Readings

Short reflections

Subterranean Dreams

I was immediately drawn to the website Subterranean Dreams because I wanted to explore an interactive gallery with sound art elements. The space-like soundscape and abstract visuals were created by Nicolas Tilly, a French interactive media designer and developer who works extensively with drone music and audiovisual environments. The site is structured around seven sections with symbols at the top of the screen. Each section introduces a new quote and a new animated form, encouraging slow exploration. The immersive experience begins with a bold pink-red, planet-like figure that appears alive in some way. The user can zoom in, rotate around it, and pull back into a vast space-like environment. The sound immediately feels unearthly in some way with ambient and expansive depth. My initial emotional reaction was nostalgia, particularly for science-fiction films like Dune and Interstellar where soundscapes help the body temporarily exist in another world. This reaction definitely reaffirmed the power of sound art in an art piece. Without narrative or dialogue, the sound alone reshaped my sense of space. The visuals feel synchronized with the audio and the figures melt into themselves with soft, fluid movement, resembling jellyfish drifting through water. As each symbol is selected, a new figure appears, and the combination of text, sound, and motion invites the user to imagine a scene. I think Tilly’s goal is to create an experiential and contemplative space rather than convey a single message. The website encourages presence, curiosity, and immersion, allowing users to construct their own interpretations through interaction. Sound is treated spatially, not as background music but as an environment the body enters. I think the word subterranean suggests layers beneath the visible world, whether emotional or imaginative. The text in each scene, paired with the pulsing objects, acts as a catalyst for internal imagery. As someone currently taking a sound art course, this piece strongly resonated with discussions around the difference between music and sound art. Sound art prioritizes bodily experience over structure, and this piece definitely exemplifies this. The drone soundscape has a textured quality that mirrors the slow and organic movement of the figures, but it does not appear to react directly to cursor movement. Instead, it functions as a continuous sonic environment. This made the experience feel immersive rather than interactive in a conventional sense. The drone evokes a calm yet unsettling mood, as if moving through an unknown space that is both beautiful and slightly disorienting. From a UX perspective, the site can feel confusing at first as it is not always clear how zooming and navigation will affect the experience. However, this ambiguity feels intentional. It leaves room for exploration and creativity rather than control. One of my favorite aspects of the piece is the full 360-degree manipulation of the objects, allowing close examination of texture and movement. My favorite scene was the second one, “drone notes in dark, deep seams.” The attention to detail made the figure feel alive, like an unfamiliar creature or sea organism. Overall, the piece suggests a world that is unfamiliar and layered, reminding us that sound and image together can create spaces that exist within the viewer’s body and imagination. https://sub-dreams.nicolastilly.fr/dream5

Reading Reflection

Eagleton notes that culture is a word that can mean cultivating the land, inhabiting a place, or protecting. Culture is described as both an activity and a value, something that is actively produced and something treated as sacred. This duality creates a tension between culture and nature. Eagleton states that “nature produces culture which changes nature.” Nature itself produces the means of its own transcendence. Humans are natural beings who remake themselves. Unlike nature, we can cultivate ourselves, but there is nuance in this idea. Culture exists because, as Eagleton suggests, “the very need for culture is that there is something lacking in nature.” Humans are never satisfied with what simply is as we crave aspects of meaning, structure and identity. We are always building and striving for more which is where culture becomes political, as it can never be neutral. Eagleton describes it as a clashing term, defining two things at once. It is tied to creativity and critical thinking while simultaneously reinforcing existing social orders. As Eagleton writes, “someone who was entirely absolved from cultural conventions would be no more free than someone who was their slave.” We are constantly negotiating between making ourselves and being made by what surrounds us, like social norms, rebellion, conformity, etc. Culture becomes inseparable from identity, and identity from power. I feel this personally as my Venezuelan-American identity has always been reshaped by migration, language, community, and personality. Culture is something I am constantly navigating. Identity itself becomes a cultural process. Matthew Arnold’s conception of culture exposes the danger of treating cultivation as moral superiority rather than moral responsibility. Arnold believed culture was an intellectual force meant to civilize society. Culture, for him, avoids revolution and chaos in favor of social harmony. Arnold famously refused to take sides on slavery during the American Civil War. Culture in this case becomes a way to justify inaction in the face of injustice. We constantly see this tension between morality and action. We see it clearly in contemporary liberal-humanist responses to things like immigration enforcement and ICE raids. Many cultural responses emphasize empathy and civility while simultaneously affirming that “the law must be followed.” Cruelty is condemned, but borders are treated as sacred. This is where neutrality reveals itself as political. Liberal humanism often appeals to humanity and reason, but those values disproportionately belong to people already protected by power. In the context of ICE, culture offers mourning and outrage yet doesn’t challenge the structures that authorize family separation and deportation. I think this is what I understood to be cultivation without action. It allows society to appear moral while continuing to produce harm.

