Set Mars Alight

Investigating the unfathomable complexity of "Art."

[blazingmars-blog]

"Autumn" at 629 S. 9th St., Philadelphia, PA 

          This mural--located at the above address in Philadelphia--depicts a rural fall scene rich in fall foliage. I find this particular piece of street art quite compelling because of the narrative that the mural conjures. The juxtaposition of the essentially urban surroundings and the scene depicted engenders a multitude of questions in the viewer because of the visual discontinuity of the autumn trees and the urban surroundings. The most compelling thing about this juxtaposition is that the very surface upon which this pastoral scene is painted is in itself a part of the urban landscape within which the mural finds rebellious context. 

           This piece is very indirect in its message, and due to this there are obviously a multitude of ways to interpret the mural. I believe that the message of the mural is that man is out of touch with nature in his/her urban wasteland, and that nature is a source of solace in our modern lives. The mural doesn’t rebel against its surroundings using aggressive coloration or geometric design, rather it rebels with poise--casting a shadow of inferiority over the crumbling city within which it has been placed.  

[blazingmars-blog]

This is an image of Gabriel Dawe’s Plexus A1 installed at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC as part of a larger exhibit called “Wonder”.  

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Week 7: From Looking to the Gaze

In the excerpt on Panopticism by Foucault, the philosopher examines the relationship between the gaze—vision—and the exercise of authority and power. Foucault describes the panoptic model by saying that “he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (202-203). The fundamental claim of the panoptic model is that the subjects become their own subjugators through their perception of the potentially constant and ever-present gaze of their authority figures.

My visual is a psychedelic-comic interpretation of the archetypal “all-seeing eye” that adorns US currency and official government documents across the world. The concept of the “all-seeing eye” is similar to that of the panopticon in that the subject may be constantly under the gaze of an essentially all-knowing observer. In many ways, panopticism also describes the relationship between a punishing god and his followers—the constant supervision of god’s eye (the all-seeing eye) forces the subject to self-regulate their actions due to the presumption of observation.

[30000fps]

Endpoint

[30000fps]

[blazingmars-blog]

Week 5: Visual Culture

In Mirzeoff’s The Visual Culture Reader, the author claims that “one of the most striking features of the new visual culture is the visualization of things that are not in themselves visual.” While the contents of the above sentence is both self-consistent and seemingly meaningful within the wider context of the work, the sentence is entirely devoid underlying meaning. I found it quite ironic that Mirzeoff’s opening chapter contains a reference to the Sokal Affair, in which a physicist by the name of Alan Sokal submitted an academic paper filled with nonsense buzzwords and ideological pandering to the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was then published. A similar incident occurred in 1999 with the Bogdanov affair, in which multiple papers entirely composed of meaningless buzzwords strung together in grammatically proper sentences were accepted by prestigious journals, published, and regarded as meaningful by the academic community until highly suspicious scientists discovered the meaninglessness. In relation to my choice of visual, I will put forward an unpopular opinion; the entire concept of “visual culture” as outlined in Mirzeoff’s work is muddled at best, and almost meaningless at worst.

I would argue that my visual primarily has meaning in the non-visual domain, in that it is not in and of it’s self a solely visual representation but instead a representation of text—the very medium which Mirzeoff’s introduction bounces between criticizing and vaguely lauding. The entire concept of “visual culture” as an interdisciplinary field is fundamentally flawed because it attempts to throw a wide net over the nature of what is “visual” but also what is defined within the scope of “culture” that is “visual.” If we classify visual culture as anything that can be seen by human beings and the cultural meaning of these representations, then the sentence that began this post is entirely wrong. On the other hand, if we define visual culture as anything that can be sensed or even thought by humans, then we are simply attempting to redefine the word “culture” in terms of our reality—which is obviously unnecessary once one realizes that our reality is the sphere within which all of our philosophical concepts are necessarily constructed. Truly, visual culture seems to simply be a rebranded, alternative approach to Art History. Visual culture is a reincarnation of Art History in which almost all human-made objects are considered and analyzed for their impacts on culture.          

[blazingmars-blog]

Picture: Jane Thomas/Caters

     This picture was taken by British abstract photographer Jane Thomas using a macro lens to photograph the fantastic colors created by thin-film interference in soap bubbles.

     Dissanayake’s ethological analysis of the nature and purpose of Art and artistic endeavor offers a compelling survey of the evolutionary origins of the universal human compulsion to embellish set outside the frame of western sociocultural concepts of what Art is. I did, however, find it strange that Dissanayake chose to largely gloss over the highly relevant  evolutionary theory of Sensation Seeking as it relates to the practice of creating and appreciating Art. Sensation Seeking (SS), also called Novelty Seeking (NS), is an evolutionary trait theorized to increase human fitness by compelling humans to seek out new experiences and to innovate. When an individual seeks and finds novel items, arrangements, and concepts, the brain releases greater levels of dopamine that act as a “reward” such behaviors; this is the fundamental mechanism behind SS/NS. Dissanayake fails to come to a conclusive statement about why human beings create and appreciate Art, partly in my own opinion due to the fact that she neglected to address SS/NS theory.  

     The visual I have chosen is a perfect example of how SS/NS theory can be used to explain the evolutionary source of Art practices. Rawlings et. al. performed a study in 2000 that was published in the European Journal of Personality that examined the relationship between scores on the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) and the individual’s aesthetic preferences. Rawlings et. al. found that higher scores on the SSS correlated with a preference for more abstract pieces such as the visual shown above. Lower scores on the SSS were associated with a preference for non-abstract works, which seems to indicate that SS drives an aesthetic preference for Art that requires less concrete thinking.

     It is theorized that all humans manifest a degree of SS due to the advantage SS behaviors conferred to early humans in hunting, foraging, and mating activities. As modern civilization has developed beyond the need for subsistence hunting/gathering, humans have retained SS behaviors. The visual above represents the artist’s own SS behaviors, while viewers are drawn to the photograph perhaps because of its novelty. The human desire for embellishment that Dissanayake finds to be universally exhibited in some form in all cultures can also be understood to stem from SS behaviors that “reward” the brain for seeking out novelty.

[oftenminimal]

n.325 | Often Minimal

by Memory Coco, 2015 // Shop Often Minimal | Support Often Minimal

[nandoom]

Kanye Ren & DR-122Y

[beeple]

SUCKED DRY

[beeple]

EROD

[p5art]

gordian knot

it’s amazing what you can create with just rectangles :)

[wavegrower]

hyperspace

[hexeosis]

[pi-slices]

Falling Rings - 160125

[pi-slices]

Blob Light - 160126

[mobymotion]

Stripe town, inspired by @pi-slices

Created in Blender

[blazingmars-blog]

This is a surprisingly accurate representation of what my migraine auras look like, which is kinda incredible considering the fact that the artist who created this gif had no intention of representing auras.