Final Project Proposal

  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wmZP7CXY0GZU8sNpmw935yGkSeDbxsPyyUtv-7N815Y/edit?usp=drivesdk In a world saturated with information and image, the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara offers something radically different: quiet, repetition, and the minimalist documentation of time. Through his daily rituals—painting the date, sending telegrams, or mailing postcards—Kawara systematically marked his own presence without ever offering his identity. Simultaneously, Roland Barthes, in his seminal essays such as The Death of the Author and Image-Music-Text , argued for a critical shift in how we interpret art and literature. For Barthes, meaning is not determined by the artist’s intention but by the viewer's interaction with the work.  I argue that On Kawara’s conceptual practice, through its minimalist text and rejection of narrative or personal expression, exemplifies Roland Barthes’ notion of the “death of the author” and the “writerly text”; by reducing art to imperso...

In Musica Practica , Roland Barthes argues that music should not be reduced to theory or passive listening but instead should be understood as an embodied, felt experience. When he writes, “Beethoven’s deafness designates the lack wherein resides all signification,” he is pointing to a deeper truth: that true meaning in music, and by extension, in art, is not in technical perfection, but in presence , tactility , and the emotional grain of expression. Barthes sees Beethoven’s deafness not as absence but as a condition that makes music more physical, more tangibly intelligible,  something felt in the body rather than just read on a score. This idea resonates with my final project, where I collage fragments of old photographs into new compositions. Like Barthes’ concept of musica practica , my process is tactile and interpretive — I manipulate found images with my hands and digitally reconfigure them into something expressive. I’m not preserving the "original" meaning of the ...