Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Seeing Visual Culture, Name: Felicia Wang Disclaimer: Hi Rachel, I'…

- - - - Smith, “Photography, Darkness, and the Underground Railroad
        
        Bey, Night Coming Tenderly
        
        The obsession with skin tone is the fundamental principle behind racism. The belief that a race is inferior and deserves to be enslaved has had impacts that resound across generations. The slaves that ran away attempted to create a better life for future generations.
  - - - New special effects that allowed Glinda to come to Dorothy in a bubble was much like the advancements that allowed Bergman to merge Alma and Elisabet's faces.
  - - - Simpson's collage style prints are made possible from modern computers and printers. She curates the parts of her art from magazines, which are also printed. This layering of printed material (icebergs and picture of women) echo the layering of blue as a representation of sorrow, water, sky, and nighttime.
      - "There's blue or blues in the nocturnal" refers to the blues, a genre of music that stems from a lot of pain from the times of slavery. These layers on top of each other are like oppressors burying the oppressed, or issues of powerless people being covered up by the mainstream. The experience and powerlessness of slaves cannot be understood at a glance. Likewise, there are many layers of pain that all conglomerate into one experience for someone.
      - Ultimately, Simpson's paintings engages in race and talks about the trauma and difficulties that African Americans had to face.
  - - - As Paglen puts it, “We no longer look at images–images look at us. They no longer simply represent things, but actively intervene in everyday life.” This inversion highlights the dual nature of power. There's always 2 sides to a coin. Being powerful does not mean you can not be overpower by the very being you thought you had power over before. While we believe we invented machines are exploiting them, we cannot be certain they will not be exploiting us in the future.
- - - - This light that we observe and are in awe of allow us to appreciate the world we live in much more.
  - - - Every person who looks can harness a bit of the power of light in illuminating the world. "Who owns it? You, who look, not to be held, but known." Knowledge can be power, for through every art piece, "every evening we unfold the light, and every morning, fold it back to return the blue to the sky" in the little opening.
    - - Being able to manipulate light to change the way we view a certain frame or object is a product of our advanced technology.
  - - - Melville believes white can be ghastly, a dumb blankness, yet "full of meaning..." This contradictory binary opposition leads us to question what whiteness really means.
  - - - Sharing the symmetry, both works play with shadows on white backgrounds.
  - - - These paintings are an example of "white images" that the art world is so fascinated with. The absence of color can denote cleanliness, purity, emptiness, but should we strive for these values?
  - - - This emphasis of white glow as like a goddess places value of race and color in an hierarchy.
        
        Not only are we seeing black bodies being belittle and exploited, it is compounded with the fact that women's bodies are being sexualized on film.
  - - - Black women who were left out of proper development of photos due to inherited bias of cameras and Shirley cards felt the double dagger of race and gender. They expected even more so to look good because they are women, but have a disadvantage as women of color.
      - Camera technology and getting the right lighting shows that technology is not racist, rather it is the standards that humans adjust the lens to that is racist.
  - - - Mama Ayo wearing blue as she gives Adenike fertility beads accentuates fertility's presence.
      - The struggle of Adenike to become pregnant and her subsequent feelings of powerlessness over her situation, being the one that must keep the secret the son she bears is not her husband's, highlight the pressures put on women in relationships.
  - - - The tyrannical white purges out color to assert its own virtue and therefore purity, power, and dominance.
        
        The notion that color "corrupts" reveals again, the paradigmatic argument that white is the pinnacle of perfection, and any color will pollute it, even to the point of black.
  - - - There's a certain quality of a color, such as blue, that hits the skin, which conveys emotion. Because the blue smoothly blankets over character's faces or shoulders or arms, it is able to permeate throughout the character and demonstrate a sense that the character is washed over with that specific emotion.
        
        Mavor, excerpt from Blue Mythologies
        
        By eating the blue lollipop of her child, Julie is essentially swallowing her whole to entomb her inside of her again. This subsumption is Julie's way of controlling her grief and taking back her child.
- - - - H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind”
        
        A surgical operation would allow Nuñez to be "blind". The inversion flips what we consider to be the end goal of advanced medical techniques. While in our world we use surgery to make the blind sighted, in the country of the blind, surgery makes sighted men blind.
    - - Ellison, "Invisible Man"
        
        Because the narrator is invisible, he is able to siphon electricity from the rest of the city. He uses this to his advantage.
  - - - Didion, “Los Angeles Notebook”
        
        The violent extremes of weather lends to the unpredictability and even a liminal state that comes during a natural disaster where humans do not know if they are half a foot into the afterlife.
  - - - Both invisibility and hypervisibility are damaging for people of color. This inversion of what's good and what is bad is jarring because one realizes that in reality, it doesn't matter whether you are invisible or hypervisible sometimes. Rather, you realize that only when you're of color and you are either invisible or hypervisible is it "bad".
        
