Pauline+Peng+FA+1071

Pauline -- Ziqing Peng GWU Columbian College of Arts & Sciences Freshman, major undecided Love Andy Warhol, love movies, love life

Different forms of art have evolved during the past centuries. As a majority of art forms exposed to the public, it is harder for us to define their originality and value. Through the comic, characters like the filmmaker help us set up the boundary between copyright and public domain. It has helped me learn about the definition of originality, copyright laws, fair applications and protection for originality of arts. It has also posed a question whether the laws and regulations promote or prohibit the development of arts. For me, the answer remained absent. The copyright law could in one hand help artists gain their rights and boost art diversity and in the other hand prevent artist creating new arts based on the production of artist. What people trying to do are to find the balance of these two sides and make the regulations beneficial for all artists.

Before reading the comic, I have learnt the idea of copyright from the famous dispute between Taylor Swift and Spotify: the famous female singer withdrew all her songs from this new cloud music player because she believe her sings were arts that required fair payment. The comic helped me define the rights of artists and their productions and pay serious attention to copyright. It also reminds me of my violation against the law. When I was a high school student, my friends and I often drew some pictures or patterns on the white t-shirts and sell it to raise money for charity. Since I was a fan of Andy Warhol, I often paint some of his famous portraits, such as the Marilyn Monroe paintings, the Campbell Cans and the Cow, on the white t-shirts. I also paint famous paintings from other artists and sold the t-shirts. At that time, I did not realize that my behavior is plagiarism, a violation to the copyright law: all my productions are straightly copies of other existed art works and they reflected the most essential things from the artists. Now I won’t do such thing when creating the t-shirts: I will create all the patterns by myself and not straightly copy things from others.

During Christmas holidays, a new Star Wars movie was shown in cinemas across states and all kinds of Star Wars figures were painted on clothes and other products. Few years ago even in 2007, a world-known luxury brand Balenciaga has moved the legs of C-3PO onto the model’s pants; Rodrte and Preen printed C-3PO and Darth Vader on the dresses they designed; and UNIQLO painted the famous words “I am your father” on t-shirts. I believe all these fashion companies have paid fees to use symbols or figures from Star Wars and not broken the law. As same of these fashion designers, we should also do our best to protect artist or art works’ rights while creating works based on their productions. Copyright laws and artists’ rights need our effort to protect and refine them. =**Colorized Photo**=

Jan 26 Writing Exercise The picture shows a young girl, dressing elegantly, standing on a barren land. The girl wears a navy dress, white ribbon bowties on her two braids and holds a bunch of orange, champagne and white peonies or chrysanthemums. There is one purple bird, maybe a parrot, standing on the girl's left shoulder and looking at the sky. A bird cage is placed on the ground near the child’s left foot, with same tangerine and ivory flowers inside. There are also peonies and carnations laying on the ground in front of the girl and near the her feet. What creates a sense of conflict is that the land that the young child stands on looks infertile and the sky looks gloomy and grey: all show an inanimate sense. While the lovely bird and flowers that the young child holds and the ones laying around her give us a feeling of life and hope. The girl in the middle of this work of art, with calm or no facial expressions, makes us wonder whether she is a angel to bring life, hope and infinity to this poor land or a herald to question us: what have you people done to our mother Earth? = Work in Class =

= Project 1: Surrealist Composite =

Other elements that are used in the project:


=Cinemagraph:=

=Homework: AR= (1)Virtual 3D map stations in cities: help visitors to locate themselves and find their way to final destination. (2)Cupcake order system: customers can DIY their own taste or flavor for cupcakes by using the system and after they submit the order, workers in the shop could complete it by viewing the ingredients list. (3)A device that could detect human minds and links with a 3D printer: users can just create their projects just by thinking about it.

= Project 2: Augmented Reality = Trigger Image: During spring break, I went to Fairbanks, Alaska. So I decided to show the inner arctic circle plane tour by creating an aurasma. The trigger image is a flyer of the tour operated by Northern Alaska Tour Company. I hope the aurasma can function as an introduction to the trip, so I added a photo when we drive to the airport, a video when the plane finally took off, a picture of landscape that was taken on the plane, and few photos of the aurora which were taken inside the arctic circle. When I first saw the northern lights, it wasn't green as I saw from pictures taken by other tourists, human eyes are not enough to detect the color of northern lights and can only see all white when the lights are below level 5. So I edit my photos by using photoshop to try to convey the scenes that I saw in Alaska. =Homework: Counter-monument= Traditional monuments are meant to glorify an event or notable person, usually heroes. The shape, appearance and the meaning behind, compared to counter-monuments, are more easy for people to detect. The counter-monuments have more profound meaning and influence for us to think about. According to the article, basically counter-monuments are often created by concepts and ideas from artists' minds that are too abstract for viewers to see and finalized into a symbol or something "absurd" that can lead viewers to critical thoughts when they are standing in front of the monuments, just like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which goes beyond the surface and looks like a cut by weapon, represents a wound of all veterans, whether physical or psychological. Meaning, visitor experience, site, form and subject are components that artists will consider when they are designing the counter-monuments. All these means that, as a designer, when I am thinking about the final project about counter-monuments, I cannot just reproduce something that is too obvious for audiences to guess. I have to grab an idea that is deep in my head, simplified and modified it into a concept and present it via the monument that will let viewers think deeper.

= Project 3: Counter-Monument = For my project, I got my ideas from a broken egg shell and sail boats and mix them together to create my counter-monument. Before I did the sketch, I looked through Zaha Hadid's productions and grabbed my inspiration from them. To create the topper egg shell like parts, I draw 2 different size of dome and overlap them. By keeping the overlapped part, which shows grey in sketch up, I have different components of topper part of my monument.

The lower parts (stairs) of the monument is like the flowing egg white or sea that boats sail on. For this part, I overlapped a big rectangular and a few circles with different sizes to create an irregular shape. Then I use push & pull tool to make a single stair and by changing it to different scales, I eventually load them up together to create the stairs and base for the monument. When I start to sketch this project, I first think of broken egg shell as a sign of born life and sail boats as May Flower ship that marks an inception of this country. I think this is pretty interesting to mix different elements together and for my assignment different viewers may have different opinions and imaginations about the monument.