Our eyes do not set. We track movements, colors, shapes. We sharpen and adjust our focus to see and follow what’s around us. Our natural attention is characterized with imperfection and spontaneity. A range of collections can be grouped by a didactic system, but it can also be grouped by a personal way of looking.

For example, in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French film “Amelie”, during a walk with the blind man, Amelie becomes an idiosyncratic lens to the outside world by pointing out and highlighting to him a number of lively happenings in the street. The film is also an extended filter of the director’s sequences of careful editing, which directs our     attention to look at certain things.

In a demonstration in Tirana, Albania, demonstrators used pieces of mirrors to specifically direct people’s attention to the moving sky, expanding the viewers’ normal horizons. Similarly, clothing designed by Jessica Findley to be inflated by air forces us to take notice of the shapes they capture as cyclists ride around the world at various speeds under the wind.

I am interested in these ways of presenting fragments that allow the viewer to draw back the connections. In a publication project where we had to represent all seventeen of the students’ influence presentations, I asked each person to choose a favorite sentence from everyone else’s writing. Two collections of words were generated, each reflecting both the individual and the collective’s interests in an altered yet precise way. I then rearranged these to form concise versions of the presentations themselves, finding the concrete overlaps to be most interesting. 24

While this was an exercise in distillation and recombination to reflect people’s interests, I also had an unrealized idea that tried to distill color. Natural color always come in a shape that we     associate it with. But manufactured color is more arbitrary in its application. I thought that a     mapping of natural color in abstract shapes makes an interesting juxtaposition to a mapping of manufactured shapes in rainbow color—they can be any color. This project was not made         because I envisioned it as an installation and it was too complex to produce. 34

As graphic designers, we work with paper. Most of the times, due to the nature of the         projects, we use paper as containers that take the passive role for carrying other things. I was     interested in finding some way to embed and     reveal more dimension in paper alone.

First I want to represent the coexistence of different physical states of paper, states between paper and ash. So I burnt a piece of paper over the top of my stove. Dark round marks were made on the paper’s surface by pinching two ends together, creating a soft fold that absorbs the heat. After I laid the paper back flat again, I drewlines tracing the area of the approximate folds. I thought that this helps to trigger an image of the once folded state of the paper. 22

Traces lend themselves to a shift of focus by pointing to a previous state in history and revealing the instability of physical materials. Our     ability to imagine a different state of an object goes hand in hand with our ability to imagine a volume in space, or to tell if a depiction of perspective is deceiving. All of these abilities are only possible by the fact that we have memory.

Memory seems to be directly linked with time and space. The idea of a trompe l’oeil takes advantage of our constructed visual knowledge to create a false eye, or a false perspective illusion of depth. Along similar lines, German painter Hans Holbein the Younger used the same understanding of perspective for his own purposes in the painting “The Ambassadors”—he hid an image of a skull as an anamorphic perspective drawing that becomes properly visible only if the viewer shifts their     location in relation to the painting.

Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema” has a similar effect as trompe l’oeil while in video. The two dimensional plane is given an allusion of three dimensional space by the factor of motion.

I was interested in exploring memory with video form. For three days, I made twenty-two attempts trying to duplicate the same walk by memory and capturing each on video. I became more skilled at each new attempt but never getting perfect. Every clip varies slightly from the others in movement and light conditions. The     final video is comprised of the two of the video clips that were the closest to each other. Presented in a split screen format, two spaces reside in one frame which also heightens a strangeness that is different from our everyday experience. 25

I looked at the idea of controlled improvisation further with a book project that tried to     reflect a collection of love stories. I thought that the stories all had a similar narrative curve of gaining, loosing, and vise versa. My idea was to perform something different but retain that curve. I filmed myself trying to hold my breath underwater for several times. The book then is made with the images and hidden folds for the viewer to     discover the stories at moments of coming in or out of the water. 27

I aspire to the way animations have both enormous fluidity in image construction while weaving intricate narrative relationships. Among many, Caroline Leaf’s animation is especially     intriguing in the rough but seamless transitions that she creates using experimental methods. It is as though time is interrupted with a personal rhythm in order to make us look at it better.

Inspired by her animations made with sand on a light table, I tried to make an animation in the same technique with flour during my first semester. I found that the material lends itself to the idea of morphing more than any other, and my animation became a two minute loose improvisation on the theme of play by smearing flour to create figures, shapes, and narratives. 10

Our minds do not just see what is in front of us. It tries to make more with what we see. In the film “Zorn’s Lemma”, Hollis Frampton demonstrates our ability to shift and create meaning even within a changing visual system. Through a sequence of filmed scenarios, he implies that the original form of the alphabet set is as arbitrary as the set that he has replaced, which consists of recorded actions and situations.

Artist group Oho once created an installation of a specific arrangement of lit candles in a grass field to imitate the star constellation of the sky that day. The symbolic connotation makes us aware of our tendency for association.

Somewhat by accident, I began creating a set of letter forms by cutting pre-folded paper. Each alphabet has a range of variations based on the alternation in the foldings. Because folds create mirrored shapes, the idiosyncrasies of each alphabet is revealed through the inconsistencies of symmetrical elements. An infinite number of variations can be created that fall in the gray area of readability. 21

Later, I began to relate these letter forms to the forms of a human body, as if trying to release the alphabets’ inherent imagery potentials for     rebuilding a visual language of its own. I spelled out different words and linked them into an     animated film. The film becomes a chain of words that describes joints, residues, and emotions. 30

For an interactive project, I filled a browser page with transparent roll-over hot spots that trigger changes in the background image. I was able to create a situation where there is no         assigned beginning or ending. The photographs waiting to be activated on the stage consists     of different states and instances of the same subject, the acorn. Thus, each casual twirl of the mouse animates a slightly different sequence of image combination impossible to determine beforehand. 28

Interested in exploring the notion of rereading and non-linear reading, I found that the means of the web browser interface offers a platform that has inherent in it the quality of shifting.