        “I DO NOT ALWAYS FEEL COLORED”
        “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND”
        These statements highlight the powerlessness that people of color have in their visibility in the world. The struggle they face of being visible and hypervisible and being disregarded and scrutinized both ways shows the powerlessness society imposes on them.
    - - Dyer, “White”
        
        “All three films share a perspective that associates whiteness with order, rationality, rigidity, qualities brought out by the contrast with black disorder, irrationality and looseness. It is their take on this which differs. Simba operates with a clear black-white binarism...” This rigid viewpoint that white is good and black is bad is detrimental and imposes a binary viewpoint of race and human variety, which is not true. There are many races and white is not order while black is disorder. The duality simplifies the human experience.
    - - Sexton, “All Black Everything”
        
        Blackness crosses with gender and class to create unique lived experiences.
    - - The myth of black people as not intelligent or smart and thus met with prejudices and discrimination is clear in Fanon's life.
        
        This harmful assignments of valued traits is what people of color deal with on a daily basis.
  - - - To control light is a source of power. Illuminating different truths allow you to write history and show the world what you want to show.
      - Our attempts to control light is a reflection on our thirst for power over our surroundings, our world, and our truth. The embedded nature of light as a metaphor in our spoken language is just one example of how light anchors the way we navigate in our surroundings.
      - Light and darkness belong to a view of the world that is dualistic, two sided, forces opposed.
    - - The cave is a place where ignorant people, and because they are ignorant, powerless people, stay, in the illusion that the shadows on the wall are the very things they depict.
  - - - Turner Stoichita, “A Short History of the Shadow"
        
        The technology and innovation in using shadows to represent and draw the human figure shows the progression in humans being able to harness their surroundings and use them to their advantage to represent objects in real life.
    - - Foucault, “Panopticism”
  - - - The truth is twisted, and he who controls what is perceived as the truth is the one with power. In this case, the shadow is able to make his version of the truth the bringer of death for the learned man.
  - - - Like Batchelor, Corbussier discusses the notion that whiteness is purity, morality, perfection and beauty. But is it really? Why must we all think against a background of white?
      - "We have in us an unfailing imperative which is the sense of truth and which recognizes in the smoothness of Ripolin and the white of whitewash an object of truth. The object of truth radiates power."
      - Ripolin, the white paint, allowed people to see dirt and expose anything colored. This is like a colored person standing against a white background and feeling exposed.
      - Our technologies to expose the color and the "unclean" casts a harsh light and makes nonwhite entities hypervisible.
    - - Batchelor, “Whitescapes”
  - - - Having body cameras on law enforcement that are able to surveil individuals in a population can be used for bad or good. But either way, it encroaches on the privacy of people. All Light Everywhere discusses the potential ramifications of having cameras everywhere and the sad reality that when it comes to survival, a camera won't stop any behavior, it will only capture it.
  - - - These 2 are an interesting sex flip. Calle is a woman, and traditionally, is not part of a sex that one would imagine when they first think of a stalker. However, she can be just as, or even more intrusive as Acconci, even crossing into personal spaces to watch her target.
        
        Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne (1981)
- - - - Minh-Ha, “The Image and the Void”
        
        “With this in mind, and with an expansive approach to both ‘activism’ and the ‘visual’, what follows are a few examples of the work of multiplicity in resistance − via the seen, the barely seen, and the unseen; in the between, the margins, and the borders of visible reality; and through the power of blanks, holes, silences, and empty spaces.”
    - - Lewis, Using Black to Paint Light
        
        The expansiveness of blue as a color and its vast influence that swallows you up like waves in a turbulent ocean are further reiterated by Lewis: “I am blue. I am a frozen blue ocean. I am a wave struck cold in midair. The wave is nude beneath her blue dress. Her skin is blue.”
    - - Python, “How Not to be Seen” (1971)
        