Reflection 02/04

I found Fanon’s argument and his idea of exhibitionism very interesting, particularly examining who that affirmation is aimed at. Fanon is criticizing the moment when culture turns into a display meant to convince the colonizer that we are worthy. He explains that when culture becomes something you have to prove, it accepts the colonizer as the one who decides what matters. He depicts an image of intellectuals comparing artifacts or glorifying distant empires, which does very little if the present conditions of domination stay intact. This also explains his discomfort with placing culture into a broad diasporic identity. He recognizes that people across the African diaspora were racialized in similar ways but he insists that being named by the same insult does not mean living the same struggle. The problems facing Black Americans under segregation were not the same as those facing people fighting armed colonial rule in Africa. When diaspora becomes the main framework, it can flatten these differences and replace political responsibility with a sort of symbolic unity. He also explains that culture is an expression of a people’s struggle and not something that exists separately from it. Culture changes when people move, including fear, resistance, isolation and collective action. Stories and art absorb the tension of a moment and push it forward. This is why Fanon argues that struggle reshapes culture. Under this sort of pressure, culture stops being nostalgic and starts becoming instructional and demanding. I thought his idea that art requires giving oneself was very important. Fanon is skeptical of artists and intellectuals who want to speak for “the people” without being changed by them. Representing suffering from a distance. Giving oneself means accepting that culture isn’t stable but actually very risky. As someone Venezuelan, this resonates as Latin culture is often reduced to recognizable symbols including music, warmth, resilience, etc that circulate easily abroad. But those symbols come from very specific histories of instability, migration, survival, etc. Fanon helps me see that culture is something we remake in response to pressure.

Reflection 02/11

I read Reading Interface by Johanna Drucker, which mentions Hoffman’s argument that perception is about creating useful icon models that help us survive and act. Hoffman suggests that the schemes by which species organize their relation to the world are adaptive interfaces. We do not see the world as it really is but rather we see a simplified set of cues that allow for behaviors and actions that are good enough to function effectively. This idea completely reframes how we think about interfaces and mental models. If perception itself is an interface, then graphical user interfaces, icons, buttons, etc are not distortions of reality but rather they are extensions of how cognition already works. When I drag a file into a folder on my laptop, I know there is no literal folder, but, the icon model supports action. It allows me to organize and manipulate information efficiently. The folder is sort of a representation of behavioral cue. Mental models are structured sets of organizing elements that support activity. They need to support performance which connects directly to user experience and UI design. A successful interface is one that aligns with our cognitive capacities and supports intuitive & low-friction interaction, which I think about a lot in my own work. In this sense, UX design becomes an applied form of perceptual and consumer/human psychology. Designers create environments that guide attention & enable users to act fluidly. Interfaces shape our behavior and our sense of agency. If our mental models are built from icon-based abstractions, then every interface participates in structuring how we think and act. Personal UX experience is subtly trained to navigate digital spaces in particular ways.

Reflection 02/18

This week’s reading reframed how I think about my own work in UX/UI and brand storytelling. I often find myself navigating between logic and creativity/meaning within my major in integrated design and media. Murray helped me see this tension as more of a creative opportunity. In many of my projects, like designing a website or developing a brand identity, I tend to focus first on structure. But Murray’s distinction between a “user” and an “interactor” is something I need to think more about when designing as I’m shaping how someone feels, interprets, and situates themselves within a digital space. These spaces communicate values and identity. This connects to my interest in storytelling and cultural expression. When I work on branding or visual systems, I am often thinking about mood, tone, and narrative arcs. Murray’s idea that we are still “inventing the medium” makes me realize that every typography or design choice subtly encodes cultural assumptions. I always ask myself if the design is cold and transactional and how/if i can make it warm and communal? Does it prioritize speed and efficiency? As someone who works in technology, design, and media, I translate technical systems into human experiences. Murray’s reading challenges me to be more intentional within my design work. The types of questions I want to ask myself are: what kind of culture does this design promote? Who does it imagine as its ideal interactor? What parts of my own perspective and background are embedded in it?