Photo meeting, lots of people crammed in the lab, awards, t-shirt distribution... and Pipo!
2009-12-16
Critique #4: Utopia
I asked many people – random people around Oberlin and also some friends, but mostly college students – what would be Utopia for them personally. Obviously answers differed greatly among people, but I found that there were certain popular themes: nice weather, peace (no violence), sufficient food, comfort, doing whatever one wants to, etc.
I created Utopias based on lots of other people’s opinions but in my own interpreted ways. I tried to create places where most people would agree to be somewhat Utopian. Comfortable places amid the clouds to sit and lie in for as long as one wishes. An open space where anyone could pursue his/her interests and hobbies endlessly. Beautiful sea and infinite supplies of food and drink...They look ideal but unrealistic. There would be practical problems in each pictures such as furniture falling through the clouds or food getting soaked in water, but this is Utopia and as far as the pictures go everything is going to be alright.All the images included in the works were taken by myself, but some were taken years ago while others were taken within the last week. I used Photoshop to combine and reorganize the objects.
2009-12-04
Jeongmee Yoon
Jeongmee Yoon, Korean, the person Becca had emulated.
A person's objects tied to his or her identity?
Very interesting & I love the colors and the squareness..
One day I should gather all my stuff and take a self-portrait =)
2009-12-01
Yeondoo Jung
Wonderland, 2005
Bewitched, 2001
Wow he is amazing!!!!!! Apparently he's one of the most "hot" artists in Korea, and he's still only 40 or something. His ideas are brilliant and he executes them so nicely...
2009-11-30
Critique#3: Persona
Almost forgot to upload this.
On August 21st 2009, I arrived in Oberlin, a whole new world for me. I had to move from high school to college from Korea to America, and to Oberlin of all US colleges. These composite pictures reflect my first three months here, how the sudden transition affected me. The first two pictures are me confined, stuck and kind of lost. I am stiff and blank. In the next two pictures I try to do something but am overwhelmed or frustrated by people’s expectations. Then in the last two pictures I try to escape the situations but I don’t really know how to.
For all 6 of them I took the picture of the school and then the picture of myself separately. I wanted a full control of where and how to place myself. I tried to create strange situations using the elements around the campus. I am almost a ghost, sometimes transparent, no shadows and looking awkward - this also represents how I feel sometimes here.
Some of the original pictures:
Some of the original pictures:
Utopia?
Quotations about utopia:
"Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream" -Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." -Aldous Huxley
"In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible." -Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason
"In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties." -Thomas More, Utopia
"I shall speak of how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another... of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next... of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin." -Gunther Grass
“If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.” -Nadine Gordimer
"Some who are too scrupulous to steal your possessions nevertheless see no wrong in tampering with your thoughts." -Kahlil Gibran
"All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in." -Toni Morrison
"Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?" -William Golding
"Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality." -Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason
"To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia." -Michael Novak
"A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists." -Max Stirner
"Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is indistinguishable from its reality, whose ontology coincides with its representation." -Fredric Jameson
"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing." -Oscar Wilde
"Utopians...consider individual freedom as the stumbling block on which the grandiose idea of mankind’s totalization may flounder." -Thomas Molnar
"There can be no peace on earth as long as there is war in love." -Dieter Duhm
"The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison." -Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -Sir Winston Churchill
"Abandon all hopes of utopia - there are people involved." -Claton Cramer
"Not in Utopia, -- subterranean fields, --
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, -- the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!" -Willam Wordsworth
"Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian." -Emma Goldman
"The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future" -Frank Herbert (Dune)
3 portfolios from Zone Zero
Number One:
From the series: In Between De la serie
Technique: Photographic index of a single 36 exposures film
Comments:
Are family photos a fragment of our memory or are they also responsible for spawning our recollections? A clear separation doesn’t seem to exist between these two concepts. As a matter of fact, our memory has the power to exclude the accuracy – and it is also constantly reinvented by ourselves, regardless of all the possible mechanical ways of documenting reality. This unfixed and exchangeable space-time line that exists between us and our old photos is where I aimed my camera – seeking an uncertain photographic index where the memory is both subject and object.
Date of work: November 2008
Number Two:
Technique: Digital camera.
Comment:
I'm fascinated in abandoned places that are regarded as ugly. The serenity, the light and shadows and the play of lines make this parking lot of a supermarket a beautiful place to me.
Date of work: 2007
Number Three:
Comments: All this images were taken in Argentina and Uruguay.
Carlos Kenji Koketsu (Brazil)
From the series: In Between De la serie
Technique: Photographic index of a single 36 exposures film
Comments:
Are family photos a fragment of our memory or are they also responsible for spawning our recollections? A clear separation doesn’t seem to exist between these two concepts. As a matter of fact, our memory has the power to exclude the accuracy – and it is also constantly reinvented by ourselves, regardless of all the possible mechanical ways of documenting reality. This unfixed and exchangeable space-time line that exists between us and our old photos is where I aimed my camera – seeking an uncertain photographic index where the memory is both subject and object.
Date of work: November 2008
Number Two:
Mariska Rooijakkers (The Netherlands)
Technique: Digital camera.
Comment:
I'm fascinated in abandoned places that are regarded as ugly. The serenity, the light and shadows and the play of lines make this parking lot of a supermarket a beautiful place to me.
Date of work: 2007
Number Three:
Adrián Markis (Argentina)
Technique: Digital camera, images manipulated in photoshop.
Comments: All this images were taken in Argentina and Uruguay.
Date of work: 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
