Dexter

Dexter is one of my favorite shows and I believe there are a few Dexter junkies in our class too. I wanted to talk about the title sequence of this show from a semiotic perspective. I was wondering if we could do a small experiment.

• For those of you who have NEVER watched this show before or does not know anything about what the show is, I request you to just watch the title sequence without reading anything about it. Please post what you think about the title sequence and what you guess the show may be about!
• For those of you who know what the show is about – I think the title sequence is nothing short of brilliance. It conveys so perfectly what the show is about. It was done by Digital Kitchen and won an Emmy for “Outstanding Main Title Design.” My take is that Design Kitchen use a heavily semiotic approach to convey the spirit of the show. They do the same thing with the title sequence of TrueBlood as well.

While we are in the topic of Dexter, I came across this limited edition T-shirt released by ShowTime which costs a whopping $475. Apart from the obvious word play, I really liked the way ShowTime used the street art aesthetic for the graphic style. Needless to point out the t-shirt was released early January this year when Obama’s campaign was in full swing. Talk about being immersed in culture! I think that the use of street art as a visual style communicates the feeling of “one among the people” – a message relevant for both the personalities. What do you guys think?

Jalou

Full disclosure: I ♥ Dolce & Gabbana and I am going to be unabashedly biased towards anything that has a D&G tag on it.

Here are a few facts:

• For those of you who have not heard about Dolce & Gabbana, it is one of the biggest (and one of the best IMO) luxury fashion houses of the world and is based in Milan.
• Sony Ericsson has collaborated with D&G and released a limited edition of their phone called Jalou. The name of the phone is derived from a french word jaloux which means jealousy!
• The D&G edition is plated with 24 carat gold and is faded-rose in color. There are other colors but they are do not carry the D&G tag on them.
• The retail price of the phone is $800 and the price of the D&G edition is undisclosed. D&G is known for it’s notriously high pricing especially since it’s a luxury brand.

Since we have been reading some fashion texts and trying to apply that to interaction design, I thought this was a particularly interesting artifact to talk about. We have talked so much about a phone like the iPhone where owning the latest tehcnology is fashion. So I was wondering how does it work when it comes to something like the Jalou. Clearly it cannot be discarded as “advertising” and “branding”. It gets even more interesting when you compare the advertisements of the same phone – one made by Sony Ericsson and the other by D&G.

Thoughts/comments?

Dolce & Gabbana

Sony Ericsson

Cheat sheet!

If we were to create a cheat sheet for Interaction culture, what would it look like? (all the fancy terms, with a two line simple explanation and a bull’s eye example). I propose that all of us do this as a class.

Currently struggling to understand these three terms – structuralist view, hermeneutic view, phenomenological view! What’s the difference? How do they fit with each other? Please provide comments or feel free to add your own terms (with or without explanations). Let’s cheat!

Here is a video from one of my favorite movies – Ratatouille. For those of you who have not watched it yet (please do), Remy (the protoganist) makes ratatouille (a vegetable stew). Anton Ego is this big shot food critic who is a hard ass, extremely critical, hard to please and is very skeptical about the stew. The below scene is when he tastes it and is completely floored by the taste since it reminds him of his mother making him this dish during his childhood.

Now let’s try to put on different goggles and see this video again.

Structuralist goggles – The stew was good because it had tomatoes, carrots, beans, etc, cut and cooked perfectly. What is the ingredient? How do we identify it?

Non-phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is usually prepared during summer. This is because most of the standard ingredients grow during summer. No lifeworld involved.

Phenomenological hermeneutic goggles – The stew is considered as a poor man’s dish since most of the standard ingredients are not expensive.

Non-hermeneutic phenomenological goggles – Anton Ego’s experience is the perfect example for this. Tasting this stew transports him back to his memories.

Am I right? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Quick Veronique Critique!

As I was not fully quenched by Kickasola, I read the user comments on IMDB, a few other critics and blog posts. Here are a few things that I found interesting.

Roger Ebert:
Roger Ebert is no Kickasola but I found a few things interesting in his critique of the movie. It starts with the sentence “Here is a film about a feeling.” Then he talks about Kieślowski’s style as below.

“He is drawn to coincidence and synchronicity. He is little interested in focusing on a character hurling from point A in the first act to Point C in the third. He is fascinated by Point B, and the unseen threads linking it to past and present. His films can be mystical experiences. He trusts us to follow him, to sense his purpose, to leave the theater having shared his openness to a moment. The last thing you want to do after a Kieślowski film is “unravel” the plot. It can’t be done.”

Slavoj Žižek:
For the few of us who cannot sleep unless we unravel the message, I found that this small snippet almost paraphrases it. It’s an excerpt from an essay titled “The Forced Choice of Freedom” written by Žižek.

“The perception of our reality as one of the possible, often even not the most probable, outcomes of an open situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply canceled out but continue to haunt our reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant linear narrative forms of our literature and cinema.”

Joseph G. Kickasola
I am pretty sure this guy was stalking Kieślowski. I am absolutely stunned by both by the quantity and quality of nuanced observations and interpretations he provides us. He situates his interpretation based on the author’s previous works (references to The Decalogue), life (French and Polish politics), lifeworld (Kieślowski’s attitude towards old people) and through his own judgements as well. This, we all agree, is by no means a simple task and Kickasola has done a kick-ass job. (Sorry couldn’t resist it!)

