Modernism + Post-Modernism

Modernism – I was
Post-Modernism – I am

Modernism – Industrialisation. The invention of the camera, smelting, building materials. Being able to make the environment the way we want it.

The following things relate to Modernism.

• Form (conjunctive/closed)
  • Relating to or connected
• Mies Van Der Rohe
  • Using new materials.
  • Traces back to the form
  • Looks brand new
  • From this came the Bauhaus kitchen, designed for apartments.
  • Barcelona Pavillion
• Purpose
• Leni Reifenstahl
  • Nazi propaganda
  • Director / photographer
  • Advertising strength of the aryan race.
  • Athletic, strong, powerful, positive
• Design
• Bauhaus coffe & tea set
  • Marianne Brandt
  • Bauhaus = free and open
  • Design is important and a functual object
  • New material
  • Doesn’t rust
  • Minimal
• Hierarchy
• Mastery/logos
  • Principle of divine reason or order
• Edward Steichen
  • First skyscraper
  • Photographed in a romantic sense
  • People on a horse & carriage
• Art object/finished work
• Distance
  • Art object
  • Distanced from it
• Pyramids
  • Far away
• Creation/totalisation
• Synthesis
  • Combination of elements
  • Mies Van Der Rohe
• Presence of realism
  • Pyramids = photographed
  • Everyone can see it without actually seeing it
• Centering
• Genre/boundary
  • Fixed in modernity
  • Women & washing powder
• Paradigm
  • A typical example or pattern
• Hypo taxis
  • Subordination of one clause to the other
• Metaphor
  • Something regarded as representative or symbolic of something
• Selection
• Root/depth
  • Plants
• Rodin
  • Objectification of the female
  • Female form
  • Totality
• Interpretation/reading
• Signified
  • Set
• National flag of France
• Lisable (readerly)
  • The thing
• Narrative (Grand Historie)
  • Marx
  • Freud
  • Darwin
  • Western Whites
• Master code
• August Sander
  • Study of German people
  • Serious
• Symptom
  • Trace it
  • Give a name
  • Tag
  • Flag
  • Prove
  • Archive
• Genital/Phallic
  • Omnipresent in modernist sense
  • Flag
  • Flat iron
  • Supremacy of surroundings
• Gustav Corbey
  • Realism
  • Shock
• Paranoia
  • Are you following the path of modernity
  • Worried about something
  • Annihilate the competition
  • Fear of something
  • Race
  • Slaves – EU, USA
  • Factories
  • Close control
• Origin/Cause
  • Trains
  • Master narratives
  • Marxists
  • Freud
  • Psychology
  • Causing modernity with shock
  • Darwin
• Metaphysics
  • Branch of philosophy that deals with being, knowing, identity, time & space
  • Freud = mind
  • Darwin = Evolution
• Determinacy
• Transcender
  • Jews & Hitler
  • This race is better
  • A machine does the job of 50 people

 

