the same thing… or the same “reality” … in very different ways.