Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Works Of Andy Goldsworthy

Works Of Andy Goldsworthy It is immediately evident that Goldsworthys works, in general, strongly accentuate texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the working process as a tactile expression, implying the involvement of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially through cues signifying touch and vision. For me, looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lost the purpose and functionalism of the commercial product. This tactile gaze, used as the central way of identifying the object, is further evoked through the use of text. For example, in a photograph of a spherical ice ball positioned aside a bleak Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the image not only in terms of its visual impact but also the texture implied by its aural qualities: Stacked ice sound of cracking. The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks symbolizes its sensual form in a way which still identifies it as relating to a river, but without the non-abstracted seamless visual art representation of a river. Goldsworthy describes this process: The snake has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes below and sometimes above, an expression of the space it occupies. Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to designate a river (in its non-place), the use of more tactile cues reclaims the spectators newness of vision: in Auges words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is the first journey of birththe primal experience of differentiation.While Auge asserts that non-places exist only through the words that evoke them, AGs words work to clarify the gaze rather than condense it to a unified vision. But what constitutes this gaze? When we refer to his earthworks, are we referring only to the symbolic object, or the whole space inside the photo frame? Like a travel writer, a heightened perception or rediscovery of the landscape is the central tenet of Goldsworthys working process: Some places I return to over and over again, going deeper- a relationship made in layers over a long time. There is a suggestion by AG that site or context affects and, to an extent, has a significant role in generating the features of his objects: When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around itThe energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within While the train, for Auge, is one of the greatest culprits behind the spectators fleeting vision of space, Goldsworthys immobilization and transposition of the train track and its practical function to a snaking in the Lambton earthwo rks?, is a way for AG to recapture the essence of the landscape, to shift its perceptual status from non-place to place: Staying in one place makes me more aware of change. However, part of this awareness is awareness that the land itself is fleeting and transforming according to environmental whim, and that the photograph merely represents a certain moment in a process. His emphasis on spontaneity and change according to environmental and climactic conditions, as well as his own sense of navigation, is significant because he is able to evoke the history of the object through capturing a synchronic moment in its processes. If we look at several of his works in which piles of material are neatly centred with a hollow hole, we sense their impermanence and a foreboding decay from seeing their present formal cohesion. A Cambridge earthwork with leaves is accompanied by this awareness in text, where a materialistic description of the object is transformed into a narrative of it: Torn Hole/horse chestnut leaves stitched with stalks around the rim/moving in the wind. Perhaps more than these smaller-scale earthworks, the earthworks in County Durham most forcefully use the concept of environmental process to allude to the movement of travel, not only through their obvious association with trains, but through the movement implied by the object, as ripples from a thrown stone. Freezing these processes is a way of reawakening the senses, by both seeing the object statically without moving too fast and by being aware of its continuing narrative, rather than being driven by the perpetual series of presents of those unrecognised non-places, exaggerated in Thomas Gurskys digital photos. According to Auge, the language of signposts etc. does not heighten the spectators perception of a place, but merely substitutes their relationship to it as a mere passing acknowledgement. Goldsworthys works seem to reclaim that historicity of the natural object that is lost in the immediacy of the commercial product, including the signs that describe and name features and punctuations in the land, trying to give it a sense of place. Challenging the prescriptions of discourse on our subjectivity, however, has always been a preoccupation in landscape art. Constables landscape paintings, for example, could represent a different challenge to the supermodern construction of landscape into a fleeting non-place, through his holistic, static, formalist and panoramic vision of the land. While Goldsworthy reconfigures the landscapes gaze beyond the static to an awareness of its morphology, materiality, unpredictability and precariousness, Constable and the landscape painters of the 18th century synchronized these natural irregularities, painting the clouds and sun simultaneously and consciously at different periods and freezing the movement of the Hay wain into a stance. In Goldsworthys work, therefore, landscape is no longer a site, implying static, but a process, implying diachronic, in which the object and its place are interdependent. Throughout the earthworks photographs and their accompanying text, two main interconnected subjectivities emerge, both of which seem threatened by the dislocation through the non-place: organic nature and Goldsworthy, who is simultaneously a conscious manipulator of natures autonomous processes as well as driven by the manipulations of nature itself. The larger scope of his County Durham Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, encourages a more structural and slightly cartographic gaze. A disused railway track becomes the site for a snaking sand track photographed aerially alongside rows of monotonous houses. Their juxtaposition, their mutual encroachment on one another and the snaking imprints echo of movement, in one sense seem to re-establish the inter-dependency of urban structures and nature, and the similarities in the way we perceive them despite serving different functions. In this sense, it allows greater insight to its organic qualities by its association. In a technical sense, it could be argued that there is a tension between Goldsworthys organic creations and their technological control by the intrinsic features of the photograph. However, any hint of the artists exploitation, evoked in works such as Snowball in trees or in references to the name of the excavator driver in the Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks, is balanced out, in exchange, by their precarious existence in nature, where a rock could be precariously balanced on a boulder. This relationship between nature and its manipulations is significant because it represents a reappropriation of our relationship with those places, designated by the artists symbols rather than the symbols of industry with which individuals are supposed to interact only with texts, whose proponents are not individuals but moral entities or institutions. Goldsworthy navigates and finds his non-prescribed place, by being led by climactic and environmental factors rather than such moral entities. Auge defines non-place in detail against the anthropological concept of place, where the traveller occupies a non-communicative, solitary space with the language of ticket machines and train timetables. Accordingly, these public facilities and structures give the spectator an image of their individuality, or a distanced simulated familiarity, by discursively framing and displacing the gaze and the individual essence towards a simultaneous collective individuality, through the individualization of references. In contrast, by allowing the serendipitous influence of nature to produce a unique result on each object, each of the processes in the Earthworks produces individual objects, which, not over-prescribed by images and signs, evolve in partial autonomy.

