tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post3305442258129391202..comments2010-04-22T11:50:58.091-07:00Comments on Seeing Seeing: Week 10Daniel Coffeenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03912050391869734890noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-18214420431423642102008-11-08T12:52:00.000-08:002008-11-08T12:52:00.000-08:00This image is free. It's random, out of linear ord...This image is free. It's random, out of linear order yet in its own order with its own linear consistencies. Even though it's two dimensional, it takes on depth because of the multiple layers overlapping one another. Each box almost appears to be floating horizontally, framed by the top nav and tool box. This image brings the viewer, for a brief moment, into the chaos of a working desktop.LouCrownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08309541753092756393noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-19008067412952646572008-11-07T00:24:00.000-08:002008-11-07T00:24:00.000-08:00This one overarching frame presents images on top ...This one overarching frame presents images on top of images, partly exposed and partly hidden. It is convoluted to the point that it is difficult to work out exactly what is going on in the image. What is the frame of a window and what is the frame within a window? Where does that window end and the next begin? It is simply an overwhelming cornucopia of colors, words, and frames. It reworks the notion of space. As one's eyes travel across the screen the depth of each frame appears to be constantly changing as the relative depth of each, constantly in flux, makes a mockery of the concepts of background and foreground. Background and foreground are are folded over and coiled around each other to the point that they lack sense. This convolution transforms the image. It lacks sense as a representation of a functional computer screen. It is not devoid of sense; that sense is merely of a different nature. The death of the functional fertilizes the birth of the aesthetic.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16899199463587242786noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-39037004387918617012008-11-06T14:05:00.000-08:002008-11-06T14:05:00.000-08:00I can't help but to be overtly anecdotal and self-...I can't help but to be overtly anecdotal and self-referential in regard to this image. It felt like it stole my idea. Haha, the humor in that egoism. Age old epiphany: ideas are not owned nor one's own. Especially ideas spawning from proximal environments. <BR/>Point is being: I had created an image of my computer screen as well for my project, only it had in its forefront a picture of a dicephalic newborn with Craniopagus parasitic and on the side of the monitor the two-headed infant at a different angle in which the parasitic head was looking at the viewer and not the real head. Not quite so subtle in my personal metaphor of the camera and the internet as a technological rhizome of annexed heads, faces, perceptions, but it does a similar trick in this now repetitive logos of images of themselves, art as looking inward instead of outward.<BR/>But what does this proximity in ideas mean?<BR/>It felt personally that the images were fashionable, innovative, and the moves became trite in having already been made (of a sort of fixed sentimentality, though, I admit, subliminal plagiarism is also in play at my part much as it seems to be on this message board). The language of the image seems too unilateral, too collective. I could go on in the comment about how the internet is itself a screen of anamorphic infinity; that it is a world embedded with manifold frames and screens that can fold, minimize, maximize, scroll, draw, overlap, write, record, and be manipulated by my touch on its appendage of keys. OR that the image gives the myriad frames of the idea world in a multi-task, in which all are sprawled out, some latent, and hidden beneath, some larger, some moved to the corner, but all areas, zones, spaces of variation. <BR/>And this argumentation is just another move. But banal when made profound or becomes art becomes banal again, creation is constantly dying to be reborn. <BR/>This very mode of thinking is already a dying breed, and I am getting anxious for a new framework.paulkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11514940941957655851noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-75466604080367377312008-11-06T14:03:00.000-08:002008-11-06T14:03:00.000-08:00By pointing to its own production, the image effac...By pointing to its own production, the image effaces the distinction between camera and image; interestingly, the desktop screenshot is at once camera and image. This particular kind of image, the desktop screenshot, can only be apprehended by means of the same device that initially produced it: the computer. Hence, by deploying itself via its original medium of production, the image engenders a sense of intimacy between itself and the viewer. That the image appears before the viewer on her own desktop occasions a personal encounter with the image.Alexander Gonghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05916310306150419219noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-79488786154208729142008-11-06T13:47:00.000-08:002008-11-06T13:47:00.000-08:00The image is hectic. The eye is drawn, not to the...The image is hectic. The eye is drawn, not to the "bulk" or "focus" of the image, and definitely not towards the center, but