Saturday, March 27, 2010

Immanuel Kant

I was a little bit confuse while I read the text, but i feel more comfortable after the discussion in class. Kant separate out and make a contrast between the beauty and the sublime. The beauty is the physical presentation of what viewers see, and the sublime will be the internal experience. In video game, concept will always fit for both of the physical appearance and internal ideal. The concept arts are needed to present to the viewer of what is going on in the painting. Mainly, it is more focus on the design, the form element, and the coloring, but the ideal is to tight everything together to present the universe in the game. One of my favorite games, Demon's Souls gives the feeling of sublime all the time. The concept, the game play, and the style etc. tie together to create a darkness post-apocalyptic world. The world is about dynamically sublime by giving players threatening, dangerous, and death etc. negative feeling. If it is all about negative feeling and then it would be not sublime, but since gamers have chances to defeat the enemy to enjoy in the darkness world. The sublime is with the player all the time since player can experience the fearful situation and also enjoy in the process.

Sergei Eisenstein

i like Eisenstein's idea about montage which two of more images create narrative of a deeper meaning. The is exactly how images work in video game. There are always two of more images interactive. When they do that they start bouncing back ideas in each other and present to the players. The consistent between images in games has to be control and well choose. The images have to be connect to each other to create reasonable ideas. If super mario is present into resident evil world everything will be bizarre and don't make any sense. Symbolize is another key point in visual representation. The images have to be understandable since everyone thinks differently. Logical but cool design are the first step of cool video games. 

Saturday, March 6, 2010

What is Art~

Art records of human history. It is part of the society. Every piece of artwork contains the artist's life. Artworks are the translation of artists experience. Artists express their emotion, feeling, and thoughts into images, words, or any other types of media. The arts tell the stories of the artists' world and transmit the feeling of experience to the audience. 
In Tolstoy's essay, he mention in order to call an art an "art", the art must evoke other people's feeling or emotion. Experience is the key factor of how "infection" sustain. Each person has different experience to other and feel different as well. It becomes controversial if we think backward - how to determine an art is not an art while Tolstoy mentioned "even in the smallest degree, then the work, even if a weak one, is yet a work of art." The question becomes more interesting and complicate as well because today there are more and more new types of art presented in different medias which is different further than drawing and painting. In my opinion, the word art means different in different perspective thus everyone sees thing differently. 
One thing that bothers me, when I think more about the relationship of the sincerity of artworks' infection. That's say an artist's work is printed on a cup and mass produced. The artwork can still be counted as an art because audience can feel the artist's effort, but does the cup can be count as an art piece when the artwork stays on the cup or it is just another mass produce product?

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One interesting experience of new types of media of art: one of my teacher, Kirk Peterson once took bunches of note papers and paste them together to form a huge heart. It looks like a big heart form by random trash papers from far distance, but he asked people to write "love" in various different languages which makes this work much more sense and meaningful. It is very new and interesting ideas and it successfully to evoke audiences' emotion because of the emotion, love and second, it is form by each audience's known language. 

Allegory of the Cave

eh...it is interesting...but also hurts my brain...

I kind of get what Plato tried to say, but it is a really confuse and deep theory. Human society is based on the existed knowledge and rule, and people are afraid of "unknown". The prisons are be held in the environment from the very beginning. To them, the image of the outside world is far from their understand of their "real world". Sometimes truth is really hard to hear even harder to accept it. I forgot who mention this, but people tend to accept the similarity and stay away the differential. It is quite often to see that in real life, being different is difficult because that tends to get more people's attention. Sometimes it could be good, but sometimes it could be really bad as well. In the story, the shadow can be rephrased as bias or stereotype and the reality is rejected. Most of times, accepting new knowledge or truth is way harder than stay the same because "changes" also meaning crumble the exist condition and create something new. 

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One interesting quote: Bertrand Russell's quote "the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

The world is full of unknown, being objective is really important to be able to accept new stuffs., but it is also one of the hardest thing to do.