Monday, January 20, 2020

Sometimes it is a single event which propels a child from innocence :: Free Essay Writer

Sometimes it is a single event which propels a child from innocence into adulthood. Discuss. ‘Sometimes It Is A Single Event Which Propels A Child From Innocence Into Adulthood. Discuss, With Reference To The Texts You Have Read Throughout The Course.’ (Jane Eyre + Red Room) Everyone has to grow up at some stage in their life, and in the three texts I have studied; the young children have been almost thrown into adulthood. This is because they have experienced an emotionally painful event, which forces them to come face to face with the harsh and cruel realities of adult life. In each of the pieces of writing, the children are all the young age of ten when they go through the horrific incident that forces them to mature. In 'Jane Eyre', Jane is locked in the Red Room when she is only ten years old. `for I was but ten;` In 'The Lesson' the boy hears of his father’s death when he was `a month past ten` In 'The Flowers', Myop is only ten when she discovers the body of the deceased black man `She was ten, ` Each of the writers makes the children in their texts such a vulnerable age to increase the impact of the tragedy they have to go through. It makes the reader feel sympathetic for the child and conveys how painful the experience must be. In each of the texts, the children featured all come from varied backgrounds, and have all been treated in different ways before being forced from childhood. Some have had happier childhoods than others. In 'Jane Eyre', Jane is an orphan whose parents were killed by TB? She is left in the care of her uncle, but he too passes away. Jane is then left to be looked after by her aunt, Mrs. Reed. Mrs. Reed made a promise to her husband on his deathbed to treat Jane as she was her own, but she does not fulfil this promise. She treats Jane with inferiority, claiming she is `less then a servant` and excluding her from family activities. Due to the attitude of Mrs. Reed, her children take the same approach, and are unkind and disrespectful towards Jane. Her eldest cousin John Reed continually bullies Jane, making her life a misery. Brontà «Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s use of language as she says `every nerve I had feared him`. The use of the phrase ‘every nerve’ conveys the intensity of the terror that Jane feels due to Johns bullying. It is because of John’s taunting and abuse that Jane is unfairly locked in the Red Room. She reacts to John throwing a library book at her head for no reason. Sometimes it is a single event which propels a child from innocence :: Free Essay Writer Sometimes it is a single event which propels a child from innocence into adulthood. Discuss. ‘Sometimes It Is A Single Event Which Propels A Child From Innocence Into Adulthood. Discuss, With Reference To The Texts You Have Read Throughout The Course.’ (Jane Eyre + Red Room) Everyone has to grow up at some stage in their life, and in the three texts I have studied; the young children have been almost thrown into adulthood. This is because they have experienced an emotionally painful event, which forces them to come face to face with the harsh and cruel realities of adult life. In each of the pieces of writing, the children are all the young age of ten when they go through the horrific incident that forces them to mature. In 'Jane Eyre', Jane is locked in the Red Room when she is only ten years old. `for I was but ten;` In 'The Lesson' the boy hears of his father’s death when he was `a month past ten` In 'The Flowers', Myop is only ten when she discovers the body of the deceased black man `She was ten, ` Each of the writers makes the children in their texts such a vulnerable age to increase the impact of the tragedy they have to go through. It makes the reader feel sympathetic for the child and conveys how painful the experience must be. In each of the texts, the children featured all come from varied backgrounds, and have all been treated in different ways before being forced from childhood. Some have had happier childhoods than others. In 'Jane Eyre', Jane is an orphan whose parents were killed by TB? She is left in the care of her uncle, but he too passes away. Jane is then left to be looked after by her aunt, Mrs. Reed. Mrs. Reed made a promise to her husband on his deathbed to treat Jane as she was her own, but she does not fulfil this promise. She treats Jane with inferiority, claiming she is `less then a servant` and excluding her from family activities. Due to the attitude of Mrs. Reed, her children take the same approach, and are unkind and disrespectful towards Jane. Her eldest cousin John Reed continually bullies Jane, making her life a misery. Brontà «Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s use of language as she says `every nerve I had feared him`. The use of the phrase ‘every nerve’ conveys the intensity of the terror that Jane feels due to Johns bullying. It is because of John’s taunting and abuse that Jane is unfairly locked in the Red Room. She reacts to John throwing a library book at her head for no reason.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

