The Art of Data Visualization Video

            This video begins with the quote “every single pixel should testify directly to context,” by Edward Tufte. He believes that design is about the viewer and how they reason with the content. If the words aren’t truthful, then the piece would not be valid. He believes that all products or art, whether beautiful of not, should represent some form of the truth. It is about showing information. He talks about how some of the first forms of art and information are written in stone, and how we see them today in Google maps. This is interesting to think about. It is interesting to think about how something so old and what seems to be outdated can be influencing out information today. He says that the development of real science is one of the most important things. Galileo, through his telescope, drew pictures of the sun and where the sun spots were. He says that the history of visualizing data is very similar to and connected to the history of science.

            Data visualization designs depend on what you, the artist, have to say about the topic. It also depends on the reader, who comes with their own context and biases. Third, is the data itself and what it has to say and that it informs the truth. A lot if information can be communicated very quickly because our brains work so quickly and that are designed to recognize patterns. There is also an emotional impact on the piece of art. Presenting the information with the visuals will impact how a person feels about the work.

            Josh Smith in the video said that truth changes. There is so much data that is a “clue to the truth.” The first step is to dig really deep into the date and the information and find each key point and create a hierarchy. Once everything is put together, the information should make sense. It is supposed to translate data from something that is complicated to something that is simple and it communicates a message that would have taken someone hours to digest and understand. Visual data makes it easier for the viewers to understand data and connect it.

            Data visualization is also supposed to be a revelation, to show us something that has never been seen before. It is about showing people something they have never seen before in a way that they have never seen it. Part of it is leaving it open to interpretation, and part of it is not knowing exactly about the system. The creator of the visual data may have ideas about how the system may be growing and changing, but they are just sharing their ideas and putting something together. It is important to respect your audience. Its purpose is to learn something not to confirm something.

Postmodernism Visual Analysis

            This piece uses the analogous color scheme. I used mostly blues, greens, whites and blacks in this piece. This brings the theme of unity together. The piece is split up into a diagonal composition. The denotative message is based on what is actually in the piece of art. In this piece there are two main figures that use negative space to make another shape. The two shapes are similar shapes and sizes. One of on the upper left side of the page and the other shape is on the lower right side of the page. There are shapes of puzzle pieces that are scattered throughout the painting. There appears to be butterflies coming off of the shapes and getting smaller as they go to the next shape. Inside the shapes, there is a butterfly, a person jumping, two hands intertwined, a running brain, a key and a chain. The connotative meaning is that a person needs to find who they are and figure out what to do with themselves if they are once liberated from something, or anything.

            The quote I used to do my postmodern piece of art is, “It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.” When I thought of this quote, I thought of freedom and a person finding who they are. Often times, a person has to go in circles to find out who they are. They end up doing the same things over and over again until they find out who they are. Every time something happens in someone’s life, they have to rethink who they are, and sometimes they feel as if they have to start all over. The centered theme of this piece brings the ideas of unity and a person’s center into it. The butterflies getting smaller and bigger (growing) symbolizes a person’s journey to find themselves. This ties into the ideological message; everyone has their own journey. Everyone has to start somewhere, and there are so many things that can push a person to being something different, but in the end, most people don’t change who they are as a person, and will always be the same person they always were, with a few changes along the way, and maturing into who they really are. Dealing with the events of life force a person to deal with it and question who they are.

Postmodernism

"Citizens of the Middle Ages and members of pre-modern tribal societies could live out their years without encountering anyone with another god, a contrary worldview, different folktales, dances or myths." If they did meet anyone with opposing or different views, they would conquer them and to convert them.In the Postmodernism world, everyone has different ideas, cultures and beliefs. Everyone's different ideas and beliefs are everywhere to see. You can't go on any website or even walk out of your house without seeing differences in people and how people think, act, look, and are. "We live increasingly in a world of interconnected differences-differences amplified and multiplied at the speed of electricity." There are now so many more ways of thinking now, and it is mostly accepted to have different opinions than other people.

All of the cultures are intermixing. It is interesting to think about this and how it affects people in everyday life. One person believes so many things, and it is interesting to think about where all of those ideas stemmed from. There are so many different shared beliefs now, in the Postmodernism world. We are forced to think and know about all of the different ways of thinking,. which, in my opinion, is a good thing.


"According to Jameson, Postmodern city-dwellers are alienated, living in hallucination, an exhilarating blur, a reality evaporating into mere images, spectacles, strange new warps in time and space, fixated on commodities, on products, on images... on bottles of Coca-Cola, collages of identical images of Hollywood stars such as Marylin Monroe, all sameness, all surface-all deathlessness." Today, everyone tries so hard to be different. People don't focus on the things that really matter. People focus on things that are materialistic and have no depth. People rely so much on the false images that the media and the world around them gives them. people don't think for themselves, according to this article. I disagree with this. I think that people do have depth. I think that these days, people are in a way forced to have depth and are forced to think for themselves. Yes, everyone is doing the same thing, but some, if not most people choose to think for themselves and do think for themselves. There is so much emphasis today on self-reflection, which is where people find out what they truly believed. In a way, people do have a hard time thinking for themselves because so many people are told what to believe. Also, everyone tries to be different, which is where I agree with this piece. Everyone tries too hard to be different, which makes everyone even more similar. I think that people should stop listening to what society is telling them to be and believe what they truly believe and live off of that.

