Lawrence Kwok
Piping hot coffee, Rhino models, prototyping objects, creative collaboration, taking pictures, reading comics. I'm always looking for new projects.
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Info
- SummarySpecialties: CAD Modelling, Rendering, Photography, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Project ManagementExperience
- May 2011 - PresentGraduate Student - Industrial Design / University of Alberta
- May 2011 - Present3D Mapping Intern / University of AlbertaProject management, HDR & Gigapan photogtaphy, collaborative ideation.
- Sept 2004 - May 2007Junior Power Engineer / Cummins Western CanadaProject management, interaction design, documentation control.
Education-
2007 - 2010University of AlbertaBDes in Industrial Design
Activities: Student Design Association -
1998 - 2006University of AlbertaBSc in Mechanical Engineering
Activities: Formula SAE
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Living
- Edmonton, AB, Canada
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Projects
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Ideas Bound
- Design Portfolio
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Tweets
- Dramatic Interpretations of Facebook - Doubt: http://t.co/8svicRTt via @youtube
- Bradley Manning nominated for Nobel Peace Prize: http://t.co/P8Z9r7SOFeb 07, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @kalycaanne @peterhaggard @the_hues How about, "EPS have pressed charges, therefore NOT a bank error" ?
- @trakgalvis Dammit Jimmy, I thought this was a legit protest...
- Support the #wikipediablackout! http://t.co/YApPdYuK. For the next 24h, I'll be not learning and slowly forgetting stuff I used to know...
- Museum!
- Just downloaded Steve Jobs biography, there goes my entire Monday.
- Another gem from RSAnimate, this time on the right & left brain. http://t.co/bb05FwD9
- Does Toronto have more zombies than protestors? #iamdisappoint
- @monisaurus will definitely get that over to you ASAP.
- @monisaurus I have! Pretty crazy. We should have a comic-reading day soon.
- Fuck moving, fuck wind, and fuck chasing my worldly possessions down the street.
- Anyone else spot the #Ghostbusters in #yeg today? Like as in just now on the high level bridge?
- Come to @transcendcoffee if you really really wanna wanna listen to spice girls on repeat.
- @bryanarchy overheard at @core77: "The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it".
- At Revolver, delicious brew coffee. Perfect day for an opening! http://t.co/NTCWbz3
- Maybe someday I can win a Britney Spears Lifetime Achievement Award. By, 'someday' I mean Thursday, and by, 'Britney' I mean Darwin.
- @nathanbox just snapped at someone at 49th for not liking El Michel's, 'Shimmy Shimmy Ya'. "It's SUPPOSED to make you wanna stab someone!"
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Posts
- Feb 06, 12
www.fastcodesign.com
- Jan 29, 12
www.wired.com
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Posts
I read Harlan Ellison’s short story, ‘I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream’ last night, and I have to admit that it’s just about the scariest thing I’ve read in a very long time. Upon falling asleep, I had a nightmare the likes of which I haven’t experienced since I was about 4.
To clarify, I don’t think it’s Ellison’s imagery that is effective as much as the fact that the imagery can’t be placed as real, symbolic or imaginary. In that sense, the unknown always remains unknown, even to the reader. It renders your omniscience useless, placing you no better or worse off than the characters themselves. The imagery stands as merely a placeholder for things that are supposed to have meaning, and yet meaning is always deferred by another nightmarish image. So you the reader, ultimately survive the imagery, but at what cost? Only to have nothing left to read. The main character has no voice and your eyes have been glued open. A true nightmare.
All of Ghandi’s worldly possessions. Photograph was in some book, I don’t remember where or when, or by whom.
McLuhan probably coined the terms, ‘Speed of Light Society’. I would say that for however many explanations the terms have, I don’t really know any. He may have said it, but I won’t ever really grasp at what he meant. I may tend to more easily understand Flip Wilson (“What you see is what you get”). I mean, all I feel is a kind of Alzheimer’s, but not the kind of affliction one has physically, but almost the kind of mental abstractness one might feel after having died, and then say, gone back to work.
Every image I see before me, moving or still, is something I can instantly take for granted, and can equally take me for granted. Am I supposed to know what this is? I’m supposed to know what this is. I’m supposed to take it in and digest it. And like Olestra, it just passes through me, on to the next destination. I just continue to sit there, helpless. I’m either socially unified in my praise, or unified in my disgust, but I must be unified. Or else, why would I be sitting here subjecting myself?
