My initial inquiries into the notion of seeing     concentrated narrowly on technology. Technology has always provided ways of seeing that depart from how we might naturally see something. It enhances our way of seeing by clearly dissecting and reorganizing an integrated view.

Close-ups, long distances, reverse images, fixed moments, multiple perspectives, slow         motion,  parallax views—the difference in appearance or position of an object when viewed from two different locations—are all examples of technologies that manipulate images.

Gavin Turk’s photograph entitled “Portrait of Something that I’ll Never Really See” depicts a portrait of himself with both eyes closed. It     reminds me of the significance of visual manipulation provided by technology. In a drawing by 17th century mathematician and astronomer Christian Huygens, two perspectives of the planet Saturn orbiting around the sun co-exist in one image: the inner ellipse is the perspective seen from a birds-eye view while the outer images show the perspective as seen from earth. The drawing presents a view that could not truly be seen but Huygens was able to construct it by combining a knowledge of perspective drawing with the use of a telescope.

I made a poster exploring our comfort zones with scale. By filling an entire poster with 4 point type—the smallest scale readable—I was interested in creating a situation where it is necessary to stick one’s nose into the poster in order to read the words. Although the poster is still flat, a layer of physical awareness is heightened because of the viewer’s interaction with it.

With this poster as a my raw material, I generated two new posters that plays with the depth of field. The first one is simply a photograph taken very close to the 4 point type poster. The second one manipulates it using an effect filter from the program Photoshop. The computer generated lens effect is a more complex one and can not be produced with a camera. In the end, I marked the poster to emphasize the distortion that different depths of fields produced. 23

My interest to somehow join conflicting notions in order to explore how we see things was evident but not successful in an earlier project from first semester. I attempted to create an abstract system that embeds multiple photographs in order to seamlessly bridge two aspects of a bookstore site. I created various gradient patterns that can be used to reorganize photos according to their content, such as contrast in distance, color, inside-outside, etc. The crossover duality was an attempt to suggest that a bookstore offers a dimension of the imagination as well as a surface of graphical marks. The result was not successful because the system became overly imposed. 3

Comparisons help create multiple focuses in basic ways. For an interactive programming on the topic of weather, I created a program that plays an animation of the number of hours that the sun is up in the sky for a city. The size of the sun was determined by the particular temperature of that day. Later I realized that the animation created a visualized overview of time that forces us to see them as discrete units, different from the way we normally experience them. 18

Methods that extend our natural habits of looking always disrupt established conventions of seeing, which creates a shift of focus in multiple ways. Sometimes things are planned while other times things happen accidentally.

On a kindergarten building in Arizona, the sun discolored the upper tiles above the roof probably unexpectedly to the architect. As a result, the difference in the color shades quietly points the isolated building back to the natural world and reconnects it to the larger environment.

How we see things is largely dependent on the context that we put ourselves in when we try to understand what we see. Writings by Rob Roy Kelly discusses and explains how endless colors can be created simply by rearranging four basic colors. The process of building new colors out of old ones is similar to the process of enlarging our focus while knowing the start of it. As a didactic exercise that I made in my first semester, this animation helped me to see my interests in a metaphorical way. 8

Still interested in scale, I attached a convex mirror on the backside of a penny made of the same bronze material with assistance from sculptor Boris Chesakov. When held at arm distance, the distorted mirror reflects a smaller image of the holder, approximately the proportion of the relief image of Abraham Lincoln on the other side. By having a comparable static representation and a dynamic representation side by side, I intended to exaggerate the fact that representations are never isolated notions, but only an extension of what we already are. 26

Another idea to explore our physical orientation started with a house I made that always sits on its side. By making it so, I thought that the     orientation of the house always refers to an axis different from the one that it is currently on. It can be on the same axis as another house at a different place of the world. This idea later developed into a proposal as painting installations on facades, but was physically too difficult to construct before the due date of this book. 35

A quick stamp project that I did takes the notion of scale literally. Because the stamp is physically a very small thing, I decided to make a stamp that reproduces a piece of my nail on it at actual size. 32

The notions of seeing can not be fully explored without the acknowledgement of the complexity of our multiple senses. Elements such as sound, memory, smell, and taste, just to name a few, open up a more intricate world of seeing, interpretation, and perception.

For a sculpture project, I wanted to take a look at the relationship between color and taste. I made a popsicle stick at human size to see if our correlation of a certain color to taste is still intact even though it is obviously deceiving by scale. In a way, this object confronts us to the visual information that we have accumulated, which proves to be arbitrary but at the same time very strong. 29

I was also interested in the difference between the way sound evokes weight in contrast to the way colors and shapes evoke weight. I took the form of the book to explore two things, the graphic translation of sound; and memory between the flipping of a book in comparison to remembering the melody by hearing. I made two books with different transparency paper on selected measures by musician Schoenberg to explore and suggest the different clarities in the process of remembering. This was also an old project and the process was very rigid. 9

While looking at books, I noticed that the transferring of weight of a book from the right hand to the left hand while one reads a book sequentially is never expressed visually. An idea I had was to color the odd (right) pages in a gradient from dark to light and color the even (left) pages in a gradient from light to dark; in order to make visible the physical feel of the book in one’s hand. This is also an unrealized idea because I thought that the idea is too singular and mathematical in expression. 31

I am not interested in analyzing existing technology or in developing new technologies of seeing. Rather, I would like to work in a way that confronts the personalities of image technologies, and by doing so, create work that draws inspiration from the differences in seeing that technology provides in contrast to our natural vision.