Contemporary Politics and Economics in Mexico Essay

Over the course of Mexican history, the governmental and economic state of Mexico has been largely unstable. The nation was marked by dictatorial shifts in party-list (and their candidates) and their constant bickering with each other; the deformed presidency, the elite and the political group controlled the economic fervor with constant insurgencies from the lower classes; the shift of the informal traditional ‘relatively’ closed market system to an international open trading system as a form of ‘globalization’; and finally, the drastic environmental events, like the 1985 earthquake which had shaken up the nation. In the following paper, there is an attempt to elucidate the static forces that govern the Mexican politics and economics from 1980s to the contemporary times. Mexican politics was largely determined by the ‘evolution’ of the ruling party Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), their gradual shifts or hold in power from a hegemonic- (1929 to 1979), bipartisan- (1979 to 1985) and finally, the pluripartisan stage (1988-2000). The bipartisan stage marked the initial infiltration of the opposing party Partido Accion Nacional (PAN) and the strong comptetion between the PRI, PAN and the PRD (Partido de la Revolucion Democratica during the pluripartic years. PRI had a hold on presidential seat for 71 years until it was put to a stop in the 2000 elections. The presidential monarchy from 1970 to 1982 coincided with a period of shared development in political organization with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in governmental positions and puts an end to the ‘sustained’ economy that Mexico originally enjoyed under the Echeverria . To combat the economic crisis and peso devaluation, the State attempted to intervene with the entrepreneurial activities, thus sparking State-Entrepeneur dissent; the private businesses erected Entrepreneurial Coordinating Council (ECC) institutions as a protective mechanism. Portillo delivered his counterattack by nationalizing bank systems and increasing the interest rates. Mexico experienced general economic quagmire — inflation, external inequity, currency devaluation, peso flight, mounting unemployment and low purchasing power — in 1976, 1982, 1987 [ e. g. 59 % inflation] and 1994-95 with middle periods of mild economic recuperation. The September 19 1985 earthquake, which killed approximately 6,500 to 30,000 individuals, aggravated the economic crisis. The 80s were dominated by neoliberal (semi-democratized state implementing free election rule) over the freemarket system, as a result of mounting external debts and the ‘Washington Consensus’. The freemarket system/informal market system originally dominated by local ‘street market vendor’ types, became an open humdrum to international financial organizations like the World Bank to ‘negotiate’ for the debts. The State Restructuring generally involved administration modernization, openness of the national market/participation with free trade with the State neighbors (e. g. 1986 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), privatization of public enterprises, and introduction of radical social and political reforms to the relatively ‘traditional’ State. The ‘Restructuring’ debilitated the State with most of the reforms resulting to dispersed control in politics, loss of ethics in politicians and political institutions, and mounting economic problems. The Neoliberal State, 1982-2000, demonstrated a stunningly low GIP per head of 0. 