Today we had crit with our given peer group Thien Pham and Vera Wang Yingfei. Both our groups explained to eachother on what our takes on the idea of utopia and dystopia was and further explained about the works we made along these lines.
The group conveyed their ideas of Utopia as a desired and idealistic life style. Though they did not say much, from their explanation we gathered that this idea of Utopia was something that was not actually realistic, in a sense that a Utopia is a setting of perfect harmony where every content within has meaning and purpose desired by the perceiver. From this we understood that their idea of Utopia, a flawless world was something that was only present in the conscience of one self.
When we asked about their take on Dystopia, the group said "opposite to Utopia". As true as this may be, this explanation did not give us to vision what their idea of Dystopia was until we were shown their sectional of their site.
Section
From this image, the group explained that this was their portrayal of their idea of Dystopia. They talked about this idea of urbanism depicted by neon lights and poisonous gases from technology being their dystopia where it is actually created by the communities within it and how they act that results in a sense of idealism or undesired setting. They also took on the heartbeat like shape that is portrayed on the right as a representation of the life of the city and how the straight line without any beats signifies the end of life of the city. Though after being shown their image of the section we vaguely got an idea of their mindset on dystopia, a better explanation would have been a lot better to extend our further understanding of their ideas.
For their two elevations of either sides of the road, they just had non edited photos on display. From our perspective these pictures did not explain anything in terms of Utopia or Dystopia or anything else in fact, other than where their site was. Even if having these non edited photos had a reason behind it, we did not know and were not able to find out as the group did not go on to explain this reason. From our shoes, it just looked like they were lacking in the amount of work that needed to be produced.
The group did have one stop motion animation of their plants but not three as requested by the tutors. The avatar and avatar moulds were not shown to us. They did have them but chose not to take it out of the plastic bag to show us.
Over all the crit was very vague in description of their idea on Utopia and Dystopia. Although the explanation of their Utopia allowed us to further imagine their idea ourselves, other explanations lacked very much on detail. The group also had insufficient work produced which could have allowed us to further understand their take on the topics we were given.
Group 43's review on us
This is the review of the works from Group 33. The main point of the works was to show how the group interpreted and presented their understanding of the story “The Ultimate City” as well as the meaning of what utopia and dystopia mean. They utilized both the collage and the animation to explore these ideas (although the latter was not required).
A number of attempts were made with the collage with each of them conveying the imagination and the mood of what the group interpreted of the “industrialized city” from the story. What most interesting was the collage in which the photos taken from the site visit were put together to create a panorama photo, divided the photo into 2 parts, differentiated by contrasting color and light: one half of the photo was black and white with darker tone, the other half was more saturated and lit with greenish light. At first view, the photo looked like a mere sunrise scene with similar layout and object, but the team explained that it was their use of light and tone on the photo that conveyed their interpretation of a utopian and dystopian city. To them, the perception of utopia was different between each individual and the meaning of dystopia was that it is “the repressive state under the guise of utopia”. The green light is explained as a reference to “The Matrix”, being the truth. The photo was therefore a representation of both utopian and dystopian city: the bright side represented the “true” ideal city while the dark part showed the false. This was a pretty good idea. An improvement could be made to make it better is to … the layout and objects in the photo in the two halves to make it more distinguishable between the utopia and dystopia.
With the animation: they showed a great variety of animation of their plants. One of the animations was used to explore the idea utopia and dystopia. They used the lighting once again on this animation to try to explore the meaning of utopia and dystopia the same way they did for the photo. The result was a nice animation but it remained an experiment as it did not contain any particular message.
Asides from the main objective, they had also completed the other activities such as: the researches about hotels, architectural evolutionary terms, as well as a fine summary of the story; and a complete set of avatars and moulds.
Overall, this group has achieved all the requirement of the first week very well. The works of this group showed that they had engaged in exploring ideas about the story of “The Ultimate City” as well as experimenting different ways of portraying their visions of what utopian and dystopian mean. The content of their work was clearly shown on the blog, which they had kept track of their progress with. The researches, the activities were all updated on the blog to show that they really sticked to their to-do list.
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