AuthorTopic: Thoughts on Pixels and Dots. Video  (Read 20348 times)

Offline AlexHW

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Thoughts on Pixels and Dots. Video

on: June 25, 2012, 09:16:34 pm
I made a video about some thoughts I had today about Pixels and Dots: http://youtu.be/yp07hmxAXRQ
« Last Edit: June 26, 2012, 12:03:38 pm by ptoing »

Offline Helm

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pixels and dots

Reply #1 on: June 26, 2012, 12:02:53 am
I don't know what you're getting at, really. I mean, I think I do but I'm not sure it's worth persuing. It's very difficult for me to follow your train of thought, I have to say. A pixel is not different to the things around it in a computer graphics context at least, since it is surrounded by other pixels, in different formations. For a big part of that video you take a long time to say the same simple thing in various different ways, and then you go into things that - from watching a few more of your other videos - sound to me like spiritualist (pseudo?)philosophy. It's a bit disconcerting to me, really. Reminds me of that type of talking - not the content of the argumentation necessarily - of self help gurus. And the way they sell their mode of living is by seeming very charismatic, together, sooth-saying and you know, trustworthy. These aren't the things you're projecting with these videos. The opposite, I feel as if you're in a vurlnerable state of some kind... it's hard to watch, honestly.

Props for solid knowledge of the ancient/Greek alphabet though. Not that I'm an expert, but I'm Greek and you know as much as I do about that stuff, heh.

Offline AlexHW

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pixels and dots

Reply #2 on: June 26, 2012, 03:37:13 am
was basically just exploring how a pixel represent a place in space that focuses your awareness to something unique. Yes each pixel is different- even if all of the pixels are black, white, or whatever color they all have a different characteristic about their place.
Quote
A pixel is not different to the things around it in a computer graphics context at least, since it is surrounded by other pixels, in different formations.
Perhaps categorically they may appear all the same, but then with that frame of mind you would never see a pixel for what a pixel truly is. All your definitions for what a pixel would be- would be generalizations that are relative to all the things they are not. If that's the case, then what are they? By focusing on the things outside of the pixel, you're overlooking the inside of them so how can you see the whole picture.

I've researched a little bit about greek alphabet but there's still a lot I would like to know about it, or a lot that I feel could be explained deeper.

Offline Ryumaru

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pixels and dots

Reply #3 on: June 26, 2012, 06:54:50 am
I don't think I was quite as lost as Helm was, but a lot of what he said applies to my thoughts as well.

Firstly, there shouldn't be any " kind of"s in a talk like this. How are we supposed to believe or learn from your concepts if they're amorphous to you as well?

Also I think it would be important to mention that " dot art" is a term that came from the east, and that our traditional view of a ( circular) dot is not the definition you speak of here. It may seem like an insignificant difference, but all the "dots" that are pixels are ones that always connect perfectly with each other ( where as a circular dot would have those star shaped spaces in between- basically descriptive limbo).

While it did come off as psuedo philosophy I think you did touch on some good points that are unique to pixel art and by looking "inside" the pixel, the artform does become much deeper than the more superficial game art that popularized it.

Offline AlexHW

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pixels and dots

Reply #4 on: June 26, 2012, 07:51:23 am
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« Last Edit: July 22, 2016, 11:09:39 pm by AlexHW »

Offline Helm

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pixels and dots

Reply #5 on: June 26, 2012, 08:54:46 am
Alex... I don't see any raw message, or at least it's not the rawness that is disconcerting to me. Your basic thing of "look at things differently/from the inside/from the outside/in parallel/Awaken your Consciousness" has been done to death by other more successful new-age guru types. Real philosophers have tackled very difficult topics related to consciousness too, but with extreme mental acuity and rigor. Even the structure of language itself has been a philosophical talking point for the last 50 years or so. You seem to be thinking you're doing something new and important to the world at large, whereas your stuff has been done to death and better by other people whose main talent in life had been the ability for razor sharp reasoning. You're a great artist, but you're not a philosopher.

The thing that makes me uncomfortable though is not that you're not a philosopher, it's that you don't seem to see what I see in this whole thing. I think I've honed into it is that I feel you're giving the vibe of either being a snake oil salesman ("look at these magnificent truths! buy my book!") which would presuppose dishonesty on your part or you're a bit unstable at the time, in which case there are other things you might want to consider than making youtube videos about whatever comes to mind. It's a slippery slope to talk to a camera in that mental state. I don't think you're dishonest.

Offline AlexHW

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pixels and dots

Reply #6 on: June 26, 2012, 09:44:41 am
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« Last Edit: July 22, 2016, 11:10:12 pm by AlexHW »

Offline Helm

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pixels and dots

Reply #7 on: June 26, 2012, 10:05:53 am
I am saying that you aren't conveying anything new because other people have dedicated their whole lives to studying life and they then express their thoughts in a painstakingly rigorous manner that, once studied systematically, makes sense both on the cerebral level and the more important subconscious intuitive one. Most people do not have this experience of 'feeling the pieces fall in place' first-hand because they do not study philosophy. They instead get exposed to core philosophical ideas through art and entertainment media in an easier to digest and stereotypical form. Most people know the Nietzsche quote of "gaze into the abyss enough and the abyss may stare back at you" as it is a pop culture meme but most people haven't read "Beyond Good And Evil". If they had, they'd see there's a sequence of ideas that starts from certain axioms and arrives at certain theories and the whole construct is attached to, and in dialogue with, every other major philosophical line of thought in the Western world, at least. The web of knowledge on the subject is vast and also beautiful. It is the grandest design humanity has to offer, the ultimate monument to sentience.

