Visual Arts and Visual Communications Design

The present day world politics is heavily guided by prejudices. One of the biggest reasons of this impasse is the fact that the dominant cultures prepare recipes, create formulas for all cultures in the world and they impose the results of their own experiences onto others. As a result, people stop thinking for themselves, take the information given as granted and behave timid in experiencing new things. If you take the notion of experience as the accumulation of previous institutional “evidences” provided by the system and not as the “moments” perceived by individuals, it is possible to see the danger clearly. If these evidences are supplied by dominant groups who do not intend to know you, your culture and your rites, the definition of experience will be an official one and not your individual characterization anymore: You stop being yourself...

This paper focuses on the possibility of (re)designing architecture virtually with the help of one of the most important representation tools: Photography. Various digital processes like stitching multiple photos together and mirroring images in image editing software like Photoshop, allow this virtual architecture to take place in virtual environments. Photography can be utilized in the process of ‘constructing’ a new space --that we can call ‘narrative space’-- from an existing spatial body. This narrative space can also be defined as a ‘manufactured metaspace’ which is a space beyond reality and representation: A constructed reality that exists solely in digital realms like Second Life.

Regular photographical imaging record volumetric planes with smooth surfaces. The reason is the camera’s deficiency in perceiving and documenting the visual richness of “persuasive” details in life. HDR imaging methods used in creating this artwork series titled “Aura” helped making invisible organism-like textures emerge and point to the notions of decay and symbiosis.

One of the main objectives in this series of artworks is to facilitate the emergence of the experiential visual complexity between the animate and inanimate, that is otherwise not possible to record. The latent aura of textural presences around us is not always noticeable easily since we tend to consume things too fast. With the rich textures achieved after high-dynamic-range-imaging (HDRI) procedures, a new symbiotic painterly visual relationship between biological (humans) and non-biological (space) was intended.

In addition, the paper will focus on photography rather as a tool of personal world making, instead of photography as witnessing. During the process of unfolding this practice; notions of superimposition, palimpsest, painting vs. photography, truth, photography as an apparatus to provoke de-familiarization will be covered. The final aim is to confirm photography as a visual language that enriches and transforms human perception.

Construction is a temporary action that exists for a while and transforms itself into another product at the end. On the other hand, reconstruction is the representational interpretation of the “once constructed” substance and it never turns out to be the replica of the original, since components and techniques that are used are not the same anymore. This modification points to a certain level of metamorphosis that carries the potential to lead to an “opinion” that may create new worlds. This text focuses on the possibilities of using digital imaging techniques to “construct” new micro/macro- cosms from existing structures.

We know that lack of knowledge causes ignorance, fanaticism and bigotry. With advances in web technologies, access to information has become too easy. There is such an excessive amount of information one can find on a topic that it is sometimes extremely difficult to sift through and find the ‘correct’ information. Most people use search engines to reach information and usually browse only the first two pages of results. As a consequence, vast numbers of people get to ‘find’ the same information, the validity of which can be questioned in relation to the creator of the pertinent information.

This paper will rest on the assumption that in order to understand the ‘other’ one needs to understand its rites. Personal face-to-face interactive ‘experience’ of reality and creativity is urgently needed and Internet platforms should be used as networking tools to initiate intercultural gatherings and projects under the umbrella of cultural exchange via web portals, blogs, wikis and podcasts in order to share creativity and avoid subjectivity. The dominant and subjective institutional images created by the Western cultures and propagated universally do unfortunately not carry universal values and local cultures have started to lose their own ‘realities’ (i.e. traditional practices) and ‘hallucinate’. More cross-cultural communicative action and more cooperation on the individual level seem to be the solutions to the problem and should be fostered to avoid hegemony.

Creativity is stochastic and assumptive in nature. The importance of randomness in the creative process must not be ignored, underestimated or intentionally disregarded in a condescending way. Notions of chance, randomness, or unpredictability are much important, especially when it comes to artistic creation.

Abstract: Forecasting, if misused and distorted, can turn into an apparatus of prophecy and exploited to misguide, convince, daze, hypnotize people. Some studies in data visualization, for instance, carries this potential. In order to make complex data more understandable, InfoVis projects tend to exclude marginalities and focus on mainstream data to make it more visible, legible, understandable. As a result, mainstream becomes majority, minority disappears since it does not find the opportunity to be visually represented. On the other hand, studies conducted on network behaviours reveal the fundamentally private ways people surf, live, shop, behave, consume and this fact pave the way for manipulation of apparently personal preferences. Commercial corporations die to get access to such info and they pay millions of dollars to academicians who are involved in such analysis, since they acquire the possibility of manoeuvring how people will consume. The disguisedly named “trend research” irrevocably evolves into “trendsetting”, and the commercial firms do not follow people anymore, instead they make people follow their firms’ trends devised after forecasting. Being able to forecast weather, natural disasters, health problems and so on is necessary, indispensable; but, when forecasting is (ab)used to control the way people live, it becomes latently oppressive, dictatorial and exploitive.

This paper will focus on the positive dimensions of the conceptions of serendipity, surprise, accident (especially in the field of visual arts) and on the negative aspects of systemic determinism where technology is ill-used to make people’s brains dull, submissive by providing “services” for daily routines that are supposed to be carried out by people themselves, and not machines.

Keywords: Change, determinism, forecasting, mysticism, polysemy, serendipity, trendsetting, unexpected.