Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Contextual Portfolio ~ Representation

In a lecture we viewed a film where the camera zoomed right out from two people having a picnic into space, showing the insignificance of the two people sat on that earth compared to the vastness of the rest of the world. It then zoomed in and rather than stopping on the people it continued through their skin and showed the biological construction of their bodies, the skin layers, the cells, the bones, everything. Rather than stopping at what we would consider a boundary, it continued to break those boundaries, revealing a complexity and interconnection that the viewer might consider very daunting.

Human beings are very structural, we work within a structured society and aim to put everything into categories and sort everything so that we can be in control, or at least feel a little more in control than if the world were in complete chaos. This works with the belief that everything that we see is experienced through a lense, we never truly experience the chaos of raw matter. The mind collects information and warps it through this lense in order to represent it to us the world the way we see it.

When we see the world as explained above, we see it through the phenoumenal which is inother words, the lense that was used to describe this theory in the work of Immanuel Kant. The noumenal world could be represented through storms and vast landscapes, things that we cannot control or put into order.



It can be argued that it is possible to represent the sublime through the use of artwork and this is why it becomes so valid in life. Someone is able to throw colour at a page such as in the image above and call it the sublime because of the lack of control thereof, however as humans it is instinct to begin to categorise and structure this design. Naturally we begin to analyse it, why has the artist used those colours? Why have they thrown the paint in the direction they have? And it becomes phenoumenal as it is then being viewed through the distorted lense.