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The Magical Umbrella

Have you ever seen an umbrella that opens by itself when there is rain? It would sound ridiculous when one argues that he saw one in real life as if it can only be happening in some kind of a mythological story or in a fairytale that is made to be read by children. This magical object in vast size that one can not see its end, was there to protect all from a sudden change that no one can interfere with. First, people on earth could not understand how it intuits whether it is raining or not. One day, the umbrella stopped closing after the rain, then it became a dome for grounders as would sky. After a long time passes they forgot all about rain and sun rays by adopting it. Then imagine that the protector of yours has disappeared out of the blue, after all of the efforts you put collaboratively to beautify what you had. Now, you do not have anything on the ground to hide from the burning sun shining towards you as like you are under the spotlight on the stage. You are all wet under the r
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Umbrella | Project Construction

The project, which has not been entitled yet, aims to construct a black umbrella that can be opened and closed autonomously. This umbrella opens and plays the song called “Katibim” when there is rain in Üsküdar. The song stops simultaneously with the closure of the umbrella when the rain stops. The size of the umbrella has been decided to be three times bigger than the usual personal umbrellas, since the relation between the installed object and where it has been placed has been taken into consideration, and it is meant to be a public umbrella that can cover many. The ready-made garden umbrella is bought yet its original plastic end tip will be replaced by hand made wooden one, and also a handle made of wood will be attached to that in order to present a huge version of an individual one rather than a garden umbrella. Additionally, the cloth of the umbrella will be modified accordingly. Raspberry Pi, a small single-board computer, has been used in the project for the creation of an aut

Umbrella | Political References

The umbrella can protect people from various factors as well as the rain and sun. In 2014, umbrellas gained the mission of protecting the crowd from pepper spray and rubber bullets during the protests in Hong Kong regarding more transparent elections, which were later named “The Umbrella Movement”. The object, particularly the yellow ones, became a symbol for protests and in general used as a tool for passive resistance. In 2019, during the time of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement again in Hong Kong, the object carried the importance of collective expression, privacy, and self-defense for protesters in the same manner yet umbrellas have been labeled as weapons by police forces so that the ordering of the object from e-commerce platforms like AliExpress was banned. Beyond being a symbol of resistance, umbrellas were used as camouflage to provide privacy for protesters, as a shield and defense mechanism for protection against police forces as the people from protests clai

Umbrella | Sexual References

The interpretation of an umbrella as an erotic symbol dates back to Greco-Roman god Bacchus and his followers called bacchantes. Since Bacchus’s cult was mainly associated with pleasure, rave, and ecstasy, the usage of the umbrella in different occasions like festivals or events by cult members assigned an erotic meaning to that object. Later its associations were generally made with royalty and wealth and this aspect has been forgotten. After a long time has passed, the character named Henrietta Petowker in Nicholas Nickleby was portrayed as “[she] knows that she is admired at the theatre by the jauntily phallic appearance of a most preserving umbrella in the upper boxes” by Charles Dickens, while he was pointing out the erotic perception of the object. Sixty years later Freud explains the relationship of umbrellas with the unconscious as such “all elongated objects, sticks, tree-trunks, umbrellas (on account of the opening, which might be likened to an erection), all sharp and elonga

Umbrella | Religion

  Umbrella or parasol appears in many belief systems both as a spiritual symbol and physical object carried in religious events, rituals, and festivals. In Ancient Greece, the followers of Dionysus were carrying parasols in bright colors in festivals and processions. More significantly, the carriage of parasols was associated with Skirophoria an Athenian agricultural festival held in the month of final harvest corresponding to May or June. In this festival, the priestess of Athena and the priests of Poseidon and Helios were walking from the Acropolis to a place called Skiron under the cover of a large white umbrella symbolizing the protection of the Attic soil against the burning sun rays. Skirophoria was organized by only Athenian women and dedicated to Demeter who is the goddess of fruitfulness and her daughter Persephone indicating the interpretation of the white umbrella as a pray toward the gods for fertility. The white parasol arises as a deity in Buddhism called “Ushnisha Sitata

The Umbrella

The word umbrella derives from the Latin where “umbra” means shadow.    Similarly, “para” defines shelter or shield, and “sol” means sun and they construct the word “parasol” which is used with the term umbrella interchangeably, yet parasols have a straight shaft different than the curved handle of the umbrella. As their etymological roots suggest, the primal intention of creating this object was the protection from exposure to the sun around four millennia before today. The early materials used in the construction were the tree leaves and branches until the invention of paper in China. The paper predecessors of this object later oiled since then the function of them have expanded from sunshade to protection from the rain even though they were not totally waterproof. These oil-paper parasols as well as dry, silk parasols made their way to Europe around Renaissance and became a fashionable trend amongst women. In 1708 The Kersey’s Dictionary defined the umbrella as “a screen commonly us

The Mirror Stage

I believe that cinema can be defined as an allegory of the mirror. This simile will not be built solely by focusing on the mirror scenes in the films but by comparing psychoanalytic aspects of both the cinema as an art form and the mirror. I will start with the emphasis on Lacan’s Mirror Stage since it is a formative theory about how the image of self is created before language and why it is crucial for a human being to function as a unified viable entity. Firstly, it can be claimed that humans are not born with an adequate number of instincts to make them conceptualize disparate bodily experiences. Therefore, the relation between the organism and its reality is needed to be established in order to differentiate the external and internal stimulants. In the mirror stage where the infants come across with their reflection, this “separation-individuation” is formed for the sake of ego subjectivity, since the baby observes its own body integrity in a full-length mirror. In the times that h