instead, the eye is drawn to the sidelines, the little gray corner in the top. It's "lack" of information allows the viewer respite from the busyness, squishedness, and overall stressfulness of the rest of the image. I say stressful in that the image offers a plethora of information, full of text and inner images, yet none of it is complete. <BR/><BR/>We should strive to see this image without the existence of Coffeen, Photoshop, screenshots, etc. in mind. To do so would be seeing an image of an image of a program editing an image of someone's desktop, where we ought to look at the image flatly, as an image in and of itself.Chris Yennhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16544047538225297532noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-1076286215555980172008-11-06T13:45:00.000-08:002008-11-06T13:45:00.000-08:00This image is the spontaneous self-creation of the...This image is the spontaneous self-creation of the world. It does not not seek to capture Coffeen's desktop; rather, in the exact moment of looking at the screen shot, the view becomes witness to the sublime organization of Coffeen's life and being at that exact moment. The information explodes in a scattered, overlapping manner, which, when looked at all at once, becomes a sort of ordered chaos. The shot has a limit- the computer in which we choose to view it, the screen in which it was framed; but the limit only frames a seamless mass of inflected bits of information. The concept of voyeurism infuses the image with a certain flavor, but it is the merging of this concept with the scattered windows that allows the entire image to constantly move. The stakes of this are that the viewer must re-constitute what it means to "create" an image, and in doing so cannot help but become enmeshed in the event of Coffeen snapping this shot.Katie Felberhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05661466208593791343noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-11782716899272310992008-11-06T13:42:00.000-08:002008-11-06T13:42:00.000-08:00The image has so many layers. Within the windows a...The image has so many layers. Within the windows are bits of more image and information. Each click pulls back an image while revealing more and more.<BR/>But in another sense its a splattering of images, or a pile of spaghetti as someone else has noted. Each window is its image itself, not the inference of what lies beneath other tabs and windows. Again mosaic comes to mind.<BR/>Even more interesting are the thin slices of "desktop background." This is supposedly the base, core or end of the layers. But this assumption of a hierarchy is challenged in the still frame desktop. UgDerek Sagehornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04574486526774487071noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-87551957081419661512008-11-06T13:23:00.000-08:002008-11-06T13:23:00.000-08:00The image strikes the viewer because it is not a s...The image strikes the viewer because it is not a single image, it is frames and image within image. What would the focal point of this image be how could you classify it. But that classification doesn't matter, what is more important is the chaos the juxtaposition of imagres crates and the dificult a viewer has making any sort of percise sense out of it.Kate Collinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01823399187274556603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-44588532789971190372008-11-06T13:16:00.000-08:002008-11-06T13:16:00.000-08:00The image is an image of a scattered desktop, the ...The image is an image of a scattered desktop, the result of coffeen's preoccupation with facebook, his blog, and photoshop. What is a rather uninteresting screenshot of one man's desktop can be anything the student viewer wants it to be and will surely result in some interesting interpretations. Which is the point. It is another image that is entirely open to speculation depending on the viewer and his/her experiences.Moiiiiiieowhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16905198725347891380noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-29841250648331386952008-11-06T13:15:00.000-08:002008-11-06T13:15:00.000-08:00At first I thought this was just a screenshot of a...At first I thought this was just a screenshot of a desktop. Then, I thought it was a screenshot of a screenshot being edited in Photoshop - I have to admit I felt kind of cool when I figured that out (and kind of stupid at the same time that I didn't catch that immediately). <BR/><BR/>But then I looked at the Photoshop navigator, and I realized that the image being edited on Photoshop is not the same as the image I'm viewing. And now, I'm just confused. But in a funny kind of way. The image is just a bit overwhelming. A bit as in a lot. These strange instances of seeing seeing are uncanny in the sense that the website in the photo is the website I am currently viewing to view the photo of the website - and so there is an autopoiesis right now as this image becomes right before my very eyes. And then there are other uncanny moments as some words seem to relate to the picture, like "whimsy," and "autopoiesis," and then with "neosporin" you kinda have to create a narrative - "oh maybe coffeen is working on some design or other for them," and then "portable infrared heater" just kinda punches you in the face and knocks the narrative right out of you. Aaahahhahahaha. I am laughing right now. Seriously. Seriously laughing. Hahahaha. I surrender to