Chapter 4 part 1

I found behold the stone age, silent music and invisible art to be a very interesting essays to read. Out of the two what intriged me the most was the essay on silent music and invisible art. Did i spell intirged right? I don’t know, i’m a really terribe speller, it kind of runs in the family. Laugh out Loud, but not really. Anyway getting back to my point that I was starting to make earlier, Invisible Art and Silent music was a very interesting read. How do I feel about this? Well i believe that if no one else ever sees your work then it is still considered art. It can be very sentimental to the artist. I believe that when one person is trying to make art it doesn’t matter if anyone sees it. As long as the artist is pleased with his work. For some reason I just the of the Simpsons episode when Homer releases all of the animals from the zoo and floods the entire town as art. Of course everyone saw it but it was a pretty interesting idea. lol. Sure invisible art and silent music may be an oxymoron, i like that word, oxymoron, but when you look at the word in context it starts to make sense. Before reading this essay I would have believed it to be a stupid thing, impossible even, but this essay showed me that invisible art and silent music are very real things. They are part of reality even tho the work stays with only the artist instead of sharing it with the world.
Behold the Stone Age was also quite an interesting read. I found it quite interesting to read about art from way back when. Art has always been a thing that has kept interest to me so much. I love looking at art and just pondering about it. Ilove to listen to new songs that I never heard of. That is why these two essays were so interesting to me. I also find it interesting that there are still many more caves out there to be found that hold ancient art on their walls… just the thought of it kind of excites me. Very good read indeed!

LAST READERS RESPONSE

This is the last readers response we have to do for the first year wrinting comp class for the sememter. I must say that I really did enjoy reading all the essays in the World of the Image. I found it to be a very great and all the essays were very entertaining to read. The first section for the last week of reading for the class dealt with reality versus what is fake in arhetecture. Now of days there are buildings like in Las Vegas such as the Monte Carlo and New York, New York that take place of the acctual places. It stated that people will go to an attraction like las vegas instead of going to the actual place. In my case I would love to go to both. I would love to go see the Pyrimids of Giza one day and I have already been to Las Vegas. I don’t think that new archetecture is taking place of the acctual experience of the place because such as the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas is an experience of it’s own. So i don’t believe at all that a place like Las Vegas can take people away from other attractions. they also talked about New York, New York which i have visited both the city and the hotel casino in Las Vegas, they are two totally different experience but I loved both of them. The next section was about called… someone’s Power, for the life of me i can’t remember the name of it but i do remember it was some kind of complex name. lol. Oh, i shouldn’t be using lol but it is a freewrite so i guess it is ok. I found this section to be very interesting but I didn’t really have an opinion on it. It was interesting to read how the guy fell in love with his sculpture and prayed to the gods that they would create a woman in her image. I also enjoyed the quote at the beginning of the section.
My expectations for the last section were high, I expected the book to end with like the best essay ever written, instead we get some boring essay that was written in the 1930′s a bit dissapointing… yes it was indeed. What i did find interesting is how the camera man takes his shots to give an emotional connection with his audience. But I really didn’t find the last section too interesting. but overall i think that The World of the Image was a really great interesting book!

Ch. 5 Part 2

This weeks reading was quite interesting yet again. In the first section it was talking about how homosexuality is portrayed in cartoons. I have no had a problem with homosexuals and i’m not to sure why people do. They treat them differently like they’re not human just because they don’t match up to the media’s standards. Apprently people don’t want to get children the idea to think that being gay is an ok thing so they don’t want that portrayed through the media. This is only giving children the idea to exclude people who are differnt from them from their lives. Just like proposition 8 in California, this is supposed to be a country where we are free yet we are restricting something that is really just pointless to restrict. But that’s my thoughts on that. The second section was ok. It talked about Reality Tv and how it revolutionized television but it is also already going down hill. I love Big Brother, I’ve watched pretty much every season and i think it is totally hilarious. They did mention the show Big Brother a couple of times within the essay as well as survivor and other reality Tv shows. I’m not sure why but i do love to watch reality tv shows just because i think they’re hilarious even the ones that are scipted like that stupid MTV show Parental Control. That is by far the most scripted show i have seen in my life with terrible actors, but i guess that helps make the show funny. As for the last section was yet another essay what what is considered to be art. I didn’t find this essay any different then the other essays with the book that talked aboout what is considered to be art. What it really comes down to is that if a person makes it then it is considered art. More than half of the time it won’t even be good, not even a little bit, but it still art either way. I know that i am a terrible artist. It really is just sad. THis weeks reading was ok, but i’m the group leader for the discussion tomorrow and i hope that i do lead a good discussion

