Magazine Cover

Cloud Composite

     The big idea I was working with for this image was that of the Cyborg, as described in Sweeny's article. I understood the cyborg as a symbiosis between humans and technology. In this cyborg state, the mechanization would be imbued with humanity, and humanity in turn would be embedded with the broadening systems of communication and progress of technology. I saw in both modern technology and the concept of humanity and people themselves a network, a system. Both run along lines of electric impulses to function, to carry information and communicate. Our hearts and hard drives pump and heat to flow energy and life into body and spirit, whether it be of flesh and sinew or metal and plastic. To communicate my understanding of the cyborg visually, I created a composite image where the grid-map of the human body flows into the circuitry of a computer. At the center of the chip, whose circuits connect to the human brain, hinting at synapses, is a human heart receiving life-giving maintenance from a god-like human hand and tool. Two hands, one robotic and one human, shake at the bottom of the image inside of the human body, showing a bonding connection between technology and people.

Retouch

For the retouching project, I transformed myself into a dragonfly-human hybrid, resembling a pixie. I reformed my bone structure with highlights, altered the color of my skin to camouflage with an insect world, changed the makeup of my pupils and eye-shape, gave myself the implied ability to fly. The dragonfly itself often being a symbol of transformation, I used this assignment to explore the ways new technologies, like Photoshop, transform our perceptions and identities through images. By rearranging our physical appearances and viewing altered images under the pretense of reality, we make the natural into something fantastical. This transformation of reality and nature makes every picture a story, a kind of myth. This myth is then taken into ourselves as we translate it in relation to our identities and understandings. I'm interested in how this technology gives us the freedom to alter ourselves and how others understand us. At the same time, I think an image can be taken for granted as being natural truth, which presents a kind of danger in the confusion and false assumptions that we may make off of that pretense. It makes me think of Photoshop with a sense of whimsy and foreboding, much as I view fairy tales.

ASIMO by Honda

With no readings or specified posts for this week, I thought I'd share a quick video of ASIMO. ASIMO is a learning robot in continuing development from Honda.

Photoshop semiotocs

         The article prefaces itself with a lot of technical talk to set up a background for what it seemed to want to address. The author kept coming back to the idea of privacy in the classroom and the idea of reality in Photoshop. In terms of the concerns about privacy, most of it was directed at using pictures as documentation for educational researchers, and how Photoshop could possibly enable researches to get around the delicate subject of documenting minors and their artwork. Photoshop allows you to do things like alter or remove an image, so if say you scew a students face and make them visually anonymous, there might not be a legal problem in using them in research examples. To me, the more interesting idea was the concept of how to work with reality in the context of a classroom and Photoshop. Photoshop is a new technology, an specifically one with opportunities in the field of art. Because it works with photography, it asks us to take into account the uses of that art form. Traditionally, photography has been thought of as a means to capture an absolute image of reality-what is actual and seen. If, then, we consider the documentational purposes of the photograph and introduce this into the workings of Photoshop, we are posed with a question and options. What od we do with the knowledge and perception of reality once we have the capacity to alter? Photoshop allows the user the ability to perhaps make something "more" real, or more true to the reality that is felt. Photoshop allows teachers not only to get their students thinking about what reality is (in an aesthetic context or otherwise) but also acquaints them with a new technology skill and perception.

              The article also mentions the use of semiotics and hermeneutics, in relation to both art and Photoshop. In semiotics, it seems to ask how Photoshop alters social semiotics, or how we as a society understand symbols in visual form. Photoshop's alterings change images and the symbols they come with. If these are now the symbols we see prevailing in society, our understandings of these symbols and what they represent are changed. The hermeneutics, how we interpret these symbols, of this new batch of images should then be informed by the existence and capacities of Photoshop. It opens a new visual system of symbols and interpretations directly linked to the creator. This is not something entirely different from what various modes of art have done in the past- altered reality. Except that in the use of Photoshop the image is often a photograph, something that we associate with untampered visual truth. And this is far from the case. And so the use of Photoshop in the class room gives students the first hand experience and understanding of how an image and photograph is a lie, a lens that can help them better interpret their visual worlds.

Cloud Visuality

   Working from the idea of the Cyborg as my main big idea, I moved to explore themes like cybernetic, humanity, humans and technology, humans and robots, robot communities, prosthesis, artificial intelligence, humanoid, technology and community. Above are examples of my most successful cloud searches.












Prosthesis  

 Most people think of artificial limbs, such as leg,
when they hear the word prosthesis. And a large part of
what I found in temrs of images was true to that conception.
Other images though, showed a connection between technology
and prosthesis, special effects and prosthesis, community and
prosthesis, and just some generally less thought of parts
involving prosthetic. I search prosthesis out of the connection
between the artificial and human, part of the cyborg idea.                                          Artificial Intelligence

                                         Artificial intelligence also brought me to a lot of images of robotics. This extended to things that were designed, involved computing, and in one case were of a learning robot prototype, called Asimo, produced by Honda.





