Structualism and Binary Opposition

Humans see things in pairs. We all have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two halves of our brains etc. We also consider people who have symmetrical faces to be attractive. This makes so much sense that I don't know why I’d never realised it before. We all interpret the world in pairs.

Structuralism is how we interpret and make meaning out of the world. Binary Opposition is a part of that, explaining why we only understand something if we know what the opposite of it is. For example, how could we possibly know what good is if we don't understand the concept of evil. You know someone’s alive when there not dead. We trust in these beliefs and they are a learned response. Just like seeing a cat play with a mouse for fun, we think it’s cruel because we've learned when growing up that killing shouldn't be enjoyed.

However some opposites are not as trustworthy as we might think, because there is always a grey area in between. How can we possibly say someone is pure evil, for example They can't have been evil all their lives, and even if they have, I’m sure they would have done something nice in their time, and like Ivan said they might have stroked a cat once in a while!

How can we tell when life begins? At a certain stage when your growing in the womb? When the sperm meets the egg? When you’re born? This thought enforces the fact that there must be a bit in the middle that no one really understands. When it comes down to the comparison of light and dark, we know that in the evening the light slowly turns to dark to become night, implying that there is a sliding scale of values between both opposites and that there isn’t just two examples. The anomalous zone is considered the bit in the middle, usually where the interesting things happen.

  

When thinking about these opposites I came up with the idea of smooth and rough. I then looked down at my laptop which has a smooth surface yet has a slightly raised patterned on it making it look and feel a bit rough. I assume this means my laptop is in the anomalous zone.





Intertextuality

I found the lecture last week on Intertextuality a real eye opener. The suggestion that art imitates art rather than art imitating life explains that everything we do stems from something else we have seen, heard or experienced. This relates well to models and model making because a model is intertextual. All models are based on other things.



I found the relationship and link between the things you see and what they remind you of really interesting. For example, when Ivan played the film clip of Madagascar in the lecture, even though I knew why he played it (to show the connection between it and the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes) it immediately reminded me of Cast Away and Ice Age. The Madagascar characters made a football into a face just like Tom Hanks did in Cast Away and Melman (the giraffe) from Madagascar caught on fire and reacted in the same way Sid (the sloth) did when he caught on fire in Ice Age. I think these two references were intentional by the film makers, therefore making them conscious intertextuality. If this was not the case however, and I was reading into the film way too much, it would have been classed as unconscious intertextualtiy.



These are awful photos, but you get the idea.

Going back to what I was looking at last week and Anish Kapoor, I saw something this weekend that reminded me of his sculptures. So I guess that means it was intertextuality at work.

I went to Bristol to see a friend on Saturday and we went for a walk near his University. On our walk we saw a large shiny mirrored sculpture, similar to that of Anish Kapoor's work. I think it was a Planetarium? I thought it was really strange after looking at Anish Kapoor last week and then so soon seeing something that really reminded me of him.

I also took a photo of a Banksy painting I saw their which I thought was quite cool. I really don't understand how he manages to paint what he does without anyone seeing!!