the whimsy of this image.david kimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14184371864536778131noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-51080598114975657382008-11-06T12:49:00.000-08:002008-11-06T12:49:00.000-08:00The image offers a “hard-drive” and a “network” ic...The image offers a “hard-drive” and a “network” icon with equal importance (or unimportance). The two icons cannot possibly represent a distinction between the particular (HD) and the collective (network). Instead the viewer (with a sense of stupidity) approaches a concept, newly scrambled from the familiar representations of the functions of programs and icons. The windows arise from somewhere, the tool bars were called forth for a purpose, but we cannot possibly be confident with any attempts to answer these questions. Mysterious multiplication and propagation confront the viewer, what do you do next? Assemble! Just as Coffeen contrived this image he created and is knowledgeable of the relationships, origins and functions for the information/tools present in the image. But for the viewer, this methodology is invisible and only the finished product is left. Like Coffeen, the viewer must assemble and build relationships amidst this sea of information and colors to derive a stable conception of the image. All of the programs, tools, information is represented by icons (representations) but in order to properly work with a computer the viewer/Coffeen must derive new connections and relationships between these representations to continually remake them and add to their index of self-definition. But as the viewer/Coffen embarks on this process they are simultaneously remaking image and themselves.willhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18403394256893821094noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-36142825849907837592008-11-06T12:44:00.000-08:002008-11-06T12:44:00.000-08:00What I find particularly frustrating about this im...What I find particularly frustrating about this image is my inability to move its component pieces of it around within the frame. I figure this feeling has to do with the paradigm in which this sight existed to me before I considered it as a static image. Still, all the right angles seem to demand my immediate attention, though the composition does not easily allow me to focus on any one box. They are layered over each other with no apparent functional reason—photoshop over firefox over word over finder. I want to check the facebook notifications, minimize the word document, put things in order. As it stands, its just ornament, different combinations of cyan, magenta, yellow, doing nothing in particular other than taunting my inability to wield any influence on them.tessa stuarthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15039934466478530384noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-74076627052711857692008-11-06T12:42:00.000-08:002008-11-06T12:42:00.000-08:00This image is hillarious. It is the image of the p...This image is hillarious. It is the image of the photoshop-ing of the image of the screen, which is itself constituted by images, and images of images. And this photoshop-ing shows us yet another image of the image of the screen, the red lines indicating which portion of it we have access to. My brain does not adequately compute. There are images of files, which are perhaps images of concepts. Everything is so strangely folded onto and into itself; conceptually, then, it exists in a inconceivable many-dimensional space. That is, I can imagine that it must exist in such a space, but I can't understand the geometry of that space. Concept and percept are intermingled and intertwined very explicitly -- the images of the people on facebook and their names. The image of the folders and their names. What spaghetti we have here.danielhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12806031569032851120noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-32135822928928690452008-11-06T12:17:00.000-08:002008-11-06T12:17:00.000-08:00These images are a congolmeration of Coffeen going...These images are a congolmeration of Coffeen going in the world. It is an extension of Coffeen qua technology. There is no difference between the screen shot and the multifarious happenings on the screen, they are all one and the same: image.<BR/><BR/>This image is always already on the blog. The section from the blog shows a posting from a week ago, yet it is right here in the moment of seeing the image. It is the proliferation of seeing. The blog is an image while at the same time is the place where the viewer goes to see the seeing of this image. It is a constant refolding of the world upon itself.Brandohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05183644022038407342noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-40932350581348346092008-11-06T12:08:00.000-08:002008-11-06T12:08:00.000-08:00All aspects of this image are in equal focus. From...All aspects of this image are in equal focus. From the Facebook messages to the folder entitled “Neosporin”, this screen-shot image suggests no privileged event, no focal point. Rather, this image is the totality of its parts. Indeed, the imagery upon imagery creates one image, this image.