Humanity

 Most of the images I came across had to do with community, how people connect, in some cases on a large scale. Some other images seemed to point out the funny quirks that humanity has.








Human robot

I was hoping to find images that showed a direct link between humans and robots, and that's more or less what happened. I found images of networks and circuitry, of robotic and human hands juxtaposed, of the computer like network of nerve points on the human body, and an image of the book out of which modern cybernetics ideas generated from.

 

Towell and Smilan, and Hellman

The Towell and Smilan article seemed more or less a reiteration of what we have been discussing in class. The ideas for implementing methods of teaching visual literacy in a class room with a multicultural picture book component was perhaps the most useful aspect of the article for me. What was most interesting for me, though, was how the Trinidadian teachers involved in the workshop brought in their own unique dialect. Not in the workshop, but in the classroom, the teachers seemed to be very conscious of bringing in local culture to better engage the students. They still valued the importance of speaking proper English, as part of becoming a global citizen, but the importance of local and cultural community was still kept as a very important component of literacy and education. The teachers' value on heritage and cultural identity in education reminded me of what some of those in linguistics study, which is the way a culture and community forms the language. If one studies a language, they inevitable learn, and must learn, about the community it evolved from. The importance of retaining cultural literacy is then essential to education, if we are to teach communication and the ability to understand the ideas of others. The article also brought up the role and importance of thinking by analogy, a skill that I've always found a valuable way to learn and relate knowledge. In terms of multicultural children's literature, analogy can be a useful tool to help students relate to the book and to other cultures.
    
Hellman's article gave the titles to a few books I'm really interested in getting for my own pleasure, like the Black and White book that was mentioned, which dealt with reader-constructed narrative. The freedom she described in the character of the postmodern children's book appealed to me, much in the way I think it does to today's children and even adults. We live in a layered society, where the partitions that once dictated the differences and values between things like low and high art, cultures, and ages have been done away with and are now part of a more unified conglomeration. In this state, education finds itself in the midst of intertextual and cross-cultural reality. And because of all that the current now offers, we have the ability to pick and choose, which is what some of the postmodern children's book incorporate into the framework of the story. Like the books, this age is meta, self-reflective and referential. Because of their unique quality in being able to deal with many multifaceted themes at once, the perspectives that are sometimes neglected, like multiculturalism, have an opportunity to be involved int he mash-up of everything else.

Big Ideas and Sweeny's Cyborg

One of Sweeny's ideas that could be used as what Walker called a "big idea" is his conception of the cyborg. Sweeny's cyborg is one of his lines of sight, in this case where the human and the technology form an intertwining symbiosis with each other. Fostering not necessarily a dependence upon technology, but rather an interdependence with it, could be useful as a foundational basis for acquainting students with technology in the class room. Teaching students how to be a part of the technologically changing world and to work have it work with them can be a beneficial perspective for them. It will encourage them to open their minds and scopes to the possibilities of new technologies, while eliminating part of that element of the fear of change and perhaps making it easier for them to think of ways to combine art and technology. Seeing technology within ourselves, or ourselves in technology, can help us come to a more interactive and understanding place in our perspectives, thus allowing for new opportunities of progress and innovation.

           While thinking on this idea of seeing ourselves with and connected to/by technology, I thought of Aimee Mullins. Mullin's is a contemporary spokesperson for "handy-capable" people. A double amputee, missing both of her lower legs, Mullin's has a unique perspective on things like prosthesis. Her own manufactured and designed limbs enable her to do things that "normal" and biologically equipped people might not even be able to do. She can change her height, her appearance, her characteristics as a species to transform into a cheetah, potentially her ability to do things like run and jump as well. Her own "humanness" and her abilities are changed and in some ways enhanced by her cyborg transformation via prosthesis.

  Another thing the idea of the humanity involved int he cyborg was the movie Bicentennial Man, based off of an Isaac Asimov story by the same name, starring Robin Williams. Williams' character is an android who longs, like any other Pinocchio, to be a real human. As the movie progresses, he challenges the concept of what it is to be human. As a make-up of pure technology, what makes him artificial? What constitutes for genuine feeling, even if it is comprised of coding and algorithms, when our own brains are just as similar to computers but chemical instead? Is being human biological? If so, what about prosthetic limbs, plastic or implanted hearts? The android goes through great lengths to establish himself, legally, as a human. And well, I won't give away the ending.





The movie A.I. goes into similar explorations through the experiences of an android suited to be a child, though with a less optimistic outcome.