Category: Ensayo

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¿Y qué hay para el 2019?

¿Y qué hay para el 2019?

 

Feliz año nuevo.

 

Todavía no se me quita la emoción de empezar un año nuevo, me ha dado desde que era pequeño. Siempre me ha gustado la idea de empezar un año nuevo. Esto suena al cliché «empezar un nuevo ciclo». Pero sé que esta emoción va más allá pues tengo bien claro que con cada día que pasa es un día menos del total. Averiguar si ese total de días es predeterminado o es indeterminado es materia para que los metafísicos, teólogos y médicos lo resuelvan. Yo solo estoy consiente que llegaré a cumplir ese total de días y es mi deber chuparle el tuétano a cada día que me queda.

 

Este modo de pensar me llevó a retomar lo de escribir. Desde hace unos años que he retomado el acto de escribir. Disfruto todo el proceso de escribir: generar ideas, plasmarlas y pulirlas. Me hace sentir vivo de una manera que otras cosas no lo hacen. No hay algo como llegar al punto donde las imágenes surgen en la mente especialmente las escenas de acción y a la mano no le da tiempo para escribir al paso que se me vienen las imágenes. Y al final, siento el bombeo del corazón y tengo que agitar la mano para descargar la tensión. O cuando me quedo trabado en una idea y tengo que maquinar como seguir adelante. Estos son unos de los momentos en los que siento que escribir me hace sentir vivo de una manera que otras cosas no lo hacen.

 

Para ser escritor creo que dos cosas son indispensables. Una es escribir y la otra es compartir lo que haz producido. Con esta premisa en el 2018 decidí publicar un post al día. Escribir algo que me obligara a hacerlo diariamente y a compartirlo. Ahora puedo decir que lo logré, cumplí con publicar por lo menos una vez al día por 365 días consecutivos. Más adelante publicaré un post dando detalles de los resultados, lo aprendido y lo que significó este reto personal. En breve puedo decir que en momentos fue estresante, especialmente cuando no me caminaba la mano escribiendo. Al mismo tiempo, entendí un poco más sobre lo que necesito hacer para generar ideas creativas constantemente.

 

Por último, quiero contarles que este proceso de publicar diario por un año me hizo reflexionar sobre mi relación con las redes sociales. Me quiero negar a pensar que las redes sociales son un mal necesario, porque esa forma de pensar no resuelve nada. Las redes sociales no tienen nada que otras formas de comunicación puedan tener, es decir no son indispensables. No las necesitamos porque ya existen otras maneras de comunicarnos. De que son un mal eso lo tengo bien clarito. Son una aspiradora de tiempo. Le succionan a uno hasta el último segundo libre que uno pueda tener, pues para eso están diseñadas. Desde que le puse un bloqueador de feed a Facebook y a mi Twitter y borré las aplicaciones de mi teléfono, siento que he encontrado un poco más de tiempo. El cual he destinado a idear nuevas historias o a escribirlas.

Aun no puedo decir que no chequeo las redes diariamente pero estoy trabajando para lograrlo. La chequeo diario porque estoy acostumbrado a revisar las redes periódicamente y también porque tengo que compartir lo que escribo. Para este año he decidido cambiar mi forma de interactuar con las redes. Seguiré publicando y re-publicando lo que ya he escrito. Buscaré herramientas que me permitan publicar en las redes desde afuera de ellas. Y dedicaré un día a la semana por un tiempo limitado en revisar las redes. Me enfocaré principalmente en distribuir lo que estoy escribiendo, lo más reciente, por correo electrónico. Quisiera recibir y responder a comentarios o preguntas por medio de correo electrónico. Si logro entablar varias conversaciones por medio de correos electrónicos en el 2019 lo consideraré como un buen año.

 

Otra cosa que cambiaré para este 2019 es que publicaré en mi página con menor intensidad. Me di cuenta que publicar diariamente me estaba quitando tiempo para escribir en mis otros proyectos. Entonces trataré de publicar una vez por semana, con esto espero continuar con otros proyectos y empezar a levantar uno nuevo.

 

Entonces para finalizar este post si les gusta leer mis escritos por favor consideren subscribirse a mi boletín electrónico. (link)

 

Saludos y que tengan un año genial.

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Binary Contradiction 2

Binary contradiction 2

Binary Contradiction 2

cuadricula binariaIn the first post where I talked about binary contradiction. I wrote about one way to solve the problem of binary thinking. In this post, I write about a second mechanism. Previously, I used this definition  for binaries. Binaries have two requirements. They need to be two elements in opposition to each other. The “on” needs to have the “off” as a binary counterpart.

I want to elaborate on the first section. How can we have two elements but more than two identities? One way to think about this is to imagine two colors, blue and yellow. Now add one drop of blue into a page and add a drop of yellow on top of the blue. The result is a drop of green. Using this line of thinking, we can get a third alternative that arises from the two original binary. This same model a can be used to get at a fourth alternative if we consider that the order of how we combine them matters.

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Check out other posts: Un Par de Colochos, Piña a Colores y Before and After the Winter Snow

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Binary Contradiction

Binary Contradiction

Binary Contradiction

Here are some binary contradictions of winter.

Since early in life we are thought to think in binaries, good vs bad. Then religion and other cultural elements continue to reiterate the idea of binaries. Our thinking in binaries reaches a point where we cannot start to imagine other alternatives and we have conceptual problems when ideas don’t fit in a binary.

