LO-07

Jonathan Harris’s A Silent Place

The Looking Outwards topic for this week is computational information visualization. I chose to write about Jonathan Harris’s “a silent place.” A silent place is a pictographic oracle consisting of rock drawings from the Utah desert.  When Harris visited this site in Utah, he was struck by the deep silence of the ancient images, which exist beyond interpretation— their meanings can be guessed at, but can never be known.each drawing appears for 227 seconds and reappears 227 minutes later in a cycle that continues indefinitely. Harris created a Magic 8 Ball with no words, speaking out of the silence, helping people see what they already know. I admire the fact that Harris thinks that nature can have this much power over emotions. I found this project really interesting due to the abnormal use of pictures on a website. The pictures were also very cool and presented very well on the website.