Understanding: that is all I ask!

With my poster design I decided to tackle the issues dealing with the Muslim and Christian worlds. I feel that many biases and much hatred could be resolved, peacefully, with understanding. I think if both parties would realize that we are all just trying to be good people tolerance would increase. I posted my picture near a Mosque, a church not of my faith, my church, by the library (where there is usually a lot of religious bickering), and on a stairwell. I know that we can get to this place of understanding, but it will be a climb. You can do some reading here!

Uninspiring Places

I had way too much fun finding places for this poster. It started out being a huge chore after I got off of work at 5 pm today, Monday, before it is due tomorrow, Tuesday. Now this may sound like procrastination, but in fact, I had to cover for my boss all weekend at work. Anyway. The only copier I knew of on campus WASN'T letting people copy anymore, SO IF IT WAS BECAUSE OF EVERYONE ELSE IN HERE, THANK YOU! I wouldn't have had as much fun if I could have installed it correctly. So, for my "installations," which was just me bringing my finished crescent board to random places, I had very good reasons for each of my photographs. I brought it to places that I didn't like, for very good reasons in my own mind, and that worked better in the end. I was originally going to post the posters just on boards and lightposts and things like that, places that get heavy traffic but not necessarily any specific area. Instead, I had the mean homeless man hold the board, and I conned the Starbuck's Kids into smiling for my malicious photograph, and I photographed it outside of AlphaGraphics, because they refused to copy it for me because I hadn't had time to spray it with fixatif. And that makes more sense anyways, because all of those things to me were very uninspiring, so they added a sense of irony and a message of small change to my seemingly silly poster. As annoying as the installation part of it started out being, it really made my night.

Child Abuse

My issue that I choose was child abuse. I knew I didn't want to use children that were hurt in my pictures, but wasn't sure how to portray child abuse and neglect in another way. I decided to go with everyday pictures because that is the majority of the kids that are abused or neglected, everyday ordinary kids. You might not know from the surface that a child is being abused. While i came across some shocking statistics I wanted to bring it down to a common fact that one might not think about when they are abusing their children and that is the future of the child. While I have a hard time understanding how anyone can hurt a child, especially after having a child of my own, it is an issue that is happening all across america. I have an hard time watching and looking at the ads that show beat up kids and the facts are often lost because I simply don't want to look at the pictures. I wanted to use some color so I choose the red for the title on the top because of its emotional effect. I also stuck with the bleached out colors because I wanted it to sort of have that real feel and not something that is too bold. The children are being placed second when they are abused so it kind of gives them a drifted off look. I had a hard time with the colors on this project because when too much color was added into the background it took away from the pics but then it got an overall faded look. I wanted the cement look though and since it was about being in prison and abused it needed an more sober look to it. I do think that my poster portrays what I am trying to say, since there is so many aspects to child abuse I feel there is so much that could be done and one poster just doesnt portray everything but its a start!

What's Hurting California

For my poster I brought forth the issue of politics hurting California right now. From my stand point, The legislation of California are taking away effortlessly from those in need. For example, money is being taken out from public school systems, and also from the teachers that our educating our youth. There has even been discussion of taking away welfare in the state of California, or lowering the amount of welfare given. I feel that that taking away from Californians is not the correct thing to do, but instead working on a way to settle this debt without taking away from those who need it.

Limitless Display of Music on MTV

When I hear about kids watching MTV, I literally see them watching TV and their brain cells are turning to mush. The phrase "TV rots your brain" comes to a whole new meaning with this garbage. Honestly, I'm really tired of always hearing about the stupid new jokes that kids and teenagers watch on MTV. The stuff they broadcast on there is so provocative and annoying. Is this generation really attracted to watching girls fight and complain about how one girl slept with the other girl's ex-boyfriend but really he just got the other girl pregnant the night before? Really? Or how about watching people go to the club every night and just get "totally smashed!" Well there's also the fact of judging people by their weight and calling them "grenades" or the best friend that brings this girl along and calling her a "grenade launcher." I'm completely appalled by this display of rude, vulgar activity. And to top things off, the company that produces these circus-like shows is called Music Television. Unless you decide you want to wake up for a couple hours around four or five in the morning, MTV will not be showing any music. My personal favorite way of keeping the music gig going is the fifteen second display of a music video in between shows. All I have to say to MTV is if your goal was to degrade the lives of children and teenagers who will soon be adults and have them be knocked up, in debt, alcohols, drug addicts, and general sluts and assholes, congratulations! You have succeeded. Anyways, hopefully this art project will be the start of many and people will start to get the message,"Where's the music?"

Super Size Me opening

My Burger Poster

During unit 4 we have been learning about emotional/symbolic color and how color affects how people feel. For my project I decided to create a poster that had to the do with the rapid rate of obesity in America. Not only are adults becoming obese but young children around the country are as well. People in America don't realize what exactly is being put in their food at different fast food restaurants but seem to not care because it taste good, right? My poster presents a giant burger stacked with tasty foods as well as stuff that is not edible. I'm just trying to say people will eat anything that a major fast food business has to offer, but are oblivious to what is actually hidden in the food that is being served. I just want to show an awareness! The reason I picked this issue was because of watching the movie "Super Size Me", it changed how I look at fast food now. Check out this short clip!

