Visible – Cornell

My blox for Cornell’s quality of Visibility has a lot of collage elements in it. Because this quality resides in Act II I thought it fitting to include a lot of small circles which could be interpreted as subplots. All of the circles contain what I would represent as the life cycle of a Tina Fey. She began as a reckless bossypants, got her footing as an outspoken improviser, then matured into a successful director, writer, and actress. I threw in that picture of an old woman just to complete the life cycle. Also, there’s a picture in Bossypants which compares Tina to an old woman and I think that, at times, Fey really does have some of the characteristics of an old woman.

In the background, I included a screenshot from a famous sketch of Fey’s called Mom Jeans. Although I wasn’t able to find a full clip of it online, I included it in my blox because it speaks volumes about how comedy is progressing into something that is more of the “gender blind meritocracy” that Fey dreams about. Also, I included an illustration of Darwin’s Evolution of Man. I think that this is significant because it ironically shows that not only has Tina evolved, but women (and men!) who want to me successful can attempt to learn from her and create their own evolution story.

Exactitude: Graphics

When I made an outline for each of the posts I was going to do from the Graphic Design book, I was sure I would use of the computer code entries to demonstrate my knowledge of Exactitude. I scanned the image in… uploaded it.. and then realized I needed to scrap it. The more I looked at the computer code, the more I realized that the image was too far to the side of “crystal” on the fire/crystal scale of vagueness and infinitely detailed. I’ve worked with computer code before so I know that even a single misplaced letter can ruin your entire program. It’s essential to be exact.

I had a really difficult time understanding Calvino’s quality of Exactitude. I think my biggest problem is that my immediate definition of exactitude is being precise or accurate; it was difficult for me to understand that there is such a thing as too much accuracy and not enough accuracy. In order to demonstrate this, I chose the Drawing with Code binary Tree entry:

Drawing with Code The drawings shown here were created with Processing, and open-source software application. The designs are built from a binary tree, a basic data structure in which each node spawns at most two offspring. Binary trees are used to organize information hierarchies, and they often take a graphical down. The density of the final drawing depends on the angle between the “children” and the number of generations. The larger design is created by repeating, rotating, inverting, connectinv, and overlapping the tree forms. In code-based drawing, the designer varies the results by changing the inputs to the algorithm.

I chose this specific image instead of other code based drawing because I think it shows the progression from too vague to too intricate. I arranged them so that they would be shown as a progression (sorry for the pixel noise). This excerpt shows that the drawing becomes more and more dense with each additional generation and that if the drawing continues, it can become very dense and overwhelming; just as Kahn was overwhelmed with the intricacies withing the small square of wood on his chess board.