FMP PROPOSAL. - A project based around previous historical art movements, mainly the contrast between Modernism such as, The Bauhaus and Post modernist movements. I.e. my idea of THE NEW AGE BAUHAUS: DESIGN IN 2012 or… 21ST CENTURY AVANT GARDE. POST POSTMODERNISM? -Based on the main idea/ concept of dissertation: employing radical, controversial tactics to not only gain viewers attention, but to then deliver a message, and for it to be interesting and resonate with people. But what is it that I want to say? -Medium is not decided nor set in stone. -Look at and identify what has been fashionable in past decades with graphic design and what has become fashionable since 2010. Once realised subvert that, fuck that, do the opposite. -A dystopian or utopian society based around design, that realises the advantages of post modernism yet buck any trends that formed throughout this time or movement. -Is there a need for a typeface? What is the form of communication, does it involve the english language? Main Idea: To suggest a new movement for art and design for the next decade. -Talk with Vaughan Oliver and tutors about creating a new persona, a fictional character… so Duchamp’s ‘Richard Mutt’ or the ‘Richard Mutt Case’. Also did Vaughan create alternate personas? -Does this project, new movement / idea need a manifesto? If so what is it?!
Above is my original proposal and as is to be expected it has evolved from its initial state. Presenting this folio in a chronological order; my starting point was research. The main method for this theoretical research has been reading a wide variety of material ranging from beat poets such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to Debord, Baudrillard, Zizek as well as Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z.
Through conversations with tutors (notes are presented) as well as my own development and understanding of both thought process and visual experiments. My project has become less about a new art movement and more about presenting a critical mind set for the understanding and consumption of the media that bombards our society daily.
In the aim of being active and gathering visuals to coincide with my research material and initial reading; I began taking photographs in London. I chose London because of its density of people, events and advertising and so on.
I also had an idea that by projecting my own writings and message based upon my research, I could create imagery to photograph and include in my process of image making as another layer. Albeit a very literal way of communicating messages infiltrating the viewers minds.
The opposite page consists of three films I choose specifically for their culture references (the idea of glorifying the outsider) and the messages underlying within the idea of either a samurai or cowboy as significant figures in western societies.
Taking screen shots from this material allowed me to play with another element of meaning and connotations within my construction of imagery.
These images are screen shots taken from individual pieces I’ve created. During the process of altering resolutions in Photoshop, the scale of the image increases as I’ve increased resolution sizes. At this time you are presented with a larger and closer look at the imagery. I feel this is important as the creator and editor of the imagery because it provides a process led, closer inspection of the layers and saturation included in the individual pieces.
The process of combing and layering images has mainly been done using Adobe Photoshop. However, there is a certain visual aesthetic that photoshop can give to imagery that I have purposefully attempted to avoid. The main advantage photoshop gives me as an image maker is to enable the build up of layers with the ability to make them visible or invisible, so I can decide whether certain photos are working well together and communicating what I want to communicate.
A process such a screen printing is something I plan to try in the near future. Screen printing will give the work a new and different visual language as it will limit and reduce not only the detail within the images but also it will restrict the colour palette. I have not done this to date as I feel working in photoshop and using a digital printer to print my images has been a natural progression from the digital over printing work I was doing last semester.
At a digital presentation of work, the way in which the work was being edited and therefore viewed was questioned by tutors. This led to the realisation that the work needs to be seen at a submersed level, by having images large scale such as this one. This allows for the viewer to become emerged and surrounded by content, emphasising the bombardment and flooding of media and advertising in to our minds daily.
Operational Scepticism: Is a publication I have produced to give the imagery and messages a place to sit; a context. The version featured in the photographs is an A5 staple bound publication. I have been experimenting with different methods of binding and am currently producing a ‘french fold’ version, to determine whether these details effect the way the work if viewed.
All of the writing included in the publication is my own. The statements have been developed based upon my reading and research. I believe in a larger publication I would include writing with a more critical basis, backing up my own statements with quotes from my investigations. To view a digital version of Operational Scepticism please click here.
After viewing ‘Operational Scepticism’ in its digital format you will have a good idea of the imagery I have produced to date. I feel this photo is very important as it represents very well one of my points. ‘Tootsie Rolls’ are a widely distributed American lolly and even despite the obvious artificial flavour statement on the packaging people still purchase and consume them. One could argue in a rather blind manner?
Again, here is a closer look at the publication. An example of a quote I might included (although it is less critical and more poetic) would be... ‘When I opened my window I could see the sun shining, and hear the birds singing and smell the air laden with scents of spring.’ Dostoyevsky. This quote captures a sense of realisation I’d like my audience to experience; their eyes to be opened.
FMP PROPOSAL (UPDATE) I feel the project has evolved and changed direction in more ways than one over the past few weeks. Although it is still very much about producing work the presents and is suggestive of a mind set and an adoption of a new model of thinking. In and out of the creative industries (and creative educational courses) I am of the opinion that as a whole society we do not question “things” enough. And “things” is all that they are, messages, commodities, theories, adverts, and programmes. So far throughout the project I have produced work with the aim of emphasising this flood of messages and media that we are unwillingly exposed to daily. I am not under a false pretence that this information is going to disappear or that the bombardment will cease. Also, I realise that by working within graphic design I am a contributing member to the media created. However, I am keen to stress the importance and need for a way of thinking about the world we live in now, in 2012. Creators and consumers need to some how be less numb and more active and critical about the way in which we deal with media. I have a few ideas of how to further communicate these messages, some being more literal than others. However, I am worried about falling astray and the depth of which a project such as this could be taken. I am hoping that within the time left I can successfully communicate some of these ideas in an interesting and visually striking way but also in a way that has meaning. Even if I am only scratching the surface of the wider issues within a project such as this.
My current time line projection. I do understand I need to leave two weeks to put my portfolio together, things need to go to print (if they’re being printed) as soon as possible. However, I have found it difficult to actually have predictions of this by this day and so on, as the format of a final piece(s) is still undecided.
Quotes Sadie Plant making connections between Situationist Theory and Postmodernism. ‘Poetry, pleasures, cities and subversions are themes common to both frameworks, and their hostility towards the Left, their attacks on the complacency and complicity of established forms of radicalism, their desire to collapse distinctions between the aesthetic and the everyday, and their search for the loci of social power in relations of language, knowledge, and everyday experience, the situationists provided postmodernism with much of the ammunition for its attacks on established genres of thought and social organisation.’
Jan Van Toorn ‘The answer to our discomfort about the public role of design then can no longer be sought within the means and methods and our disposal, but in the mentality with which we attempt to bring about social and cultural mobility - in the belief that the established communicative order in relation to the audience can be changed.’ The point above backs up my notion of a change in the way we think as creators and consumers, our mentality and our exposure to a different way of thinking (i.e. whilst in education) has to change before the way in which media invades lives and encourages greed etc, can be changed.
Walter Benjamin, taken from Jan Van Toorn’s Design’s Delight: ‘One should not look at cultural archetypes as timeless essences, but as the result of concrete social and economic relations. The specious illusions of harmony and unity in the bourgeois notion of culture should be destroyed first to expose what it is in reality; a heap of rubbish of stereotypes and clichés, fragments that have piled against ruins.’
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