Image Assignments

Part II Studium/Punctum

When I saw the image of a guy relaxing under a tree on a blanket (RF39), I looked for something that would maybe tell his story. I looked around the picture, and I noticed what looked to me like a flower down by his feet. It could just be the leaves positioned in a strange way that just look like a flower in the black and white image, but to me, it's a flower. It's a punctum flower.

The man lying on the grass is just a man under a tree until you see the discarded flower.

Then I saw the tattoo on his arm, and upon closer inspection (zoom in, zoom out), discovered it was of a woman. Now, he could just be a typical guy, obsessed with women in bikinis, but there’s that flower. If there is a connection between the woman on his arm and the flower thrown away at his feet, then I wanted to draw attention to it, so I used similar colors to highlight both, and darkened the lines of the tattoo to make it more visible. The tattoo, however, was too near the guy’s face, which draws a lot of attention to it. To bring more attention back to the flower, I created more flowers.

Part III Sign Systems

This project is currently destroyed by my computer. However, before its destruction, it was a leaflet targeted to undergraduate students studying engineering or math who may potentially become statisticians. The goal is to encourage them to pursue graduate studies in the field of statistics.

The front is color-coded red. It says, “50% pick up this side.” There is an index: a circle in the middle for reflective foil, to act as a mirror. When the person picks up the leaflet, they see themselves, and think, “I’m that 50% who happened to pick up this red side.” There’s a pie chart for a symbol. Half is red, and half is blue, and it says “50% This side” for the red and “50% The other side” for the blue half. Below the mirror it says, “Don’t be just a statistic – be a statistician!” All of the text is also symbolic (inherently arbitrary). The icon is a picture of a person picking up a leaflet (under which it says “Statistic”) next to a picture of a person with graduation garb (under which it says “Statistician”).

On the other side of the leaflet it says the same thing, but the colors are switched, so that everything that was red is blue, and everything that was blue is red.