Decoding Dress Codes

Everyday we are faced with tons of advertisements through numerous streams of multimedia. I want to decode dress codes and what exactly are is presented on a socio-cultural aspect. As many people look at the way we interpret text, codes and signs. I want to look at why that outfit was chosen? Why is she/he wearing it? I hope to only use online resources that I frequent already such as fashion blogs, magazines and videos. These forms of expressing fashion is a new emergence that allows for people of all different backgrounds and socio-economic levels to participate.

What drives you to dress the way you do?

These two photos, I choose show two very different forms of dress. The first is an example of a man who doesn't have an interest in fashion. But why is he found on a popular fashion blog? The next is a personal sketch or characterization of a French fashion blogger. What made her choose the items she put in the sketch? For example, the bag in the photo is immediately recognizable for any fashion connoisseur and puts the artist on an entire different level of wealth and status. Does she embody the bag? Or does the bag add to her cultural identity?


Photo credit: 1. http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-12-27T08:44:00-05:00&max-results=20

http://www.garancedore.fr/category/photo/

The Beginning

So I've been sitting around contemplating which path to take in this class.  I think after some thought I've got it (at least for now). Here we go.
The States have it wrong. As a country we seem to believe that our excrement don't smell. Some sort of arrogance has filled this country and it is making me sick. Ignorance shouldn't be tolerated. What kind of image are we portraying to the world and where is this country going?
Now, I understand that there was a time when the US said that it would not deal with other countries and would just build itself up.  In my eyes, we have built ourselves up and have started interacting with other countries. What i do see happening is that we don't accept other countries as equals. It is a real shame that we have to hold our noses so high even though we are no better.
Here is my plan for this class. This ignorance must be stopped. Too much important information is falling between the tines of our forks. We need to catch more. Language is one of the important things that i see not making it on our forks. In the US we need to get people knowledgeable about the world. A way to do that is with language. If kids were all taught different languages while young, we could move forward in the eyes of the world. My goal is to work with a language. I will try to improve myself and then work to help others.

First Post!

I enjoy the irony of this picture because it represents how things have negative feedback loops in our society that keep catapulting our culture into danger. Where does it stop? We create our own limits by engaging in this vicious cycle. I hope to incorporate this ideology into a piece focused on the environment.

Qualifying Speech

The question proposed by Moss in DL1 about whether free speech should be limited in light of the events in Tucson has been on the lips of reporters and politicians across mainstream media, but as Richard Stengel, Time magazine's managing editor, put it in the most recent issue "that discussion has quickly fallen into predictable patterns: the left blaming the right for inflammatory rhetoric, the right blaming the left for unfairly singling it out" (Stengel). Even in a discussion about how divisive speech may in part have led to the violence of the Arizona shootings, politicians are dividing along party lines--demonizing the other side--creating an "us" and a "them." Each side has its own motivations for limiting the speech of the other, and if either managed to push their agenda forward I doubt it would be in the interest of all people. In October of 2010, John Stewart led the "Rally to Restore Sanity" where he called for simple changes to the media's rhetoric. Instead of totally demonizing the other side, Stewart suggested people try things like: "I disagree with you but I am pretty sure you're not Hitler" (Adams). Rather than searching for ways to limit free speech, we should look for ways to better speak to each other.

In a recent paper on the concept of good development, I wrote this:

//A development project in Cote d'Iviore, a country that has faced a rise in gender based violence in the aftermath of war, simply provided women in three different villages cameras and asked them to "make a record of their daily lives" (Jones) as a way to "give them time... to discuss what they would like to change" (Jones). Women in all three of the villages—who at the beginning of the project “feared they couldn’t do what they would be asked to do” (Jones)— stood up in front of their villages, displayed their photos, and spoke for change (Jones). In one village—upon seeing a photo of a battered woman’s leg— the old chief called for violence of any kind to stop (Jones). In the second village, a woman who had been badly beaten by her husband showed her photos to the village and that night, “for the very first time, he gave her money to buy food for the children” (Jones). In the third village, where six different languages were spoken, the men were not so receptive—yelling over the women—but the women still spoke. Men, under the lens of a camera, learned to see themselves and to see their wives. Women holding a camera found their voices. While this approach might not work in the United States where photographs are often retouched and used to sell rather than to communicate, in Côte d'Ivoire a camera bridged some of the distance between men and women. Simply speaking in public “left the women exuberant” (Jones).// (Stokes)

We must pioneer ways for people to communicate and thus remind ourselves of our similarities rather than our differences: not to reduce speech, but to create more productive dialogue. By seeing each other as people instead of competition, by defining ourselves through similarities rather than differences, we can better our and one another's lives. I hope to use this class to produce space online that allows for this kind of productive interaction: a space where "people are reminded of their collective humanity and responsibility to that humanity" (Stokes).