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-53301738858696939182008-11-06T12:06:00.000-08:002008-11-06T12:06:00.000-08:00This is an image of a flat canvas proliferated in ...This is an image of a flat canvas proliferated in multiple dimensions, multiple frames, both folding in on themselves, over each other, and folding out infinitely, yet within a certain limit. And the limit of each frame is contingent upon its relationship to other frames. When one frame is shrunk or stretched, it directly affects the limit of all other frames it touches. The outer shape of one frame defines the inner shape of another. They set and define each others limits, as well as their own, and merge together to set a new limit, a new frame encompassing infinite frames proliferating over, in, and through each other. Squares intermingling with squares reproduce more squares and not squares at all.Sharhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01886430714937869055noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-85640616907895167502008-11-06T11:50:00.000-08:002008-11-06T11:50:00.000-08:00There are two areas that I see as “most-framed,” a...There are two areas that I see as “most-framed,” and in that sense, as having particular structural importance to the overall image. They are balanced in the top right and top left corners of the image.<BR/><BR/>On the right, the mini-window within Photoshop with the tab labeled “Navigator” is framed almost in the way that you are, in perpetuity, when you stand between two mirrors. The borders of the image as a whole, and the exterior surfaces of internal frames (windows) frame the Navigator window. It then frames itself, first with the bars at top and bottom, then with the Navigator tab, then within that tab by an image pairing, then further still, by a box which draw attention to photographs framed within the pared images. The movement that this frame within framing all but requires is a movement into the image, which can only ever be a movement into the viewer’s experience of the image.<BR/><BR/>On the left, the space that counts as “most-framed,” in my view, is the portion of the desktop itself that remains visible within the boundaries established by Photoshop’s toolbars, a Finder window, and a Firefox window. And what’s contained within this frame? Folders for Neosporin, Rhet140_F_08, and Writing. The presence of so many reminders of this class within the image as a whole gives the slight elevation of the Rhet140_F_08 folder a little more significant than it might otherwise have. If this space in this corner is indeed privileged in that it is “most-framed,” it’s groovy that Rhet140_F_08 is a little bit above writing. Of course, the two must be inextricably woven together. After all, my syllabus has as more pieces written by Coffeen than anyone else. On the other hand, the writing and teaching that seem to register so high on the list of “things-that-Coffen-gets-excited-about” are sharing their privileged space with Neosporin. But why shouldn’t this be the case? When are bliss and banality really separated by more than a moment?<BR/><BR/>Nobody now looking at this image can separate their seeing of it from their knowledge of its origins. Its structure and movement are as much things built and directed by the viewer’s ideas of Daniel Coffeen and Rhetoric 140 Fall ’08 as they are things in, of, and unto themselves. That being the case, it seems necessary to read more than just this image, to include the milieu that’s made up of what I think I know about Coffee, what I think I know about Rhet140_F_08, and what I think I know about seeing seeing.<BR/><BR/>I know Coffeen made the image, and that the image simultaneously made Coffeen. But the latter is more difficult to talk about.Seth Mooneyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10815956354991040877noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-36717389352557027152008-11-06T11:40:00.000-08:002008-11-06T11:40:00.000-08:00In this desktop image its functionality becomes pe...In this desktop image its functionality becomes performative because it will not perform. Merleau-Ponty contrasts Cezanne's seeing with that of ordinary folks: "We live in the midst of man-made objects... and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use" (16). Cezanne "suspends these habits of thought" by painting a seeing that is conspicuously strange, but Coffeen and his computer seem to suspend habit in the opposite way. The desktop does not <I>look</I> strange; it looks rather familiar. Of course, Coffeen's desktop is much different from my own, but it's undeniable that it almost looks like it could be used like anything else in the frame of my computer--and that is what makes it seems strange. It looks familiar until one realizes it cannot be touched in the same way. The image which is commonly understood to be functionally performative in its responsiveness to human interaction becomes aesthetically performative in its lack of such. <BR/><BR/>In this use of palpable vison perhaps it is not so unlike Cezanne's painting after all, but instead of presenting an odd (yet supposedly common to all--primordial) haptic vision of the painter's, we are confronted with the conspicuous lack of a thoroughly familiar haptic vision of our own.Jared Alfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05880947168069021631noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-36063147178137690362008-11-06T11:33:00.000-08:002008-11-06T11:33:00.000-08:00At first, this image seems to capture the whole co...At first, this image seems to capture the whole computer screen. But then, the image of the photoshop breaks the line of capturing and creating. It is no longer capturing and copying but it is a repetition of the image being reformed and reshaped. Each windows and text seems to be placed randomly but with closer readings they are carefully placed to take up the new shape. Each image is identifiable. Yet, each image along with all the other images recovers and recreate. It doesn’t resemble anything.Danny Sung Chun Kimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09604655269746258756noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-35537603785874414552008-11-06T09:48:00.000-08:002008-11-06T09:48:00.000-08:00the desktop as an image, an argument for it's exis...the desktop as an image, an argument for it's existence as an image.