The author discusses the relevance of Sugimoto's photography mainly as it relates to the paradigm of landscape photography exemplified by Ansel Adams. He is quick to note, of course, the similarities between the equipment of the two photographers, but their products are all but independent. He considers Sugimoto's work a commentary on the formal expertise that has continued from Adams' time but as an indicator of what he feels has been lost in photography, art, and society since the earlier works: some sense of spirit.

The author begins with a surface description of the image, and brings up a series of social associations with the location given in Sugimoto's title, and relates these to the image loosely, with no claim that the imagery produces them. Rather, he notes, the image serves as a seed for a set of internal human analogs and in its presence invites us to meditate within our current state and its roots. He takes note both of the title and author of the piece, clinging, apparently, to those last sharp crags of text which accompany the image, those last vestiges of structure that Sugimoto's postmodern minimalism otherwise disintegrates.

He connects the seascapes with Sugimoto's earlier works, claiming that they continue his earlier encoding of lifelessness within facades of life. In earlier wax work, he commented on the constructed emptiness of historical personas; here he brings us face to face with the abyss. If the beach seemed normally a frabjous place, he turns its life eternal and in so doing has it embody fear.

Wilsdon claims that Sugimoto's imagery, among others, "inoculates us against everything in Romantic Art that is no longer meaningful". He unconsciously equilibrates spirit with variance and bemoans its loss of meaning and absence from current life. Ultimately though, the subtle ripples of Sugimoto's stasis bring us about face from the variance and toward a unity which has been left untouched for too long. He recommends not the discard of multiplicity but its pause, its consideration.


Wilsdon, Dominic. Hiroshi Sugimoto - Aegean Sea, Pilion 1990. Singular images : essays on remarkable photographs / edited and with an introduction by Sophie Howarth ; essays by Darsie Alexander ... [et al.]. New York : Aperture, 2005.

Lee discusses the emphasis of stories in our valuation of objects and points to the importance of audio in this process. The author affirms this even given objects that are ostensibly non-aural in nature (the concept of photographs as placeholders for storytelling from memory is a particular example). The author questions the techniques and heuristics used to evaluate sound formally in search of relevance and value.

The historical value of objects is discussed, mainly as pertains to historically relevant persons (notably, ourselves). The author encourages design decisions to be made on the basis of considered use of the object in question over time.

In the visual arts, the author brings a lively discussion of provenance and its importance to art collectors, and characterizes and classifies different types of changes/uses that affect an object: (some annotated, some not) [33-34]

• Transactions of Utility: How am I being used?
• Transactions of Equal Standing: How are we doing today?
• Transactions of Memory: How is my life changing?
• Transactions of Emotion: How do we feel about each other?
• Transactions of Time: Do you believe in me?

The author goes on to consider human expectations given sound artifacts and how various systems have manipulated these for various effects.

In considering design as a whole, the author discusses the ability for objects to communicate their utility, and transitions into a transactional model for denoting the expected inputs and outputs of a designed object. The granularity of recordings is discussed as it pertains to the various methods of material perception employed (highly relevant to interface questions).

Interfaces, of course, are the interactive layer between designed objects and their employing agents. Lee attempts to anthropomorphize the experience from the perspective of the tool or object, with reference to the various systems enabling knowledge visualization and perceptibility developed at the media lab and in analogous communities.

The author conducted a number of brainstorming workshops to determine perceptions of time, and identified narrative as the connective tissue in this fabric. The project they implemented was a constructed bench that attempted to computationally model the human evaluation of temporal events into a coherent narrative through various algorithms, and played back its ‘condensed’ series of events for comparison with those experienced by the participating human.

The project seems severely limited in scope and rather absurdist in conception. The bench is not designed with long term effects of environment in mind, but is rather an extremely temporary installation piece, leaving much of their earlier analysis fallow. The results are interesting but seem to be more relevant algorithmically than aesthetically or specifically.

Lee, Hyun-Yeul, 1974- Storied objects: design thinking with time / by Hyun-Yeul Theresa Lee. c2007.