So then what is this feeling if not an actual Alzheimer’s? Some kind of post-dementia? What’s the difference between a mind that cannot hold on to what it knows, and information that merely washes past it, like a babbling brook?
Perhaps when it comes down to it, maybe Flip has a point: When you watch a, ‘time lapse’, that’s precisely what you get.
Back to work.
…numerous studies have found that making material harder to learn — what the researchers call disfluency — can actually improve long-term learning and retention.
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Posts
When the work of art is instead offered for aesthetic enjoyment and its formal aspect is appreciated and analyzed, this still remains far from attaining the essential structure of the work, that is, the origin that gives itself in the work of art and remains reserved in it. Aesthetics, then, is unable to think of art according to its proper statute, and so long as man is prisoner of an aesthetic perspective, the essence of art remains closed to him.
Giorgio Agamben, Man Without Content, p. 102 (via yourharbour)- The Ritournelle
Music + the odd Deleuze reference = The Ritournelle
The Ritournelle is therefore a form of incantation for a claimed spatiality, but it is also a sort of song that, despite is supposed lightness is calling for the power of the cosmos. As Deleuze turns it: “This is like if the stars would start to play a small song of cows’ bells or actually it’s even the opposite, that’s the cows’ bells that become, all in a sudden, promoted to the status of celestial noise, or of infernal noises.”
# DELEUZE /// The Ritournelle I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.
Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)- on perception images
“And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the purest vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things.” (p81)
-Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image
I will be exploring this further soon…
- on creativity
So….
I am currently writing on ‘creativity’ in education. Mainly about how ‘creativity’ has been co-opted by business gurus and the like and ‘sold’ like any other form of capital…
Counter-actualized by a Deleuzian notion of creativity…
SO MUCH GOOD STUFF!
“Philosophy is not communicative, any more than it is contemplative and reflective: it is creative or even revolutionary, by nature, in that it is ceaselessly creating new concepts. The only condition is that these should have a necessity, as well as a strangeness, and they have both to the extent they respond to real problems. Concepts are what stops thought being mere opinion, a view, an exchange of views, gossip” (Deleuze, G., 1995 Negotiations).
“Thinking is always experiencing, experimenting, not interpreting but experimenting, and what we experience, experiment with, is always actuality, what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape”(Deleuze, G., 1995 Negotiations).
More to come…
Creation takes place in bottlenecks … A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities … it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through. You have to work on the wall, because without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric … You have to open up words, break things open, to free earth’s vectors.
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations. 133-134.- paper writing
“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”
(Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
I’m working on doing this currently….
Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater.
Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia- Investigation: 'Real' Affect (and Justin Timberlake)
Ok, I lied. I am writing a post. I’m on hiatus from my hiatus.
I have other writing to do, but in the spirit of procrastination I would like to share a wee investigation into a film I can’t get out of my head. The film is Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales.
This film surprised me. After reading a brief online synopsis and perusing the list of names that make up the ensemble cast (an ex-pro-wrestler, a pop star, and a former vampire slayer to name a few), I thought I had an idea what to expect from this film. Action-packed sci-fi/drama, right? I mean, just look at this movie poster!Yes, that is The Rock, J.T. and Sarah Michelle Gellar. But, it is also directed by Kelly, of Donnie Darko fame. Well, maybe not fame, but cult status for sure. So, apparently people HATED this film. Not me! I can’t stop thinking about it!
The reason behind the haters’ hatin’ and my lovin’?
In a few words: this film is ridiculous.
However, I think that this is one of the points the director is trying to make. ‘Hollywood’ is ridiculous. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, my reaction to this film was strong. Especially my affective response, one which was very difficult to process into any coherent or clear meaning. This, for me, is the key to this film.
The ‘real’ affect.
“Why?” you are asking. Well, lemme tell ya!
Using the action/sci-fi genre, Kelly has created a world inspired by our present moments and our relationship to media, technology, politics and celebrity. This story takes place in Los Angeles and recounts the happenings of an alternate timeline, one in which the U. S. of A. is involved in World War III, the government monitors all internet activity, the mediated image is what creates both power and identity, and a possible apocalypse looms above all. Wait…this doesn’t seem that futuristic after all…Anyways, as Steven Shaviro points out in his article on Southland Tales, “the conceit of an alternate timeline allows Kelly to explore, in exacerbated and hyperbolic fashion, our actual current condition of ubiquitous surveillance, restricted civil liberties, and permanent warfare” (Shaviro, 2010, p.65). (If you like film and theory you should definitely read Shaviro! So good.)