The following things relate to Post-Modernism

• Antiform (disjunctive/open)
  • Lacking connection or consistency
• Renzo Piano
  • No reason for the shape of the building
  • The shard
  • London Boat
  • The Oracle
• Play
• Nam Jun Paik
  • Korean media artist 70s/80s
  • Realism, how we see the object
  • Perception in a different way
  • Phenomenology
    • Other media that does it
    • Modernist purity
    • Essence of the object
• Chance
• Cattelan Ferrari
  • Toilet paper ad post produced
• Anarchy
  • Absence of the government
• Exhaustion/Silence
  • Voice
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
  • Sea scapes
  • Negatives @ 8×10
  • Meditative
  • Horizon line in the same place
  • Repetition
  • Contemplative view
  • Driving theaters in the US
  • Open shutter for whole of file, that film is on my film
• Process/Performance/Happening
  • Playing roles
  • Demonstrations
  • Social experiments
• Participation
• Demonstrations
  • Modelling
  • Congregate
• Decreation/Deconstruction
  • Taking things apart
  • Feminist
    • Black
    • White
    • Asian
  • Truth could be in the now
    • Barthes
• Antithesis
  • The direct opposite
  • Renzo Piano
• Absence of realism in a virtual piece of art
• Dispersal
• Text/intertext
  • Mixing things up
  • Man & washing powder
  • Lots of works of art had text on
    • Barbara Kruger
• Syntagm
• Parataxis
  • Places of clauses or phrases one after the other
• Metonym
  • Substitution of name, attribute or adjunct for that of the thing meant
• Combination
  • Language
  • Materials
• Rhizome/Surface
• Koons
  • Michael Jackson statue
• Against interpretation/misreading
• Signifier
  • Leads to the signified
• Roland Barthe
  • Empire that would have empowered South African people / tribes
• Scriptable (writerly)
  • Koons
• Antinarritave (Petit Historie)
  • Gay
  • Black
• Idiolect
  • Speech habits of a particular person
  • Venacular street language
• Robin Maddock
  • Portsmouth
  • Photograph in book
  • Throwaway image
  • Loose
• Desire
  • Psychological idea
  • Looseness
  • Narrative
  • Organisational
• Polymorphous / Androgynous
  • Renzo Piano
  • Gender identity
• Bowie
  • Gender identity
• Schizophernia
  • So many things
  • Can’t identify
  • Epileptic
  • On your phones
  • Text/image
  • Lots of ways to communicate
  • Sensitive to lots of different things
  • Branding ourselves on social media
• Difference / Trace
  • Death of the author
  • Original text
  • Voice is mixed with others
  • Who’s history is it
  • What is the history of design
• Irony
  • Jeff Koons
  • Not seen as an art object
  • Commodity space of art
• Indeterminacy
  • No longer determined or attempted to determine
  • Futurism / cubism
  • Mechanical
• Immanence
  • Waiting for something to happen
  • Can’t find something new
    • Death of the Author

Ecstasy of Communication – Baudrillard Text

The text for this post is available here.

What else did he write about?
– Hyperreal
– Simulacra

This text is a little earlier than the other two concepts, which makes it useful to us for other things.

Baudrillard is a French theorist but slightly different take to Barthes, he is more interested in popular culture & America’s influence over French life. He got very famous with the idea of simulacra, and that the Vietnam war never happened & we only experienced it as a movie. He was obsessed with the idea that we are not experiencing reality, we are experiencing it third hand.

This particular essay relates to the network quality of life, and written in the early 60s. What we consider to be traditional media, is different to him. He starts referring to another essay that’s called “System of objects”. The idea of objects having presence and power is being replaced by something else.
What is replacing it?
What qualities does it have? 

He uses the example of a car, and relates to Barthes when he wrote about a new car. We used to project ourselves through which car we have but now we are more concerned about what it can do for us.

First we think of the car as speed, we think about the aspects of the car and make us feel great. But actually this is an ecological idea.
A good example is Top Gear, but what is the opposite of Top Gear.
What kind of car is well regulated? What kind of car doesn’t need a driver? So people say by 2020, how many million driving jobs will go, but maybe that’s the direction we’re heading in. People could say that 50 years ago but it still hasn’t happened. If you are driving in a driver-less car, what is the most important thing?
Will you get where you want to go?
Will you get hurt?
If it’s machines doing it us for us then we have to be very concious because they have no awareness of others lives.
Start looking at the system, it’s not about the system of driving through a location, it’s about what is in the location. A single turn can lead to a catastrophe. i.e roadworks in the road, the system may not know. The system then crashes.

The metaphor is the astronaut in the capsule to show the sensatation of what he thinks the idea of the driver is. it’s more about social economics. Why do we buy an electric car? We buy it because we care about the environment.

The living room; To what extent is the living room a personal space.
Even though you’re sat around the TV, you’re in a different world and you don’t concentrate much on things around you. Can you imagine the living room without the TV? No. How would the room look without the TV? It would look weird, most furniture is pointed at the TV. TV hasn’t always been around, so now we all live differently to when TV didn’t exist. It’s a choice, it’s how we are. If it’s all negative then why do we do it? He compares it to flight simulation, so it isn’t real. Other things that are similar to flight simulation is video games, which is more relevant to today. It’s involved in a lot of people’s lives. It’s something we like doing, but what quality does it bring?

