Map of Commutes

The map details various information on the class members' commute to GMU.

Infosthetics images

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I found this map series to be very interesting. It definitely shows a lot about the person whose map is being shown. Exactly what it means will vary for each person - sometimes people will have a lot of red just because they are popular and so many people follow them without personally knowing them, sometimes it would mean that they just don't want to bother with returning requests, etc. There are many meanings that can be read into the map, but it always says something.

Re: Denis Darzacq's "Hyper"

These photographs were taken in various shopping center aisles. Some at the grocery store, others in hardware or home furnishing stores. These are centers of travel and daily life - places where ordinary people come every day to do ordinary things. All the people in the pictures are young, and are caught in the middle of various extreme motions. At first, it looked to me like several of the pictures were taken in the middle of an elaborate fight scene, with one of the participants off-camera, and the one shown having just been knocked back or down, falling through the air. Not all the pictures matched this feel, though, and after reading the description, I could see that they were indeed doing some sort of street dancing.

By pairing the ordinary scenery with the not-so-ordinary poses of the subjects, this series seems to convey the idea that such actions are in fact ordinary themselves. People who are truly being themselves all the time will feel more free to do things like dance even in public places, and should not be thought of as eccentric for doing what they love.

Re: Teun Hocks

The photos seem to all be taken in such a way that they twist our perception and fool us into thinking we see something that isn't actually there. Most of them have painted backdrops that were designed to make it look like the person standing there is actually in the scene. Some of them replace expected objects with others to fool the eye - for example, the ticket booth glass has been replaced with a mirror so it looks like there are two of him there, and the "hole" in the floor is actually just a black circle laid on the ground. For the mouse hole and cat, the hole is sized to fit him, and the shadow of a cat is just projected on the wall. All the photos use similar tricks. My personal favorite is the one where he is sticking his head through the painting, since the trick was camouflaged so well.

Childhood map

Re: Eric Johansson

Most of his work seems to be surreal simply for the sake of surrealism. Many pieces take classic impossible shapes and just show his own rendition of them, such as the "Penrose lego" and "Crossroads." These sorts of illusions have been done countless times, particularly by M.C. Escher, but also by many others. Other pieces take expected images and situations and make them somehow unreal, such as "Arms break, vases don't," which is just as the title says.

Some of his pieces deal with definite conflict between humans, nature, and cities or civilization. In "Strange forest," and "Big laundry day," for example, it seems to show that civilization has spread so far that it has become the norm, and basically replaced nature. In "Homo sapiens" and "Fishy island," he is showing a deeper connection between humans and nature. The messages are that humans come from the earth, and the earth on which we live is itself alive, in the two pieces respectively. In "Zip city," it shows a conflict between cities and nature, but also between cities and people, as the tractors (and presumably their riders) are positioned to be retreating from the incoming city as it zips up. So in all, there doesn't seem to be a cohesive message except that perhaps people, nature, and civilization all interact with each other, and no one thing is dominant in every place.