Ch. 5 (first two sections)

This was a really short section that we had to read this week. I didn’t think that the first section on patron art was that exciting. It was ok to read about the uncle Sam poster but that’s about it.
Now as for the second section section I found alot more interesting. Hitler really was one of the greatest most terrifying and harsh rulers of all time. I really didn’t know that Hilter was so much into art. But now that i think about it he did have to put alot of effort into his propaganda to really keep control of the people. I do know that he chose the swastika for a very specific reason and i also remember hearing about how the swastika was used in everyday society until Hilter twisted the sign and made people think it is something evil instead it use to mean unity and peace. I did find this section to be very interesting although it wasn’t my favorite section to read. Well i hope the discussion is interesting tomorrow. I’m sure it will be because it usually is.

Ch. 3 Freewrite writers responce

Chapter 3 talked about webcams and symbols that are used in our society and just to warn you now i am a terrible speller so without word i’m probably gonna butcher most words. When I was reading this though all i could thing was that will all of these cameras everywhere people have access to everything we do almost every second of the day unless we’re out in the middle of nowhere where no has a camera on us, but even then we still aren’t too sure. Everywhere we go whether it is on the road or even in a hotel there is a camera on us all the time. This also makes me think of cell phones because it is like we are always available and with this it is like we never get alone time or time to ourselves because this chapter make it sound like a camera is on us all the time no matter where we are. We come a long way in technology in the past 20 years and who know where we’ll be in the next 20 years. All these webcams everywhere just feel like an invasion of privacy but i guess that they do do some good too like they catch robbers or people that run red lights. So i suppose that there is some good to these webcams, but oonly a little bit.

This process of writing felt really wierd for me because i was not able to look at the screen and see what i was writing and it was extremely hard to keep my pinky away from the back space button. I’m not going to lie i did hit the backspace button a couple of times because it’s just a reflex that happens during typing and it is almost impossible to stop unless you are really concentrating or going slow enough to make, and also by not looking at the screen it felt like i was writing a message to one of my friends so i was tempted to put an “lol” in some areas but i remembered that i couldn’t do that for school, and i was just tempted to do it again. The freewrite does keep a stream of conciousness and idea going but at the very same time it just feels like i’m writing something that is very sloppy. i wonder if we will be talking about doing the freewrite during the discussion tomorrow. Well my time is up so i’m going to publish this now.

Ch. 2 part 2. Writer’s response

The Second part of Chapter 2 in The World of the Image by Trudy Smoke and Alan Robbins discussed body decorations, photography throughout the ages with a focus on African American families, and a new way for witnesses to pick suspects. I’m happy to say that the essays in this book are getting more and more interesting as the reading continues.
Out of the three sections from the reading I would have to say the most interesting was The Body Jigsaw: Borrowing Body Decoration from other Cultures by Philippe Liotard, which brought up many interesting points such as how the punk scene started in Britain in 1976. One of the things that was going through my mind while I was reading this section was if people got tattoos to label themselves in a certain group or to show their identity. Reading about the origin of tattoos and piercings was also very interesting to read about. The word “Westernization” was brought up several times throughout this section which refers to such things as the average Californian being a surfer and having a muscular bronzed body. In high school I remember my high school teacher telling us the some people in this world stereotype Californian’s exactly like this. For example, when I went on a cruise to Mexico and on this cruise I met and talked to several different people that lived all across America. I used the word “hella” to emphasize and word and someone asked me if I was from California.
In the section Visual History and African-American Families of the Nineteenth Century by Donna M. Wells I also found interesting but not as interesting as the section before it. I did enjoy reading about how photography has transformed throughout the years and how the photographs were made. I had no idea the African-American’s had such an impact in early photography. I was also surprised to read that the first black photographer, John B. Washington was the first black photographer and became a member of the Felix Lodge in 1865. I was just surprised that an African-American was accepted into a group in Washington D.C. in the 1800’s. It was nice to read that there was some integration starting at that time.
New Jersey Trying a New Way for Witnesses to Pick Suspects by Gina Kolata and Iver Peterson was another interesting section to read (like I’ve said that I have enjoyed this week’s reading). I agreed with what they had to talk about. I agree that showing a witness suspect pictures instead of having a line up eliminates the biases that may turn up during a line up.