3 %. With income distribution becoming more unequal. The year 1994 marked the participation of State to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Inequality in income and devaluation of the market price coupled with the global inflation of prices created insurgencies from the lower classes and the emergence of anti-political groups like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation from the State of Chiapaz. The peso devaluation, increased exchange rate volatility and meltdown of stocks will persist up to the current state of economic affairs. This was naturally fueled by distrust of external investors to the weak form of governance. Federal Electoral Institute, mediated by ordinary citizens was erected in the early 90s to ensure that elections are ‘clean’ compared to PRI unfair appointing of offices in the past. Quesada won the 2000 election due to the insurgency and popular voting but have few votes from the Congress. It was the former President Zedillo who officiated the electoral results thus stunting the chance of PRI to question the results. The administration of Fox signed up with the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America with the hope of modernizing the reforms and the pre-existing labor laws, opening investments in the energy sector, and improving the infrastructure. The 1994 NAFTA agreement’ beneficial effects were apparently not agreed upon by participants. Whereas the US reiterates that there is ‘speeding up’ of the economic activity of the free market system of Mexico as indicated by the thrillion dollar class, the quick economic growth did not improved the standards of living of the lower and middle class. Calderon, the current president of the Mexico and also a PAN member, experienced many oppositions from the PRD; the attacks were on post-electoral and on ‘Banobras-borrowing’. Calderon attempted to reduce the economic crisis of the country by producing reforms like Tortilla Price Stabilization Pact, salary caps, security policy and first employment program. The current presidents waged an active advocacy against drugs. The contemporary politics and economic changes in Mexico are centered on neo-liberalism with opening of the State to globalized free trade. The drastic results of the State restructuring persisted up to now and the reforms enacted by the current government will hopefully resolved the problems.

Friday, January 3, 2020

The, And Education Pioneer Researching Learning And Cognition

Lock (1690) was and education pioneer researching learning and cognition. Locke wrote a pivotal book regarding the Essay Regarding Human Understanding. Locke tried to determine just how exactly humans learn. While Locke and other scientists have researched learning and cognition, theories developed that explain human interactions with their environments. Specifically, Activity theory expands upon the idea of humans and their interaction with technology. Engagement is a principal element used to improve upon the design to make interfaces more useful and productive. Learning or cognition is the root of Activity theory. While Locke was an early pioneer in researching the creation of knowledge, another scientist investigated and expanded†¦show more content†¦Computer Science, Engineering, and Psychology) that deals with the theory, design, implementation, and evaluation of how humans interact with computer devices and software. While HCI is more â€Å"user focused†, Activity theory addresses the joining of consciousness and activity. Activity theory is a theory of human consciousness, construing consciousness as the outcome of a person’s interactions with people and artifacts in the context of everyday activity (Kaptelininand Nardi, 2006). 2.0 Basic Concepts of Activity theory Activity theory has three concepts or principles. The first principle of Activity theory relates to all humans directed toward their objects, called â€Å"objectiveness†. A task performed because of an object. Objects focus on the outcome and the primary motivation. The second principle of Activity theory is the â€Å"hierarchical structure† consisting of our actions. Different, decisive actions are performed to obtain distinct goals. A hierarchy of actions are determined by our subconscious and automatic processes. They are not permanent actions, but constantly changing as reality changes. Additionally, â€Å"development† is the third concept of Activity theory. Activity theory requires the context of development and human interaction be analyzed. This human interaction development constantly reforms practice. When Activity theory is applied, it is usually in groups of active participants to