Works Cited

Adams, Richard, and David Batty. "Jon Stewart Rally- As It Happened." The Guardian. 30 Oct. 2010. Web. 17 Jan. 2011

Jones, Ann. War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak out from the Ruins of War. New York: Metropolitan, 2010. Print. 15-55.

Stengel, Richard. "After Tuscon." Time [New York]. 16 Jan 2011. 2. Print.

Stokes, Jessica S. "Good Development: Perception and Practice." International Grassroots Development. University of Michigan, 2012.

First Post

I plan to create a video projection poster. It will be a 3x5 ft poster. I walk through Nickels Arcade almost daily. I always enjoy the walk and I always enjoy looking around at the facades that are thrown up to the ceiling. I also always, almost always, think different thoughts every time I walk through the arcade. My poster will reflect this. I will film the walk through Nickel's Arcade at, what I feel are, different moments during time or experience. When I have a sufficient number, I am thinking around ten to thirteen reels of the walk, I will place all of the short clips stacked on each other. So the image should be something like ten fruit by the foots set flat on a white surface with the edge of each touching the one above and the one below. Or another image that should be helpful is the one of the time stamp where you can adjust the separate bands to the current date. There will be bottom and top white margins - like where the space for the headers and footers go on a word document. (It is important to note that each clip will not be playing at identical speeds)

Onto these clips I will graft a poem written while reflecting on that particular film and the feelings emanating from and around me at the time of filming. Words will be emphasized and lighted, slowed down and toned in concord with the content of the poem.

In such a manner I hope to demonstrate the interactivity of the literature with time and space. (With space set as, more or less, a constant). My finished product should present the reader with the urge to linger in front of the poster trying to read all of the various texts that, according to each film, move slowly or quickly, sporadically or smoothly. Since these clips will be on a loop, some poems will present themselves more often than others thus reflecting the influence of redundancy and repetition on the ever moving and ever changing poster.

First Post - Rap News

Hey fellow Remixers,

Here is an interesting youtube video that has some remixed elements. I'm considering using some of the ideas presented in my blog/project/website. Let me know what you think of it!

Some Limited Fork History that is also Some current Limited Fork Theory

Welcome
to a place where our ideas (already forked) converge, mingle, diverge, etc. (politely); that is: they interact in any way possible for them to interact (polite forms of the ways possible, please) while configuring and reconfiguring tines of a Limited Fork system

You'll be exposed to much of the history of Limited Fork Theory in Design Lab 1, but not all of it, in part because Limited Fork Theory deals with partialities of partialities, an inevitable handicap for an approach to making understandings and to applying understandings that relies on a flawed tool, whose flaws include being the only tool available within what would be a closed fork system if the fork did not have gaps between the tines it must have as a forking or bifurcating system. (image of tree of chaos and bifurcation theory by System.dat-User.dat at flickr, bifurcating lung system from zhezhang/project)


I also do not yet (and do not to ever) know the entirety of the history of Limited Fork Theory. I can share with you a moment in which I both became one of the tines, and became aware of he presence of a limited fork (something already in place, joined in progress) —please note that in my sharing a moment from a prior event system, a part of the past (that which adheres on some scale to any part of a tine forking up the past to reconstruct it for you here and now); a part of the past becomes (is forked into) part of the moment occurring, the moment occurring seamlessly that we fork into parts: minutes, years, etc. (incredible flexibility when you think about it).

The sharing of a moment in October 2004 when I became aware of a system of thinking and making already in progress via the video poam (product of act[s] of making made that weekend, on Saturday night after coming home from a movie at the Quality 16 Cinema on Jackson Road in Ann Arbor, the video poam shared with my classes and colleagues on the last Monday in October, transforming everything in the configuration of everything the fork provided/provides:

THE 1st LIMITED FORK THEORY VIDEO POAM (from forkergirl) from October 2004:
The Song of Iota


FreeVideoCoding.com


The Song of Iota contains the Saturday night system of understanding that arrived at that moment of awareness in the Quality 16 Cinema on Jackson Road (see map below); I opened iMovie for the first time when I got home and with that application made the Song of Iota.


View Larger Map

In 2005, I made DOD: the death of depth (you'll notice that the video starts with the death of death —oops! such configuration of intention is a possible outcome of interaction), a video book about the birth of Limited Fork Poetics, an ancestor system of Limited Fork Theory:



FreeVideoCoding.com