Chapter 2 Writers Response

In chapter two of The World of the Image by Trudy Smoke and Alan Robbins titled Mirroring Ourselves discusses how an attractive physical appearance will lead to people going further in their life. As tragic as that statement is I would have to agree with it because people that tend to be beautiful or handsome are usually favored more in life.

The first section, Equation for Beauty Emerges in Studies by Daniel Goleman first talked about the structure of humans faces and what is considered beauty. As I was reading this I immediately thought of The Ventruvian Man created by Leonardo Da Vinci because he created it to show how the perfect human should be structured and how the perfect symmetry of a person creates beauty. Much of the section talked about just this. “In the last two decades, psychologists have come to realize that physical attractiveness, in males as well as females, carries with it an impressive array of social and psychological benefits – from getting more attention from teachers in childhood, to earning more money in adulthood.”, as stated by Daniel Goleman (pg. 42). Even though things such as education shouldn’t be affected by our physical appearance it is sad to say that it is. I definitely saw this while I was growing up and now that I reflect on it, it disgusts me that people that are more attractive do get more attention in school.

In the second section of our reading Never Just Pictures by Susan Bordo discussed the harsh reality of how our society is completely involved in self image. It was depressing to read about people who believe they have to be anorexic to be pretty and how our society has accepted this as beauty. I would have to say one of the most disturbing quotes I read was, “If I had to say my anorexia was about any single thing, I would have said it was about living without desire. Without longing of any kind.”, which was quoted from Stephanie Grant’s, The Passion of Alice (pg. 51). I believe that our personal desires each make us who we are and if we strip ourselves of that it takes our character away from us.

This chapter was a much more interesting than the first chapter but even though I did enjoy reading it I still found it to be a bit disturbing. I find it sad that people must take drastic measures just to consider themselves beautiful. It would be a much better world if people can conform to focus on inner beauty instead of only looking at the surface.

Writers Response on Chapter 1: The World of the Image

In the first chapter of The Real World of Image by Trudy Smoke and Alan Robbins presents five different points that described how our vision works, how we can improve our vision, how our eyes piece together images and how our eyes fill in blind spots among several other key topics that have to do with our vision. I believe that a lot of valid points were made throughout the first chapter such as exercises people can do to improve their vision, but there were also other ideas that I thought to be dramatically over exaggerated . As this chapter explained vision and how it has such a great impact on our life it made me realize the large role our eyes do play in our lives.

In the second section of the chapter called Seeing and Awareness written by Deborah Curtiss, talked about how we can improve our foveal, peripheral, and scanning vision. As I was reading through this chapter I trying out some of the techniques myself, I would have to agree that these exercises will be able to put our eyes to their full use. According to Deborah Curtis, “An expanded and strengthened use of our eyes to perceive the visual world with interest, breadth, and depth, can lead to expanded metal capacity as well” (Curtiss, pg. 9). I have only tried each of these exercises once but I want to continue practicing them because I do truly believe that by focusing our vision we will become more aware of our world around us.

In the third section of the chapter called The Vision Thing: Mainly in the Brain written by Denise Grady, touched on points of lighting, blind spots and how our brain fills in the things we can’t exactly see. A key topic in this chapter was also how the lighting in our world controls our vision. Anstis created goggles that reversed the lighting causing her to the world just like a photo negative and after a couple of days she lost interest in food because it no long appeased to her anymore (pg. 11). I think that it would be crazy to how my vision reversed, even though it would only be a visual transition, would have a great effect on my outlook on this world just as Anstis did.

I would have to say that the most interesting section in the whole chapter would be When Babies Become Aware of Themselves by Mark Pendergrast as he writes about the development of babies and how their self image is part of shaping their lives. This section talked about how self-awareness helps us become who we are as people. Although I would think of this idea to be somewhat conceited I have to agree with it to some extent. Self-awareness helps us build confidence.

The fourth section however I didn’t exactly agree with and found to be a little over the top. Seeing by Annie Dillard brought up a point that I found hard to believe. Such as when I was reading about the little girl that was born blind and then she had a surgery to recover her eyes. She at first saw the world as a beautiful thing but at times she would scream in terror that she was afraid because she now how the ability of sight.

I would have to say that this first chapter was an interesting read and I am happy to expand my knowledge on the act of seeing. Although I don’t agree with all the theories I always enjoy reading or hearing about what other people have to say.