Lecture 001

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Making Sense(s) Wonders and Cabinets and Knowledge and Representations

Wunderkammer - Cabinet of Wonders: (Wiki)

• European historical periods of claiming lands

• good for expansion of knowledge

• rising middle class -> moving into capitalists

• people buy stuff to represent accomplishments (personal museum)

• not just collection, but culture

Rosamond Purcell, One Room

Questions:

• what does it mean to have a collection

• what is the point of making a replica of a collection

(Here)

(Here)

portrait of portrait

(Here)

• collection is more valuable than single object

(Here)

Questions:

• how do we contain

• how do we represent

• how do we sense

• how do we make sense

• how do we wonder

What is a representation?

• Representation is an abstract idea that shows the most important value of a thing.

• answer: representation is a part of the event (representation and meaning are together, there is no so called "original")

  • once your work is out, the culture will interpret it, and you don't get to choose what this work represents.

What can we address in this class?

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TODO: Read Week 1 Texts: essay, summary of representation, video on representation theory (see calendar for detail)

Representation Theory

• Like NLP, each word in the sentence is defined as the vector of all words around it.

• Sampling bias resulted in biased representation, including minority (or rare cases) could solve it.

• Biased representation hurts minority and establishes inequality.

• Minority can't be easily heard -> Data Compression Effect (our memory is limited)

Resonance and Wonder

• resonance: using the context and prior knowledge of the world to produce greater meaning

• wonder: evoke attention

• you should consider how other will interpret your work before starting the work