Exit Slip: Ropes, Colour and Capturing Moments in Time?

After attempting the seven-strand braid, I initially felt discouraged from fiber work. However, I became fascinated with making rope out of grass. This process left me with some lingering questions: does twisting each strand to its maximum have a tipping point where it weakens the rope rather than strengthening it? And while twisting the strands, they naturally wanted to coil together, was the angle they tended toward ideal for overall strength?

Another activity we tried involved color-matching paint chips to objects in nature. I found this surprisingly difficult. Whenever I held a paint chip up to an object, I couldn’t always tell whether the colors didn’t match or if the difference was merely one of saturation. Perhaps the exercise was meant to spark critique of how artificial our modern world has become, or maybe I just lack an eye for distinguishing subtle color differences. I’m leaning toward the latter, since I’ve been told that before.

During a group discussion on how external factors shape our perception of reality, I brought up Huawei’s Moon Mode controversy. Some critics claimed the phone “photoshops” the moon into user photos. While I couldn’t verify the accuracy of this claim, a paper on the controversy raised interesting points: debates about Huawei’s Moon Mode aren’t just about image integrity, but about how societies negotiate new norms for what counts as a “photo” in the age of AI. Photography, traditionally seen as evidentiary, is increasingly a site where politics, technology, and meaning-making intersect. Regardless of the claims’ validity, Samsung has also been accused of reconstructing moon images with AI.

 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01634437211064964 

 https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra

https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/samsungs-moon-photos-are-kinda-fake-but-should-anyone-care-6fbad684ff41