Here is a video about John Maeda’s Nature series which is showed at La Fondation Cartier in Paris. The Nature series consists of a series of seven “motion paintings”.
Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings especially these composition trees are made from nature as well.
I want to focus on visually simplifying complex nature in visaul part.
simplicity：
(“simplicity.” The Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English. 2009. Encyclopedia.com. 27 Oct. 2009 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>)
I emailed my project research question to Andy for some advices. Andy’s suggestion is that I need to narrow my question, clarify and focus on field I want to explore.
Simplicity and complexity cover a wide field. What I would like to explore will be focused on two parts.
One is about people’s daily life especially when someone is going to keep his mind on something, like reading a book. When a man is reading a book, he really immerses himself in reading it because of only the book in his mind. We can call the condition simplicity. What if there is a cup of tea beside him, beautiful music, or a blast of wind, situation becomes more complicated but still mild and balance. What if music is noisy, wind blows off paper on desk, and then it loses balance.
Another part I would like to focus on is how to visually represent the relationship between simplicity and complexity.
An interesting processing work by Burak Arikan. He did an installation which shows the relationships between transaction item and their effects changing overtime. “Each node represents a transaction and connected to each other through categories and dates. Thickness of connecting lines shows the total spending amount of the paired transactions. At a given timeframe, the last day’s purchases and the two weeks of past spending are shown. ”
Discloses the artist’s personal financial records by exploring and revealing essential patterns in daily transactions.
MY POCKET: Transaction Graph
When these daily transactions are excessive, it’s a sort of complicating our life. I can use the similar idea for reference in the life part of my project. However I need to find more samples from daily life not just about spending.
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We Feel Fine
by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
An exploration of human emotion on a global scale using data gathered from blogs.
It’s a huge project which created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. They did amazing job to collect enormous information, classify them, design the feeling colours and representing data visually and logically. They show their Methodology on the website which I should learn.
Clean water looks simple and pure, and may be the simplest thing in the world. Once a drop of ink enters it, the most complicated image presents.That’s the most interesting point about relationship between simplicity and complexity, just one tiny step, it totally changes.
I took four photos of the process to record.
When I am sitting in a room, I will be attracted by floating dust if there was a beam of light. The dust floats in a beautiful and elegant rhythm. That scene could be used in my project.
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Today Andy introduces some interesting websites and works made by processing.
I’ve started reading a book for learning processing some days ago. Because my friend told me that the book is easily understood. However, what I can do is still very simple graphics until now. I will do better because I focus on my project proposal recently.
I found an animation made by processing, it looks like thousands of birds flying past. I like the graphic thing.
Firstly, I was inspired by Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photograph series “Theater” and “seascapes”. Maybe it’s because I was influenced by the Eastern culture as a child, it’s easy to be attracted by the kind of simple but significant work. Philosophical thinking of time and timeless is always brought from his works such as “Theater” series. In the “Theater” series, the only thing we can see from the center of screen is white light and nothing else. That’s because he captured a whole movie in one frame. Behind the simple white screen, it may be a very touching movie. His work makes me think about the meaning behind it, that’s what I hope my work might have.
Then I saw a John Maeda’s speech about simplicity and read his book The Laws of Simplicity (2006). John Maeda is a contemporary digital artist who did a lot of beautiful and complex visual work. And now he is currently working on SIMPLICITY, a research project to find ways for people to simplify their life in the face of growing complexity. In his book, he offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. For my project, what I want to achieve is the balance described in Law 10: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”
Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart write a book The Collapse of Chaos (1994), which shows how simplicity in nature is generated from chaos and complexity, and how to discover simplicity in a complex world. Their articles can guide the project I will do and become critical theory. John Maeda’s theories on simplicity and complexity will define my experimental work as well, like his Law 5 “Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other”, Law 9 “Failure: Some things can never be made simple.” Key 2 “Open: openness simplifies complexity.” And Law 10 I’ve quoted before.
My primary aim is to explore relationship between simplicity and complexity visually. I’m considering exploring it through daily life and vision.
How does simplicity transfer to complexity? and how does complexity transfer to simplicity?
How to balance them in the two parts?
What’s influence or distraction happening because of losing balance between them?
(What is audience’s choice, “Less is better” or “More is better”? and why?)
I’ll look for experience that we might run into in daily life through survey, observation and experience. Because complicating simple things happens everyday and everywhere. I should collect them and pick up something interesting. I should read these books introducing how to have a simple life or about simplicity as well, look at how minimalisms make their works and their thinking. Then for my work, I will think about methods simplifying complex things through interacting. In progress, I can photograph, shoot and draw to record.
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Secondary aim is to develop a work through interaction or new media, digital media to represent my primary aim.
How to let audience make a choice?
How to make it more interesting or relevant to “simplicity and complexity”?
The interaction of my work should be related to the aim. I’m learning processing, and curry on as well. I hope it would be used and combined with the aim well.
I’ve read the paper “Two Myths about Immersion in New Storytelling Media” by Pierre Gander.
It’s a long, dialectic and useful article. I learned how to write a dissertation in a prudent methodical way, which is different from my previous essays in BA course.
He builds some arguments and then gives many examples to disprove them.
Whatever Gander’s paper argues two myths about immersion in new storytelling media are correct or incorrect. The more immersive audience’s experience is, the more successful the project is. That’s what I am looking for, at least.
One of two myths what he discusses in his article is “more is better” which is related to my project concept “simplicity and complexity” . In my opinion, “more is better” or “less is better” depends on audiences themselves or different surroundings. Just like a post I wrote couple days ago, sometimes a simple image or story is much more interesting and thought-provoking than a complicated one. More information or advanced technology may not increase immersion, but distracts audiences’ attention from the image or story.
So if we can’t decide which one is better, why not give the choice to audience? So I am considering to do an interactive work to lead audience choosing what they prefer.
I’m still looking at more artists and works they did to get some inspirations for outcomes.
Directed by Marie Hyon, Marco Spier
Design by Marie Hyon, Mate Steinforth, Mato Bilic
3D by Todd Akita, Alvin Bae, Dave Barosin, Laurent Barthalemy, Pakorn Bupphavesa, Damon Ciarelli, Kevin Estey, Jason Goodman, Ajit Menon, Naomi Nishimura, Melanie Tonkin, Lutz Vogel
Flame by Jamie Aguirre, Eben Mears, Joe Vitale
Roto by Ella Boliver, J Bush, Stephania Gallico, Carlos Rosario
Producer Angela Bowen, Lucia Grillo, Brett Goldberg, Chad Nau
Executive Producer Justin Booth-Clibborn
Graphics by dvein.com
Monographs by alextruchot.com
Sound by combustion.ws
Yesterday was China’s 60th National Day. Happy Birthday, My Motherland!
Unfortunately, I got burned on my figures when I cooked.
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I found a good book about simplicity.
I quote some words from its back over.
“Isn’t it strange that we are constantly developing new technologies to simplify our lives and work, but in the end we are left with the impression that everything’s just become a lot more complicated?
SIMPLICITY — more than just the pipe dream of a society dominated by technical revolutions, global networks and inundations of information. No other concept of late has enjoyed such widespread popularity and so accurately expressed the needs of our times. Just how are we to cope with the increasing degree of complexity in the reality we in habit? how can we tap and utilize the potential of global communication in an efficient and responsible way? How can we develop systems, devices and programs that are responsive to our strengths and intuitive capabilities?
… …
SIMPLICITY is not the opposite of complexity–it is its complementary key.”
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