One easy attempt to think outside binaries comes from including the middle grounds. The “maybes” and the “grays” are easy finds but still do not satisfy the appetite for alternates to binaries. A next step could be, the contradiction of binaries. For this, we need to know how do we define binaries?

Binaries have two requirements. They need to be two elements in opposition to each other. The “on” needs to have the “off” as a binary counterpart. This definition of binary gives a road map to create alternatives to binary thinking. The options are 1) to have more than two elements that oppose each other without having a third element to disrupt the “bi” prefix and 2) to contradict the opposition. I will work on the first part on a future post.  So let us talk about the second part of the definition.

A binary contradiction happens when you have a binary opposite, but in the opposite you find the original. One example of a binary opposition from life is beauty and ugliness and the binary contradiction would be when you find beauty in the ugliness.

For this series, I set out to find binary contradictions in the winter urban landscape. Drop a comment down in the section.

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Check out other posts: Un Par de Colochos, Piña a Colores y Before and After the Winter Snow

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Before and After the Winter Snow

before and after winter snow

Before and After the Winter Snow

As winter starts to get serious I am preparing a few posts that reflect on the language we use to describe winter. The posts will reflect on our use the words pure, crystalline, mushy or bitter and how they conjure a feeling or a memory, and how we can flip from saying “Oh, how nice is the snow” to “Arg! it is snowing again”.

I took these photographs two months apart. I tried to stand in the same place and I think I was close. This was the first snowfall that accumulated in 2015 in Boulder, Colorado. The temperature was below 0° C.

By the time I decided to head back my fingers were starting to hurt. And I was beginning to worry that my camera was going to freeze since the ambient temperature was below the lower optimal working temperature. But, still I stopped to take a few more photographs.

These two photographs remind me of those then and now photos to which I am always attracted. The signs show a historical site back-in-the-day and now. Most of the time the picture from the past is in black and white and the picture in the future is in color. With this pair of photographs the past is shiny, full of color, and the present is bitter, bone-hurting, beautiful. And still one reminisces on the recent past.

Leave a comment below with your thoughts on winter. I am particularly interested in reading how you deal with the cold.

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Check out my other post: Diffusion, Me Di Un Vueltin, or Abstract Photography

 

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Ginkgo

golden ginkgoGingko:

A photograph of Ginkgo leaves from Berkeley, California. The Bay Area is one of the coldest places I have visited. The cold creeps on you unexpectedly, but the warmth of the people wraps you with affection.

Ginkgo’s leaves senescence at the onset of winter. Covering the sidewalks in a golden yellow color where the parallel to the Wizard of Oz is evident. As I follow the yellow brick road or, in this case, the golden ginkgo curb, I think of the characters: Dorothy, Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. Each character is missing something that I consider important in my life. Dorothy is missing her home. Scarecrow lacks a brain. Tin Man has no heart. And the Cowardly Lion needs courage.

As I step on the Gingko leaves I reflect: do I have a home, not a physical space but a place that I can call home? I consider my decisions. How will they have the positive impact that they are intended to have? And do they have negative consequences that I need to mitigate? I also ponder the passion that carries my actions. And, I think of courage, asking myself: did I speak against injustice today?

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Check out my other post: Hojarasca, A zu lado, or Red Orange

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Diffusion

Diffusion

Diffusion:

We can think of color as a concentration of pigment particles. We can also think of these particles as having a concentration. These concentrations can be higher or lower than other concentrations. This way we can think of colors going from high concentrations to lower concentrations. Moving as a physical process. Here in this series I present a way to visualize the process of diffusion in a digital context.

Another way to think about diffusion comes from an anthropological framework. Here diffusion is the process where a cultural trait moves from one culture to another. If we consider colors as cultural traits, then the series would represent cultural homogenization. Where the cultural traits of one group overpower another.

With this series, I demonstrate that digitally and metaphorically we can represent diffusion. I would like to introduce the idea that art can have multiple meanings presented at the same time. The meanings can exist at the same time without being mutually exclusive or related to each other.

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Check out my other post: Hojarasca, A zu lado, or Red Orange

This is the first video that I post on this website. I have more ideas or videos in the works. Let me know if you would like to see more videos posted by leaving a comment down below.

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Abstract Photography

Abstract Photography

Abstract Photography

One thing about abstract photography is that deduction or induction don’t work well to get at the meaning of the photograph.  Abstract photography encourages you to seek other ways to understand meaning. Other methods that are different from rational thinking.  You can create conjectures and inferences to arrive at a meaning, and still you don’t know if it was the original meaning the artist intended. Scientific, analytic and synthetic methods gum up as they approach abstraction. They are not capable of extracting meaning out of an object. Their goal is to describe their existence.

As the meaning for me might be different from your meaning, and those meanings can be different from the meaning of a person standing outside. The way we can get at a common meaning is by a conversation that exchanges conjectures and inferences. And still this is just a shared meaning among a few, it is not absolute. Abstract photography then becomes a conversation starter that has as a goal to share our meanings of the images.

Abstract photography has also a temporal component. As photography in general does, it captures a moment in the past. Seizing that moment in time is a fixed action. While the meanings can continue their course changing their essence as time goes by. The meaning changes in time because the cultural perspectives that are viewing the image shift as references of comparison emerge or disappear.

The abstract theme within photography can maintain the visual integrity of the object. It can also keep its context in which the object exists and still be considered abstract.  The intent of the individual at the moment when the photograph was captured is the element that renders it abstract. The freezing in time of a split of a second that turns the photography abstract. Leading you to ask what happened before or after and question its meaning.

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Check out my other post: Hojarasca, A zu lado, or Red Orange