The story told by Kelly is not unfamiliar or completely shocking (one may think of other apocalyptic war/action movies that warn us of our potential demise), but the way in which it is told is what makes this film exciting. The disconnected, hyper-active, plethora of images, stories, characters and plot points move the viewer through a space that it is at the same time flat and extremely complicated. As participants in this film, we are never exactly sure what we should be looking at or paying attention to. This lack of hierarchy is one of the major elements criticized in the film, in addition to the fact that the film is not edited according to any “traditional cinematic logic” (Shaviro, p. 73), but it is also what makes this film so compelling. Shaviro points out that this “looseness or arbitrariness” and the fact that it is difficult to make the leap from “affect to concept” is the very point of the film. This was exactly my experience while watching Southland Tales. On several occasions, I experienced affective moments that I could not fit into any conceptual framework. I tried to make things fit, either into some sort of narrative or thematic structure, but often times I was left with extra pieces.
O.k. blah-blah-bi-da-blah… let’s get a move on and look at some scenes. (P.S.: watch this entire film if you get the chance!)
Scene 1: A hallucinatory sequence where Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake) injects a dose of Liquid Karma and then proceeds to lip-synch and dance to the Killers’ song “All These Things I’ve Done”.Watch!
O.M.G.
I don’t even know what to say sometimes… Film, music, bud light, J.T., so many things. What did you think? I want to know. This scene, called the “heart and soul of the film” by Kelly himself (Peranson as cited in Shaviro, 2010, p. 83), was for me (at the same time) eerie, kitschy and mesmerizing. This scene breaks away from the diegesis of the film — although thematic links could be drawn if necessary— and instead acts as an affective focal point.
Affect, ‘real’ affect. All I could do was watch, and then it was over. Like a car crash.
Scene 2: The sequence in the “megazeppelin” when porn star Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her entourage dance to Moby’s “Memory Gospel”.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Memory Gospel Dancers!”
Um…what? Whatever just happened, it was magical. Or, in one word, CLIMACTIC. In this six minute scene we see a group of beauty queens in sparkling gowns dancing in front of the American flag; a posse of “neo-marxists” take down the government agency US-IDent, guns blazing; an ambulance spinning through the air propelled by a cop who is literally beside himself; and a love triangle play out through a slow-dance while an impending apocalypse looms. Once again, this scene is ridiculous. It brings together all of the typical elements of ‘Hollywood’ film — action, violence, romance, heroism – and places them next to each other as disparate pieces that have seemingly little connection. The dislocated nature of these elements, in addition to the music, was both unsettling and gripping.Affect, ‘real’ affect. All I could do was watch, and then it was over. Like a car crash.
“Have a nice apocalypse!”
Shaviro, S. (2010). Southland Tales. Post Cinematic Affect (p. 64-92), Winchester: Zer0 books.
- Dear L.K.: hi! 8 us
Well hello!
I am writing to notify you that I am on hiatus for the next few weeks. The two papers I am writing are stealing all my brain juice leaving nothing left for me to write here.
I guess I could just post celebrity gossip rumours and bad one-line jokes (I do love a good paraprosdokian)… maybe I will.
After I regain brain power and enter back into this supposed ‘reality’ we all share, I will fill you in on some recent thoughts, ideas, and many many many questions.
Questions like:
How does ‘1’ locate oneself on a plane of immanence?
When is the future? Is it the future now? Now? Now? Now?
Why do animal masks make me so happy?
And, where does creamed corn fit into the workings of the universe?
(I stole that last one from the log lady.)
O.k.? O.k.
- Dear J.B.: Imaginary Answers to Symbolic Questions
Your use of a Möbius strip is elegant, likely very true, and utterly unprovable. At least I hope so. It reminds me (figuratively and literally), of the concept of infinity. We both know what infinity is, and also we actually don’t. We know its representation, and we can even use it mathematically, as we can with pi or e. But we could never fully know it, which is why we have symbolic representation, because in a sense we’d rather show it exists through a mathematical proof. Then all of a sudden, it’s a plain as day.
