Author: Nico Cabrera-Schneider

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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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Tenue pero allí sigue

La fotografía – Tenue pero allí sigue

tenue

El poema – Tenue pero allí sigue

De entre el frío y nieve, emerge.
Como la esperanza del pueblo Guatemalteco que se niega a extinguir.
El verde lucha por no secarse, lucha por no quedarse en el olvido.
El verde,
bien verde
quiere ser
Igual que la Gualtemalteca
libre,
bien libre
quiere ser.

Tenue pero allí sigue

Un alguito que escribí el sábado. Mientras caminaba encontré esta planta que creo que es lavanda. El chiflón me cacheteó inseperadamente, volteándome la cara hacia abajo. Reincorporándome y despúes de un par de pasos pense en el verde, tenue, pero aún presente. Las primeras líneas del poema Tecún-Umán se me vinieron a la mente y recordé la cita en la plaza constitución.

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Check out my other post: En Honor al Chapulín Colorado, Piñas de Colores, or Un Par de Colochos

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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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Piñas a Colores

Piñas a colores

Piñas a Colores –

Hace un par de años se me ocurrió preguntarme qué tipo de fruta es una piña. Sin darle más que pensar, no me preocupé por abrir un libro de botánica o investigar en el internet. Pues fue hoy que vi la piña en el frutero, saqué la camara y abrí el navegador.

Resulta que la piña es una sorosis, un fruto compuesto donde las bayas de una inflorescencia se fusionan y su tallo se vuelve pulposo. Otras frutas que son sorosis son las moreras y las jacas.

 

 

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

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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