Busby and Patrick

This week in STAC art we worked on our Busby Berkley inspired circular drawings. I stuck with my tree theme and began to add shading. I did like some of the sections where I shaded from dark to light, left to right, however I am trying to improve the sections where there dark begins from the center and moves into a lighter shade as it goes outward. Also I found that I did not have perfectly symmetrical tracing, which causes a problem because it is difficult to shade in the same way. Then again, the small offsets add to the originality and credibility of it being human work. After all, Busby Berkley's dancers were not all the exact same person. Otherwise it would be like a computer created the symmetrical design.

This week's Prisoner episode, The General, roughly resembled this subject of computers and their power of knowing information. Alike computers making perfect, inhuman artwork, computers in this episode were able to produce answers that were precise and pre-rehearsed: very inhuman. The more obvious theme was that humans were fed information to memorize in history but they really could only answer specific questions asked in a specific context. Human knowledge and really understanding the idea is much different than simply memorizing. Moreover, computers that can only memorize data, can not truly apply it to human life and more philosophical ideas. In fact, at the end, when #6 asks the computer to answer the question "Why?" the computer malfunctioned and completely destroyed itself in confusion. This theme and moral of this episode showed such a different side of the Prisoner compared to that of the first episode. We now see the transition of #6 trying to escape to #6 simply messing with the system and now implying bigger concepts into the audience. Here it is that we as humans and therefore computers are not meant to know these psychological questions like why? or even how?

Here McGoohan expressed his own feelings on the idea of knowing everything. Many people devote their lives to discovering the "meaning of life" or why things happen the way they do, but McGoohan here gives his English audience the simple solution of just letting some things stay unknown.