Someone provides an axiom and a theory. And then other thinkers debate their points of view endlessly and offer contrasting theories. The thing becomes complex organically. That's what philosophy is. If you're not engaged in a dialogue that goes as far back as Plato, you're not really presenting a philosophical argument in a way that takes advantage of the history of thought. You're reinventing the wheel.

What people do this? People that are offering shortcuts. Why do they offer shortcuts? Because philosophy is only posing questions, there are no answers. Some people want answers, and fast. Some people are desperate. Other people pretend to have answers and take advantage of desperate people. Nobody really has any answers, only a million of questions. Gazing into the construct of these interconnected questions often gives an intuitive feeling of a structure, structure to thought and language and method. That is the closest thing we have to an answer: There are a lot of questions arranged in a system whose function is to interpet experience in a useful or inspiring way.

Are your videos contributing to that construct? I don't think so. You don't seem aware of the backlog of knowledge to internalize it, and what you're offering is very muddy and even when I get to understand it, the points you're making are trite. Some philosophers can work without having much prior knowledge and their 'outside' points of view are very valuable, but they still are incorporated into the grand discussion that is philosophical discourse because what they have to offer is - when understood - viewed as integral. After 4,000 years of human throught, most 'virgin discoveries' of this sort have been made.

The things you're writing are resistant to being discussed because they are super vague and apparently contradictory. You'd have to work a lot harder to get anyone else to follow your train of thought. If you're really serious about philosophy and you're not 1. trying to sell something 2. in a shaky mental state, then I would urge you to put a lot of study time into Philosophy! Right now you're not that "thunder perfect mind" that can sidestep the whole world's accumulated effort on understanding life and the human condition via suspect spiritualist notions. It is very dubious that you think you've come across something life-altering and super-important and 1. you can't articulate it 2. you don't seem to be very together at all. If you had found the Truth and Answer to it All, I would expect a very different result on your psyche. You might be deluding yourself.

Offline AlexHW

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Re: Thoughts on Pixels and Dots. Video

Reply #8 on: June 26, 2012, 04:31:03 pm
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« Last Edit: July 22, 2016, 11:10:31 pm by AlexHW »

Offline Helm

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Re: Thoughts on Pixels and Dots. Video

Reply #9 on: June 26, 2012, 06:16:23 pm
As a courtesy, please spare me the psychoanalysis. Fair is fair, I told you that I think you seem a bit out of it and I will accept that you think I have a broken self, whatever that is, sounds like I have it. But as to why either of these things have happened, I won't guess and I ask you not to offer your guesses. The phenomena are there, leave the psychoanalysis to the therapists.

I don't have any answers, as I've said. Philosophy is about questions. A big tree of many branches, every one of them when scritinized have even more branches. It is not my answers that are threatened, it is my sanity.  I am wrong all the time, yet remain sane. I have misunderstood knowledge, esp. philosophy to a great extent, so, so much, yet I keep on trucking because the construct is sound. I don't think I'm often right even for much more basic things. I am not talking about right and wrong. I am talking about things that are useful versus things that are not.

The things you're putting in your videos are madness. Not all of them, some are more lucid than others, but some are just rambly incoherent messes. They're not useful to me. I can tell from watching 5 minutes of them and yet I've watched a couple of hours just to try to understand what's going on with you because of our previous Pixelation history, even if it's not useful to me personally. We never had the best relations in the past, but I sincerily worry about you, Alex.

Again, for clarity. The videos are madness because you ramble on and on about things that either
1. don't make sense
2. make a very banal sort of sense

The words you put in a row are not defined, you use them in strange ways and you abuse their connections. It's like a dreamy haze, you say 'stuff', 'perception', 'reality', 'thinking' a lot and you arrive at no higher structures, just a word soup of these basic things in haphazard, rambling connections.

And when you do wrestle an understandable point out of 10 minutes of rambly dreamy stonery monlogue, the point is self-evident and not illuminating at all, like saying "when you think outside the box, you percieve things differently, then good things can happen". Well, alright!

I expect that to you you make perfect sense and are reaching for the heavens with your revelations. That's what worries me, self-delusion. It's not that I don't understand you, it's that what you're presenting is resisting to be understood. Can you see the difference? You're doing a bad job of conveying information or the information you present is nonsense. If it's the former, work harder. If it's the latter, stick to making art, where more vague ideas are best channeled.

You do not seem to me to be 'unfiltered and raw'. You seem to me suffer from delusions of grandeur. You think you're saying important stuff, how many people you've exposed your thoughts to agree? How many lives have been bettered by your wisdom? As I said before, I don't think you're trying to sell ice to eskimos here, I do believe you that you believe yourself to be saying great and important things. This is what really worries me. Back on the earth plane, how are you making do? What do you do for work? Do you have friends and family and a support system? Do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend? When's the last time you went out and about? Are you taking care of your health?