<BR/>It's in photoshop, ready to be cut, rearranged and re-composed to something new. <BR/><BR/>(I have the strangest urge to use the photoshop buttons)<BR/><BR/>It's interesting, that it's not that I can't interact with this piece the way I can with a desktop, (these window's are fixed, I can't actually use the icons), but instead, I can interact with it on a more affective level. <BR/><BR/><BR/>Here is something I usually rearrange standing still, arranging me. <BR/><BR/><BR/>*also, it's locked in as background, but really, this whole image is foreground to me. A busy, hectic multiplicity of a foregroundOneofmanyKaties(chramm)https://www.blogger.com/profile/03527850529752950095noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-61409558923751667542008-11-06T09:07:00.000-08:002008-11-06T09:07:00.000-08:00The image is a clutter of boxes, excessive amounts...The image is a clutter of boxes, excessive amounts of visual information cascade over the frame. Here we see the limits of the visual conceptual space offered by the computer. These boxes designate the areas /spaces for information. But the space is limited and for that reason the boxes give into one another by overlapping. When that happens it forces concept on top of concept, words are cut and finished by different boxes. The structure meant to designate and isolate fails under the limit of space.Travishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03477323612180711710noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-54588523971615735812008-11-06T08:28:00.000-08:002008-11-06T08:28:00.000-08:00I'm seeing what Coffeen is seeing after it's alrea...I'm seeing what Coffeen is seeing after it's already been cut up and then uploaded to another place, copied yet again for me on the blog. <BR/><BR/>An infinite type of seeing a reproduction far from the original. It is full but also lacking. <BR/><BR/><BR/>A type of voyeurism is attached with this privilege of seeing and gives a type of scopophilic eroticism knowing what Coffeen looks at while sitting alone at his computer...Ashley Russellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00510042991090065365noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-3896378787634253672008-11-06T08:23:00.000-08:002008-11-06T08:23:00.000-08:00This one fleeting moment, now an image, an event o...This one fleeting moment, now an image, an event of so many happenings. So many frames, so many sites of seeing, so many things that are seeing, so many things to see. I see what Coffeen saw on his computer screen for this one moment on Thursday, 7:39 PM. I see the world from his perspective, and I don’t see the world from his perspective. I see the same things differently since I am my own seeing, and he his.<BR/><BR/>All these separate, minimize-able, click-and-drag-able, closeable windows on the desktop are flattened out when they become a singular image in Photoshop—one background layer, one image. And there is another flattening, another perspective of seeing, with the screenshot of the screenshot of the desktop within the Photoshop frame. But this flattening, however, is not a suppression or suffocation of these various frames. Quite the contrary! This image has so much depth: seeing seeing seeing seeing seeing seeing, on and on and on.Alicehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14527171515518088333noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-45048408907376701452008-11-06T01:02:00.000-08:002008-11-06T01:02:00.000-08:00One snapshot of a desktop opens layers upon layers...One snapshot of a desktop opens layers upon layers upon layers of images. This image is sensory overload as a proliferation of images expound within this one frame: multiple tabs are open within one internet browser, another browser on Facebook, a window containing the local disks, some folders, Photoshop is open and running, along with an essay entitled "A Conspiracy of Whimsy." Does this title explain the essay or does it explain this image with its multiplicity of layers. All these layers of images are always already happening and yet it is just happening right before my eyes as I view it.Stephaniehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06047612036692052029noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5875284755189599675.post-18936284149647721062008-11-05T23:00:00.000-08:002008-11-05T23:00:00.000-08:00I did not know that an image (or images?) could go...I did not know that an image (or images?) could go that way. There is nothing to center on. On the contrary, there is too much to center on. The image is becoming. Too many thoughts consist in these images, which present the viewer with an emerging form of being and becoming. The banality of this image completely counters itself because it presents the simple as “too much.”Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09207583395373006220noreply@blogger.com