And here is where I start whining. I have one huge issue with this article. He beautifully states of what I think is the paradigmatic glasses we need to be wearing while watching Kieślowski’s movies.

“… the essence of the film hinges on the experience of watching it, not simply on an understanding of its story, characters, and use of metaphor.”

After stating this, he does exactly the opposite – explains the story and provides rationalistic explanations to the characters’ traits by contextualizing them with respect to the metaphors and motifs of religion, spirituality, politics and philosophy. It does help us understand the movie better but aren’t Kieślowski’s movies meant to evoke? Does one need to have a rational understanding to “feel” it better? If Kickasola is trying to do that, then he is essentially at logger heads with Kieślowski.

Kickasola paraphrases Kieślowski’s attitude towards this by saying
“This type of abstract, nonverbal “rhetoric” can be very persuasive…”

In other words, to me it feels like Kickasola attempts to help us understand a movie that the director did not want us to understand in the first place.

All said and done, I do not deny the fact that knowing about the director’s life, his works, his beliefs, the metaphors and motifs used in the movie and Kickasola’s interpretation of them have definitely enriched me to understand the movie. But the answer to the question whether it has helped me to feel it better is NOT a big resounding yes!

PS: I wonder how Pauline Kael would have critiqued this movie!

“What The Foucault” series: Author

So I was trying to understand the works of Michel Foucault and came across one of his essays titled “What is an Author?” You can get the text here.

I think what Foucault has to say about the notion of an author is very important and is key to our class discussion about authors, architects, musicians, film directors, ciritcs and ultimately designers.

The Title:
Foucault did not make a grammatical mistake when he titled his essay as “What is an Author”. Rather it sets the tone for his entire discourse. He views the author not as a person but as an idea or a concept.

Sociology 101

So I started reading this week’s reading and found it to be “glerb”! After a few hours of crash course is sociology (I love you wikipedia), I think I understand the reading better now. I thought I should share this with the rest of you. So here we go!

Sociology

• Field of sociology divided into 3:
  - Micro-sociology: How individual forms identity and how s/he interacts with others. Study of individual.
  - Macro-sociology: Society is not just a bunch of people. It has something else. What is that “something else”? Study of society.
  - Meso-socilogy: Studying society and individual based on one particular criteria. Say for example, race or gender or income.
• Sociologists were kicking and pulling each others hair before. Now they have realized that these three schools of theories are complimentary and inseparable. So they are well behaved now.
• For our class reading, we will now focus on microsociology. It is heavily derived from phenomenology. Basic premise is how does an individual make sense of his surrounding world. Serves something as a bridge between psychology and sociology.
• Symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology are two key micro-theories amongst others.

Field trip!

Frank Llyod Wright’s Falling Water for $18

Field trip! Field trip!! Field trip!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090924/lf_nm_life/us_fallingwater

The meaning of it all!

I was thinking about this game that we used play as kids back home. It’s called “Chinese Whispers”. The name may be different here, but I am sure kids here play it to. Basically they all sit in a circular arrangement. The first kid whispers a statement into the next kids ears. This passes on till it reaches a whole circle. The last kid after hearing the statement, loudly announces what he heard! Almost always it ends up completely different and totally funny than from what it actually was!! Reading all this epistemology, hermeneutics, phenomenonlogy, subjectivoity, context, culture, signifier and signified, constructed knowledge is making me feel like I live in a mondegreen universe. I am not saying this is bad. Just feeling a little discombobulated!

Meaning of it all??

PS:

• Open the picture in a new window to read the text more clearly.
• I know that I am exagerrating. But in a way this is pretty much how I feel
• The picture of Eli was to provide a context. I am NOT implying that he’s a bad critique or that he views everything through the eyes of sustainability. I chose to put his pic so that all of us can easily relate.

THAT Four Letter Word!

The other four letter word – LOVE!

Björk is one of my all time favorites. For this analysis I have chosen the video of her song “All is full of love”. The video and the technique used to produce it are obviously genius and the awards and attention it has recieved confirm it. This is what happens when two geniuses, Chris Cunnigham and Björk, meet! Enough with the extolments!! Here is the video!!!

The Caster Semenya Saga

Disclaimer: There may be certain parts of this post that may not be directly related to this class. But since this was raised in class today, I am risking it here.

Gender and Sex:
First things first. It maddens me when “respected” newspapers publish stuff like “gender tests to determine sex”. I cannot find enough expletives. As Yujia pointed out in class, gender is a social construct. How one identifies hirself (gender neutral pronoun). Gender is about identity. Sex on the other hand is about the actual biological and physical manifestation. And we all agreed that gender and sex of a person need not match.

The Sex Game:
CJ raised a point today in class. What if a transgendered person who identifies hirself as a female wants to participate in women’s sports? Then the transgendered person has an unfair advantage over the other biologically female contestants. So I deduce that the point made here is “No matter how you identify yourself, if you don’t belong to this biological category of sex, then stay away from here.”

From this point of the article onwards, I am not addressing anyone in particular from our class.