        Becoming completely hidden is the end goal, and will allow one to survive, just like how the narrator survived because no one noticed him siphon electricity and live in his underground room.
    - - Steyerl, How Not to be Seen (2013)
        
        Utilized are markers that the United States Air Force used in their technology to measure how large objects were on the ground from the sky. The increased use of cameras and being able to take pictures of all surfaces of the Earth shows human advancement and the entrance into a new age of surveillance.
  - - - Kleege, “Molyneaux Redux”
        
        A theme that follows is the exploitation of blind people, and how the researchers did not care about the girl, only seeing her as a lab rat.
    - - Visionists believe “that the differences between the sighted and the blind must be almost incomprehensibly vast, and that vision is a fundamental aspect of human existence.” But this isn’t true for blind people, for they do not see themselves as “deficient or partial – sighted people minus sight – but whole human beings who have learned to attend to their non-visual senses in different ways”. Again, there exists a spectrum, it cannot be just totally blind or totally sighted (but what even is this?).
        
        This incomprehensibly vast difference was also viewed with a polarity: that sighted was stronger and above the non-sighted.
    - - Sacks, “The Mind’s Eye"
        
        We need to stop thinking of sight as good and powerful, and blindness as bad and powerless, but instead as each having their own unique properties and ways of navigating the world around us.
        
        Like the experience of blind people in Sack's article, the blind girl in Kleege's hypothetical has her own unique way of experiencing the world around her which should not be diminished
    - - LaFarge, “Colors/Black”
        
        This inbetweeness
    - - Weems, Colored People, Slow Fade to Black
        
        Taking reign of the representation of black people is an important step in eradicating the invisible/hypervisible dichotomy seen in Rankine's Citizen.
    - - Popova, "19th Century Insight into the Psychology of Color and Emotion"
        
        The way the color wheel is oriented and structured follows color theory and results in an aesthetically pleasing presentation of colors.
        
        Albers reveals the anatomical workings of the eye by showing us how to trick the eye into thinking 1 color is 2, 2 colors are 1, or have things appear transparent.
        
        Albers, excerpts from Interaction of Color
        
        Knowing these phenomenon with color allow artists to create beautiful and mind boggling works of art.
    - - Daston and Galison, “The Color of Subjectivity”
        
        "Sensory physiologists soon anchored the new terminology of 'objective' and 'subjective' phenomena in practices of inquiry developed to explore the distinction.
    - - Jarman, “Into the Blue”
        
        Is blue fading into black or is black lightening up into blue? This 2 way street, in limbo in an in-between state, poses questions about the nature of blue, ultimately.
        
        While "The earth is blue. The virgin's mantle is the bright blue sky", so much of earth is blue, blue is the color of lingering, and the last color before death, the color that is in the threshold of life and death.
      - Jarman, Blue (1993)
        
        The uncomfortable blue screen with the ominous voiceovers in the background is allowing the viewers to get a glimpse, even an ounce, of how uncomfortable it is to come to terms with having AIDS and dying because of it. Jarman's Blue is a film about dying, both for oneself and loved ones around them.
      - Klein states that "blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not." Whereas other colors are connected with physiology, "blue suggests at most the sea and sky". This specialness and expansiveness of blue may speak to its association with crossing over to the other side.
        
        Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial”
        
        The overwhelming nature of blue harkens to the blue water of the pool that swallowed up Julie when she immersed herself in her grief. It is something that you drift into and the expansiveness of it is something that Julie finds herself unable to escape.
  - - - Rodney, Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice
        
        Simpson is reclaiming power of how black women are represented through her repurposing of pictures of black women in her collages. Along with text printed around the image which tells you how to read the body, "the fragments [she used] are like a stammering or murmuring of sense shaking itself loose from the maelstrom of object meeting abstraction, of documents of exploration meeting painterly inference — all this stirring in the arctic ice."
  - - - Bergman, Persona (1966)
        
        The black and white also emphasizes the binary nature of black and white films. However, that blurs too, as shades of gray, played out from the translucent and billowing curtains, rub together the black and the white.
        
        Black and white film and post filming edits allowed Bergman to play with shades of black and white and merge Alma and Elisabet's faces.
  - - - This spectral quality of color sits along the color wheel. Traversing the color wheel will bring you to every color and back to the starting point.