TED video

A really interesting aspect of the talk was the perception of color related to evolution. I attempted to look up some more info on it and found the Munsell Color Science laboratory page 'Ask a Color Scientist' which answered a couple questions, why do we have color vision? what environmental factors encouraged the survival of individuals with color vision? Also this website they had a link to was interesting.

One of the answers that was interesting was that evolutionary advantages of sensing changes in illumination (that came along with the development of cones sensitive to a variety of wavelengths) was to better respond to changes in weather and time of day. Perception of red-green differences was advantageous to improving the ability to find ripe food, which usually varies in color from surrounding vegetation.

None of that really answers the question Miranda and Mario were asking, but I was wondering that too. It is just interesting to see the evolutionary aspect and maybe this info can be related to why color change based on background would be associated with our evolutionary perception of the world. Taking what Lotto said, that the association and what we do behaviorally with information we receive (retinal information or otherwise) is what is really important, then background affects color perception because the distinctions between vegetation and differently colored predators or food was behaviorally advantageous. I guess even though this makes sense to me it doesn't explain why similar colors will display differently depending on the background or why that is.

Color Video

The Beau Lotto Color Optical Illusions video was definitely a lot more interesting than I expected it to be since I didn't know that there was a lot of shocking things that could be done with different color schemes and how colors were arranged. I really liked how he took the same color and just changed the background lighting and it changed the top color right away. One of the most amazing things that I felt was portrayed in this video was how color was able to be translated into sound. What even amazed me more was that a visually impaired person was able to understand what color was being heard from the sound. Another thing I really liked that Beau Lotto said was that uncertainty was equal to understanding. This statement is very open ended but what I got from it in comparison to color is that there are a million different ways to put colors together, but once you do then you can understand the different ways they work and don't work.

Wow

This video really hit the spot for me. i love the idea of that what the mind percieves is not always completely right. This is just proof of that. The illusions they did were amazing and incredibly interesting to me. Its just amazing that what you see can be altered. It really proves that not everything we see is the truth. The body is an amazing thing but to me its even more amazing that the entire life we live is subjective to ourselves.

Color Video

I am a big fan of optical illusions. the video that we watched during class was very intriguing into the world of optical illusions and how are minds perceive color and how these perceptions can easily altered or changed. Even though its hard to accept the optical illusions from tangible reality, its kind of fun to allow your vision to be altered and to see your visual through alternative lights and experience color in new ways. I'm excited to further independently study optical illusions with color and have more usage of them throughout my work

Ted Talks

This video was very interesting in some of the optical illusions. I also agree with Emery, the red and green coloring that switched was awesome. it was also interesting how if you put the color on different backgrounds, black or white, it looks like a totally different color. I have to say though I am with Taylor, if we are just perceiving colors as certain colors what color is the object for real? Or is there no color in the world?? I agree that there is something in color that our eye perceives otherwise there would be no genetic conditions such as color blindness. But it is just a difficult concept for me to grasp because if it is just in our eye then color isn't real it is just a perception, right?! It was very interesting though to see his different points in seeing color and little tricks our eyes play on us. Definitely a bit mins boggling though!

Ted Talks

I had the same question as Mario after watching the video. Why would color change based on background be associated with the evolution of our world and reality? That doesn't really make any sense to me, so I kind of feel like that is just a theory to think about. I had to come home and watch the video again because I felt like he was tricking us on some of the illusions, but I couldn't find any trickery, so now I just think it is odd that our brains retain color information and impose it on other objects. What in the information, besides the fact that it is light, makes it stay in our vision, like with the green and red desert scenes. Optical illusions are fun, but my brain gets tired of them quickly.

Ted Talk Video

I am wondering the same thing as you Taylor, it does seem a little confusing of what our eyes are perceiving. In the video the speaker did mention something about the light that falls off our eyes being meaningless and in a since the presentations he gave showed that. For me, the thing that stood out the most in his video was when he asked the audience to stare at a image that had two colors at the top(being red and green) with a white circle in between those two colors. While staring at this white circle the bottom image that depicted a mountain seemed to shift in colors, it was amazing! I feel that what we perceive as color is something that is and will continue to be studied for some time.

Ted the Talker

I thought that the video we watched in class this week was super helpful in trying to understand how our eyes perceive color. Emery, I totally agree with you on which part in the video was the most interesting! Seeing the difference between the green and red planes was really cool! I also like how in the video he showed us that even though by placing two different backgrounds such as black or white behind a color doesn't actually change the color, it just makes our eyes perceive that it does. I find optical allusions to be one of the most interesting things in the world! This video relates to what we have been talking about as well as doing in class, such as the color experiments we did earlier this semester. But I am still wondering if what our eye perceive as color is from what is being reflected off an object, then what color is the actually object?