This video was a reflection and response to a few readings I had these last two weeks in a class I am participating in.   The readings talked a bit about the collection of sound and language.  The future and how we will be able to understand our past and the loss of languages.  As a response to the readings this week we were asked to take videos from  prelinger archives and write a narrative about the future.  So taking videos from the past and writing about the future. My way about commenting on the future, which is so unknown is to comment on our insecurities about being unsure what will happen and our intense need to save every moment.  

To start off the project I took some of my favorite parts from the readings and tried to interpret them into a discussion I might have in my head when I worry about the future and what will happen.  The abstract discussion was created to represent both our insecurities about the future and the future to understand us and our past.  It is also created for the purpose to to remind ourselves that there is only so much you can do by collecting moments in time, but that by collecting we are not doing as much to help our future as we think. We must also be able to communicate the moments effectively so that even if the way we communicate changes in the future, future generations will still be able to understand the past and who we were and are.  

​We need to think about how we collect the moments and show them at there truest form. That is why I specifically took from the readings the words "There is always a rhythm to the space between things.  Pause. Hold the thought.  Check the moment. Repeat. Wait, there it goes again.  Another moment though.  Another pause in the stream of conscious in another abstraction." From that I tried to take what I thought about that collection of words and abstract it into that discussion about insecurities and ways of preparing for the future. 

​Check the moment.
Repeat. Wait.
There it is again.  Another thought. 
Another pause.
Another moment lost to the noise around us. 
There will always be a rhythm to time, space, sound, pictures, and thoughts.
In our heads.
We collect these moments. These sounds.
With the purpose to save, collect and make memories.
Sound memories. Picture memories. Time and Space memories.
Moments of time that are lost to the past.
To our future selves we worry they will be lost without our effort to collect these moments.
We grasp at straws trying to hold on to the past.
Worried our future won’t be able to understand us.
Who we were in the moment.
To collect these moments is to save ourselves. 
To understand ourselves.
To understand is to believe.
To believe we existed in more than the moment.
We worry for our future.
Our future will not be lost because of our inability or failure to save or collect these moments.
Our failure will come from our inability to explain the importance of these moments. To show these moments in the truest of context.
To build from these moments.
We must be able to keep these moments.
Collect these moments.
Communicate the moments.
Check the moment.
Repeat. Wait.
There it is again.  Another thought. 
Another pause.
Another moment lost to the noise around us.  

I am starting to experiment with coding for a class. In the class we were asked to take code and replace the imagery and the words in the code with our own.  I am connecting this project that is primarily technically based, to two readings we have also had in class.  One of the readings is from the previous week, where we read some pages from Saussure.  Saussure talked about the the relation of words to an image.  The second reading was a book I had read in a previous class and watched videos of in this class. The book was "Ways of Seeing," by John Berger.  With John Berger's reading/video I wanted to connect again with the way in which someone views themselves through others. With that being said I would also make a point that I will follow up with later in this post.  I believe that humans are incredibly vain creatures and we see relations to ourselves in everything we come into contact with, including other creatures.

When I decided on the imagery for this assignment I picked out photographs I had taken that I feel can evoke different meanings to different people based on their life. I believe they evoke different feelings or emotions based on different discussions I have had with various people on the images. Although the images are of specific animals we don't necessarily only connect to them on that level.  We see contemplation, sadness, strength, purpose, drive and many other things.  In relation to John Berger we often see ourselves for what we are through others. If someone says a model is beautiful we create a guide on which to rate beauty based on other's opinions of it. With imagery having a different meanings for different people, I would like to throw out there a connection between what I mentioned earlier about humans as vain creatures. We see connections to ourselves through objects and other creatures. We often say a person looks like a pig, or we say that a person's dog or cat looks just like them. So when we say that we connect a differently to a image, it isn't too far of a leap to say we connect to other creatures differently as well. 

The words for this assignment I arranged them in the code to tell a specific story.  The code randomizes the words and so no one will be able to guess the story I am telling without seeing the code and even then those words have their own meaning to me and would tell a different story to someone else.  I felt this was important to the readings and videos we had watched this far in class because an artist or designer can only take the audience so far with a design before the audience creates their own interpretation of the design.

To spin it all together the final out come of this project is a visualization of a story I tell about myself.  The images and the words tell that story for me, but without my explanation it is unlikely that anyone will be able to interpret the story in the way it was meant to be told. All of this ties back to my post from last week in how we all have the ability to interpret sound/ music to have meaning that is unseen. The same way we interpret sound, we interpret imagery and words, to have the meanings that are based on things we already know. 

This last week we were asked to read a set of three readings and design a collage around our interpretation of those readings.  A lot of my understanding actually came from the final reading I had waited to do till the end.  The first two readings confused me greatly and it was not until the third was I able to wrap my mind around anything that was being said. 

I think in part the misunderstanding came from anxiety eating away at me more than normal during the week this assignment was assigned. While reading the final article titled, "Course in General Linguistics," by Ferdinand de Saussure, I was started to really think about how one persons interpretation of a sound and its relationship to a image can be completely different than another person's interpretation.  The part that stuck out the most was the mention of "psychological imprint of the sound and the imprint it makes on our senses." I began to think about peoples relation of image to word and then how that relationship is impacted by personal experience whether it be learned or experienced by life. After reflecting on this for a while I then began to wonder how words/sounds can impact image and then how is that impacted when you introduce either color or emotions.  

With the comment being made about anxiety, I was originally going to create a college of images and words in my head and how I visualize those stresses and decided that was going to be quite personal to have people comment and critique on. So I decided the next option for me would be to see if I could create a image that showed how I visualized music and how I visualize my brain interpreting the senses from music into a understanding that makes sense to me. 
 
My collage is a reflection of outside things like words, music and images that come to us from a million different places and how are constantly bombarded by all these sensory things. It is then the job of our brain to take what is thrown at us and make sense of it.  I imagine that what our brain does is creates a beautiful masterpiece of all things that are thrown at us whether it be sound, images, color, words and then takes our past experiences, emotions, and knowledge and weaves all of it together to create some sort of understanding that would only make sense to us as individuals.

What I wanted to show in this collage to the process my brain goes through when listening to a song.  While many of us can listen to the same song, we all create images and relationships to what we are hearing based on our experiences in life. So the explosion of shapes, color, lines, all have meaning to me and how I feel I process music.  When I listen to music, I imagine the song dancing around in a empty room in my head.  While the song dances around in my head, I imagine all the thoughts and emotions from past experiences running together or bouncing off one another to create these trails of color and lines that merge together into the new images. 

This may be too deep of a look into the readings, but this is where my mind headed while I was reading all of papers.  I can not apologize for the way I interpreted them and how I came to this understanding.  The reading I mentioned above even fights for my argument by explaining, that one persons understanding of the word Horse may be different from another person sitting in the same room.  With that being said and if that is the case, then this is my understanding of the readings, whether it be right or wrong.

The collage was created using giant white post-it note paper, paper from color books left in the studios, and different sized pens I use when I feel the need to be more creative.