I’m very much reminded of mathematician Kurt Gödel and his theorems of incompleteness. In a (har har) nutshell, there will always be unanswerable questions, because the system (axioms) you use to produce those answers, will never be complete, never airtight.
I mean, imagine you are one of these ants on this Möbius strip. You never see the other side, even when you eventually get there, which means you don’t even know you’re going around a never ending loop. Even if you were to knowingly experience it spatially:
- half the time you going downhill, and half the time you’re going uphill.
- half the time you’re banking left, and half the time you’re banking right.
That almost sounds like the worse advice I ever got (Well sir, you win some & you lose some). It’s almost infuriating, the idea that you know you’re in a loop and yet you can’t explain it. But it drives you to think that you can. To me, not being able to prove it feels like a kind of trauma. You have to separate your sensation and your representation in order to arrive back at sum of zero. It’s as if in order to understand the Möbius, we are told that we have to take a pair of scissors, cut the strip, and untwist it. Yet, the act of cutting and partial inversion IS the trauma! Somehow we would go through with it anyway to satisfy our curiosity, because we’ve given in to the seductive idea that we can actually grasp it. In doing so, we’ve transformed something knowable and unexplainable, into something that we think will pass as knowable because it’s now fully explainable. We’ve turned out imaginary trauma to a real one. But we don’t have to.
So really, to kind of sum up, I don’t know what’s worse:
- (The idea that) I’ll never truly know anything I can’t explain
- OR (The idea that) anything I can explain isn’t really true.
And yet, when I replace the ‘or’ with an ‘and’, somehow I feel infinitely better!
L.K.
One must free oneself from one’s ideas in writing, not take charge of them. One must free language from its purpose, free concepts from their meaning, free the world from its reality - which is an even greater illusion.
Fragments, Jean Baudrillard- Investigation: "free" acts
Did you watch the videos? Notice any common themes?
Well, I did!
It appears that a new form of romanticism is approaching. Each of these young lovers is exercising a sense of “freedom” that appears to transcend time and space. We watch as each of the (ultra cool, btw) couples move effortlessly between geographical places and temporal spaces. City turns to country. Day turns to night. Girl turns into a horse? This effortlessness is also echoed in the nonchalant, no big deal rapport between each couple. There is much, much more that can be said about these videos but what I really want to talk about is this idea of a “free” act.
Perhaps the big D. can help explain. I mean Mr. Gilles Deleuze.
Actually, I will reference Daniel Smith and his writing on Deleuze and the question of desire (Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics). Here, Smith draws on the work of Leibniz to describe a “free” act: an “act that effectuates the amplitude of my soul at a certain moment, the moment the act is undertaken. It is an act that integrates the small perceptions and small inclinations into a remarkable inclination, which then becomes an inclination of the soul.” (Smith, p.73). Amplitude of my soul. In other words, at any given time, we are swarming with inclinations and therefore a “free act is simply an act that expresses the whole of the soul at a given moment” (Smith, p.73).
This is where Deleuze comes in. As cited in Smith, Deleuze weighs in about these “free” acts with the following:
“There are all sorts of acts that do not have to be confronted with the problems of freedom. They are done solely, one could say, to calm our disquietude: all our habitual and machinal acts. We will speak of freedom only when we pose the question of an act capable or not of filling the amplitude of the soul at a given moment” (Deleuze as cited in Smith, p. 73).
So, with this in mind, maybe we aren’t talking about “true” “freedom” in the videos investigated here. Perhaps the “freedom” the couples are demonstrating is just a response to a growing disquietude in the twenty-first century. Excitations of imagination and responses to fleeting emotions.
More to come…
- young 'love'
I am noticing a phenomenon.
Firstly, I miss music videos.
I remember coming home after school in junior high to watch video countdowns. Remember? And, remember how much that video was a part of the song?! I do.
I also think about how much those videos ‘defined’ a specific time or cultural moment in my mind. Is this the same today? Artists are still making videos, now much more accessible with the internetz. Those videos could be seen as promotional tools, but in my eyes they appear more as creative extensions of the song and artist. And, in many cases they are windows into a specific cultural moment. A re-presentation of culture, if you will.
I still look for videos when I find a new song I like.
Of course, the videos vary, but there is this little something that I have noticed appear in several cases. (At least in the music I have been picking and choosing, which probably says something more about me than the videos themselves).
