Brianna Kobrin's Blog

"The explosion of new communications technologies and the continuing fragmentation of cultures into thousands of little cultures has forced us to view our world as simultaneously expanding and shrinking." This sentence really stuck out to me from the Postmodernism introduction reading. This got me thinking about how technology affects the world today. Due to the expansion of technology we are able to communicate around the world and gain information about other cultures with the click of a button. This expansion is happening at the same time that face to face communication and real experiences are becoming much less. I think this is what Post-modern theorist, Jean Baudrillard, was trying to get at with "The Death of the Real." "Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, which in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of stimulation....

               This podcast begins with the discussion of Isaac Newton trying to discover if the color is within or outside the mind. Most people know his experiments with the prism, but I did not know that he stuck something into his eye to try to discover the answer that question. I find this disturbing and interesting that he would choose to do this. Eventually, his experimenting led to the findings of what we know today.       I thought that many of the points that were made in this podcast were very interesting. It surprised me that all humans/animals see different variations of colors. Dogs only see blues and greens. They do not have the cone for red. This one cone that they do not have adds such a limitation on colors. On the other side of this, sparrows can see more than us. They can see ultraviolets. In addition, butterflies have 7 photoreceptors, and a mantis shrimp has 16, while humans only have 3. Also, I thought it...

These objects both looked very white separately, but when they were put near each other the colander looked like a more blue white and the notebook looked more yellow white. When I changed the lighting, the color change was more drastic. The colander had a more rose white color and the notebook was more rose yellow white.

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#1: Dancer at Pigalle's by Gino Severini I chose this oil painting as the most intriguing to me because of all of the movement that the picture displays. The composition used here was the Golden Triangle. This painting contains various organic and geometric shapes. When I first looked at this image, I was drawn in towards the sequins in the shape of a heart. From there, my eyes seemed to dance around the page. Before I looked at the description, I believed that there were spot lights that were focusing on the movement in the center. The description reveled to me that this is the moment of a dancer as she is twirling around and her dress is spinning. I really liked this painting especially because it included some 3D elements of parts of the dress. #2: Peonies by Odilon Redon I chose this painting because it is very elegant and simple from a far. It is more "clean cut" and recognizable than the first painting. Once...

          In Ways of Seeing by John Berger, the aspect that struck me the most had to be the first sentence. It has a captivating nature about how it was worded. "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak" (7). This is a very simple concept, that I had never considered before. Once a child enters the world, they take everything in through their senses. Sight, even though very blurry and near-sighted at the beginning of life, is a child's way of exploring and trying to make sense of the world. I believe that this sentence sets the tone for the rest of the article as intriguing, powerful, and thought-provoking.           Another aspect that stuck out to me was the fact that seeing is different for everyone. All individuals can look at something and connect it to something else. "The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe" (8). I agree with this statement, because it emph...

          The paintings and photographs in this art gallery were by Gwen Hardie and Regina DeLuise. Although these two artists were featured in the same gallery, the did not initially collaborate to make their art similar. I think this aspect of the gallery was pretty cool how they created similar work, found each other, and then ended up in an art gallery together. I believe that the back and forth between photographs and skin tones makes for an interesting combination. Both the photos and paintings of skin seemed to evoke some sort of emotion from everyone in the room, even those who believed that the skin looked like planets.           The circles of skin tones were placed all around the room and each had a different color scheme. This smooth gradient-like oil painting was an interesting representation of skin. Usually, individuals may think of skin as textured, and may include lines or hair. If this was included in Hardie's depictio...