Podcast Blog

In the radiolab podcast, they talked a lot about the colors that people can see and how it is possible for organisms to see color. They discuss the differences in how different animals and organisms see color. For example, humans have three color receptor rods, and see variations of red, blue and yellow. Humans see the colors on the ROYGBIV scale. For example, dogs only see blues, greens, and yellows. Butterflies have more color receptor rods that humans. different animals have a different amount of color receptor rods and therefore see different variaions of colors and in a different amount of detail. 

They talked about how they did experiments on monkeys. They took red pigments from something and put it into the eyes of the monkeys. At first, the monkeys saw no differences, but about twenty weeks in, the monkeys started to be able to see the difference between the colors, and could then see the red colors. This is interesting to think about. After a little while, the monkeys could see the single color that was different from all of the others and clearly point it out. It shows how much the eye can change how you look at something. Colors have so many layers to them, but certain eyes can only see some layers of colors, while others can see color in so much detail. 

It depends on what the animals and organisms perceive as the colors. There was one woman who they were testing to be a "tetrochromad, " which means that she can see many more colors than the normal human eye can. The could tell the different color in the set of three colors every time. The control for this experiment, however, was a male painter, so he could not be a tetrochromad. This man saw all of the colors and got all of the answers correct, as the woman did. The man must have also been a tetrochromad as well. On the other hand, when the people involved in the experiment all looked at the sky, the woman said she saw pink in the sky, where everyone else saw a deep, turquoise blue. She saw the pigments of red and pink in the sky, which is interesting and could also prove that she is a tetrochromad. 

Photoshop

BMA Visit

Still Life With Lemons
Georges Braque
1928

This painting was very intriguing to me and was my favorite to look and think about. It is formatted using the golden triangle. In this painting, there is a smudge in the middle of it, looking as if someone swiped their finger across the painting. It looks as if it is accidental, but if you look closer then you can see that it was intentional. It made me wonder why that was there. It also made me look closer into the painting. The painting has scratched that look like grapes in them, but they are not their own separate color. Also, I spent a lot of time thinking and looking at the object on the bottom right of the painting, wondering what exactly it is.







The Shaded Stream at Le Puits Noir
Gustave Courbet
1860

 This painting was interesting to me because it was so dark and hard to see. You had to really look closely to see what was in the picture. This painting is split into "L's". There is a stream in the middle of the painting and it shows the reflection of the earth around it. There seem to be  cliffs, and in-between those cliffs there is a very dark cave. The dark cave is where my eyes first look. It makes you wonder what is in the cave and why it is so dark, along with the rest of the painting. The painting's dark, earthy colors make the painting seem scary and real, but it is also very pretty to look at.

Mont Saeinte-Victoire Seen from the Bibemus Quarry
Paul Cezanne
1897

This painting is split into horizontal thirds. The bottom layer of the painting is where the trees are and where the roots of the trees are, then the second layer is the next layer of cliffs. The next layer is the layer of the mountain and the sky. The mountain is very high and far away, while the trees are very close to the front of the painting. This painting shows the lowest point of the earth, the tree roots and the dirt, and it climbs up very high to the top the mountains, where the colors are grey and blues. The paint strokes are very thick and distinct, which makes the painting more powerful.

John Berger - Ways of Seeing

Ways of Seeing by John Berger brings up interesting points about how art can be affected so much by modern life. Every piece of art has its original, but many pieces of art have duplicates of them in many different forms. Even as I was watching the video, Berger says that this piece of art work is the original, then he says it is the original for him, not for us, the viewers. We are seeing the piece of art through he video camera, so we are not actually seeing the real piece. Art can be duplicated through a camera, a videocamera, other paintings of people trying to duplicate it, and many more ways. When looking at art, many people do not realize how important it is to look at every detail the piece of art has. 

Berger talks about the art works themselves and says that "this religiosity, usually linked with cash value, but always invoked in the name of culture and civilization is in fact a substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible."  
Berger says that the camera destroys the meaning and value of a piece of art. He talks about how a camera does not have the ability to capture every little detail a painting has. Paintings and works of art are famous for every little stroke they make. Every stroke is thoughtfully put onto a painting, and a camera will not and cannot capture this detail. The meaning of a piece of art can be changed dramatically through the use of a camera or video. Berger talks about how a camera can zoom in to a smaller piece of the painting and change the meaning of the work as a whole. Music changes the way the viewer looks at a painting or any piece of art. The reproduction of paintings in different colors changes the meanings of them. 

This video made me realize how important it is to pay attention to how many different things affect how we see art. If we are simply looking at art through a camera, through pictures of paintings, then we are never going to truly see the real meaning of the work. We have to try to know and understand the meanings of paintings and we have to realize how everything affects how we see it; from how our daily life affects it, to the sounds in the background as we look at a piece of art, to the pipes of art around it. We have to be aware of how art affects us.