User:Chen Junyu/graduation/theise/research notes/Notes for thesis

[English Scripts]Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art: Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chinese Version

Chapter1: Nature Idealized

Earth, Sea, and Sky begins with artistic visions of nature shaped by powerful ideas. Western culture has a long and rich history of nature imagery derived from literary sources and the imagination rather than from the world before the artist's eyes.

From early times, people struggling to understand powerful natural forces imagined them as human in order to mitigate their fear of the unknown. The tradition of personifying nature continues to this day, for example in the practice of giving personal names to hurricanes. The personification of nature is a form of metaphoric representation that depicts a culturally understood avatar for the idea of a river, season, or time of day

nature personate

Chapter 2: The Human Presence in Nature

A human figure can literally wear nature as a crown of foliage or a rough animal skin, thereby taking on the symbolic attributes of the leaves or the strength and ferocity of the wild beast.

Chapter 3: Animals

The earliest prehistoric cave paintings of primitive man featured animals, and they have remained an important subject for art through the centuries. Many of the creatures seen here embody something more than the zoological species depicted. Pagan gods, for example in ancient Egypt, often assume animal form. Christian art finds symbolism in every species. The challenge for the artist often lies in preserving the true character, energy, and appearance of the animal while also expressing a theological or metaphorical meaning.

Artists try to give every species their own metaphor in works

Chapter 4: Flowers and Gardens flowers sometimes serve as symbols. All flowers have brief moments of perfection, and so their portrayal often implies the idea of transience.

The word "photography" derives from the Greek for "writing with light," and so despite the technology involved, photography is a form of art made of nature.

for the various manifestations of the theme of nature in art are recapitulated in this one medium: idealization, animals, gardens and flowers, and landscape.

<The Great Wave> Its success can be attributed to not only Le Gray's technical tour-de-force, but also to the picture's Romantic evocation of the sublime—the lone ship on a wide expanse of sea suggests our small place in the vast universe.

The Nature And Art of Motion

Introduction

The inescapable attribute of our time is its runaway pace. 我们的时代的固有属性是其失控的速度.

The traffic of the outside world has its inner counterpart. Our interior world is shaped by the restless haste of bad consciences.

Our proudest and most potent possessions, without reliable social guidance, become misused. we live under the terrifying shadow of superinventions, with their much too easy push-button control.As we all know so well, these have brought us to the brink of final disaster.

It seems impossible to look inside ourselves and find renewal of spirit. our privacy, the sanctuary for our imaginative powers, is invaded, not only by such lashing tentacles of this world of motion as the onrushing images of the television screen, but even more by our own frantic restlessness. Motion, in a strict physical sense, is change of position with respect to a reference system(参考系) of space coordinates 空间坐标系. In a broad social sense, motion is change with respect to a reference system of basic human values. --we find ourselves trapped in a gigantic social and emotional traffic jam. just as our cities are strangled by traffic because vehicles overflow our streets, so our vast traffic of new knowledge and power is choking to a standstill.

The last accelerated decades of history span what used to be centuries of technical progress and centuries of economic and social advancement or regression. Unable to correlate the time of the individual's willed puirsoses with the time scale of social directions,others of us blame a hundred different things: events occur absurdly fast....we shift scapegoats without realizing that the real problem is our lack of a coordinating, genuinely contemporary, dynamic scale.

We should understand this dizzying, runaway environment is just the final wild reverberation of a long-evolving change in the foundation of our knowledge and system of values. Not least among its roots is change in our scientific understanding of motion. 我们需要明白，这个令人头晕目眩想要逃离的环境只是我们的知识和价值观体系的长期进化的变化过程里，最后的荒凉的回响。尤其是，它的根基是改变我们对motion的科学理解。

Interpretation of physical motion has had a seminal role in science and technology.(Galileo's study of falling bodies --established-- solid foundation of our scientific understanding of physical nature//Outstanding scientific achievements of the 17th century base on interpretation of planetary motion.//infinitesimal calculus, the mathematical tool was decisive in the shaping of our scientific and technical world,grew out of investigation of change of motion// in 20th century, the constancy of the velocity of light is fundamental to the new physics.)

the stable, solid world of substance which in the past was considered perment and preordained, is understood as widely dispersed fields of dynamic energies.--matter: the tangible, visible, stable substance in the old image of the physical world--is recast today as an invisible web of nuclear events with orbiting electrons jumping from orbit to orbit.原因：固定的，有形的，稳固的 对这个物理世界的旧印象中－－现在正在重铸为一个不可见的核事件网络在不同的电子轨道上切换。

Paralleling the dissolution of the old notion of matter is a fundamental transformation of our ideas about men and society.

In spite of all this mobility (the function of our eyes), the essential characteristic of the world as we perceive it is , in fact , constancy and stability. The world as we perceive it is made up of things with persisting identity, existing in a frame of reference of stationary space. Motionless objects, as we have said, are perceived as though flat, and only when the eye receives a successive flow of light patterns reflected from an object can we recognize depth and detect the object's three-dimensional extension. The changing position of our eyes relative to an object reveals its characteristic three-dimensional "thingness".

This paradox has its inversion. (e.g. 一个移动物体的连续场景的照片以被拍摄的速度投映会被感知为那个物体正在运动。改变连续静止视网膜刺激引起了对于motion（移动）的体验)

Futher implications of motion as a generator of vision and insight.心理学家观察到这样的概念常数－－机械式因果关系，是基于我们儿时具体的motion experience的。当一个孩子他自己通过推动物体造成物体移动的同时，他第一次体验到 因果关系 这个概念。然后孩子开始理解和探索这个可能性，并且基于对因果关联的了解进行跟进一步的改变。

The Botany of Desire