Check out the next few videos. I have been thinking a lot about ‘love’ (theoretically anyways!) and thought these lil’ proclamations of ‘love’ (so to speak) would be interesting to explore. Culturally.
enjoy!
- Investigation: Smoke and Mirrors
“We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are.”
Time for a good ol’ investigation.
This time, Mr. Christopher Nolan’s Memento. I like films. I like watching them and I like thinking about them and I like talking about them. And apparently I like writing about them. Especially theoretically!
So, Memento. If you haven’t seen it, this will make little to no sense. If you have seen it, this may still make little to no sense. I won’t summarize the film here as there are many synopses online available for your reading pleasure. Instead, I want to look at Memento specifically in relation to some previous posts (on Lacan and the like) in order to explore this concept we call ‘identity’. Specifically, let’s poke around at how memory informs this notion of ‘self’ we all seem to value so much. One of my first lil’ diddies looked briefly at Lacanian ideas and Aphex Twin but here I am going to go a bit deeper in order to see if I can continue to work this crazy stuff out!
Let’s begin with Leonard as a starting point. A.K.A. Lenny. This is him:
Leonard has short term memory loss and therefore remembers things through notes, pictures, tattoos and ‘conditioning’. Leonard tells us continuously throughout the film that his problem means a loss of memory, not a loss of identity. He consistently and adamantly expresses that just because he has lost his memory, does not mean he does not know who he is.
Is that right Leonard? Well then, to what extent does memory inform our understanding of self and identity? Huh? Huh? Inevitably, this leads me to think about Lacan’s psychic orders, specifically the imaginary where we create the “ego ideal”, or ideal self, based on our desire to experience the real. (For more on this read here!)
In conceptualizing the imaginary, Lacan references what he has called “the mirror stage”, which is a stage of development experienced by young children wherein a child begins to recognize that their own body is separate from the world and from their caregiver, thus leading to a feeling of anxiety and a sense of loss. In order to deal with this anxiety and compensate for this loss, the child desires to make-up the lacking part of him or herself in hopes of filling the void. This is done through the creation of fantasy images of the self, or what Lacan terms the “ego ideal”, which is continuously perpetuated by anyone that we set up as a ‘mirror’ for ourselves. In other words, we seek out those who reflect the ideal image of ourselves and how we desire to be ‘seen’. In Memento, Leonard demonstrates this concept of the imaginary through the meticulous and complex ‘mirrors’ he has set up in order to develop and maintain a sense of self that ultimately reinforces his desire: to avenge the (supposed) rape and murder of his wife.
Leonard’s ‘mirrors’ come in several forms. Through ‘conditioning’ and a complex editing of ‘reality’, Leonard has meticulously manipulated the ‘mirrors’ around him in order to reflect back the necessary ‘facts’, stories and self-image needed for him to continue living. The ‘mirrors’ create an “ego ideal” that give Leonard purpose and something in which he can believe. Throughout the film, Leonard himself acknowledges this idea stating that he has to believe that there is a world outside of his own mind:
“The world doesn’t disappear when you close your eyes, does it? My actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. My wife deserves vengeance, and it doesn’t make any difference whether I know about it.”
Ok, so what? Again, who cares? And why should we?
I’ll tell you why! Because this film raises an important question about the ‘self’. That question is:
Are the ‘mirrors’ created by Leonard much different from the ‘mirrors’ created by anyone else? In addition, how does memory act as a ‘mirror’ that reflects the selective elements one chooses to ‘see’ in an understanding of the ideal self?
I have often thought about how memory informs my own understanding of myself. Due to my love of film (and escapism), I often remember things in a somewhat cinematic fashion. I like to think of my memories as recordings of what actually happened, something that can be rewound and fast-forwarded. Using this same analogy, however, this means that these same memories can also be edited, superimposed, deleted and taped over. These memories are virtual and are always seen through the lens of the present. They are continuously becoming. It is within this analogy that I realize that memories are yet another ‘mirror’ created in the imaginary, ultimately adding to the perception of an “ideal I” or “ego ideal”.
For me, Memento shows this concept ingeniously, implicating the viewer themselves to question how memory and identity are continuously influencing one another. This idea is epitomized in what I think is one of the best lines of the film where Leonard is discussing a new ‘fact’ with the caller on the telephone: “Oh shit that’s true. It fits!”
As Leonard states: “You don’t want the truth, you make up your own truth”.
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