Three characteristics:

Displacement of bodily movement – you don’t need to be moving to experience it.
– Watching motor sports, you feel like your part of it but you’re not.
– Video games
– Abstraction of qualities when we homogenise it
– Less peculiarities, find something that is common
– Virtual reality

Everything becomes the same

The way the body transforms itself into something unreal

Everything becomes small or miniature

Why miniaturisation, why does everything become small? What is the effect of that?
An example of this would be mobile phones. There were no mobile phones in the 60s, but it is a very accurate description of what we do today. We are free to do what we want to do but according to Baudrillard, we are just living around technology. Technology is the hidden actor here.
The effect of this, comparing this to the living room, the real itself appears as a large useless body. It doesn’t excite us anymore in the same way.

What does he link advertising to? He links it to the social aspect. It’s targeted to people that all connect and talk to each other. It is the public space.
How does advertising treat or affect it? He uses the metaphor of a screen. What do we use public spaces for? The traditional town square was a meeting point for people, markets, events being held, and where you go and see and be seen.
To what extent does public space still exist, if not what has replaced it? Nowadays, Facebook has replaced it. You go there to socialise, like you would a town square. Even if Facebook didn’t exist, people would meet at a town square and walk to somewhere else.  It isn’t a good social space. The Italian cities with the big round places, they are made for people to socialise and hang about, but people don’t do it a lot anymore. People & places in Europe are much nicer to hang around outside and socialise, but people in Britain seem to use more technology. Culture and weather could have a massive impact on meeting points in town squares.

Assignment Brief

Today I received the first brief of the year! We have to write an essay and choose between 4 questions.

About the assignment

Analyse & reference.
1000 words (roughly 2 pages)
Short & sweet
10% over & under the word count
Include a bibliography – Harvard

1. Select a current or recent digital campaign and discuss it in terms of its relevance in the realm of popular culture and within the context of what Roland Barthes has called myth. 

• Myth
• Semiotics
• Saussure (Vis comms)
• Other ideas of Barthes
• Advertising for games/holidays/anything
• Digital campaign
  • Online adverts
  • Videos
• How you analyse it

2. Contemporary life is being market by its networked quality. Discuss an Advertising campaign in the context of Baudrillard#s “ecstasy of communication”, and what distinguish it from previous era.

• How different communication is without networks
• The idea of being “always on”
• Open campaign choice
• The network
  • Social media
  • The way you generate a response
  • Integrated campaign

3. How does celebrity endorsement in advertising become park ot complex processes of popular meaning in contemporary society? Discuss it with reference to current Celebrity theories.

• Celebrity
• Always been around
• Theories – no specific person
  • After half term, looking at a range of ideas around celebrity
• In what way celebrity endorsement has become part of a popular meaning
• Unmask why a particular person
  • Why Peter Andre does Iceland, why not someone else

4. Explore rituals of resistance to contemporary consumer culture and whether they can be successful.

• Naomi Klein
• Look at a resistance, are they successful, do they have significance
• Advertising works with whatever is around
• Changes in advertising
• May have impact in terms of how we approach a campaign

Look over the half term at subjects for the essay to discuss when we come back.

 

Marking criteria

Evidence of wider reading – bibliography & reference
Correct usage of conceptual tools – language that theorists use
Reading, referencing, and explaining
How well you understand what you’re writing about
Make sure you have a good insight to the subject
You must be able to write in context
Why is what is being represented, important

 

In terms of scope, don’t write about everything. Choose one, maybe two and focus your argument. Most essays need examples to talk about. Need to have theories and contextualise about the chosen subject. It’s how you work with it. Be specific.

Comparative essay – 2 examples & make a point
Take an example, make it the focus and wrap everything else around it.

Do not use too many examples. You want to be able to cover all of your points.

 

 

 

Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate, which used to be Adobe Flash, is used for game design, animation, and all sorts. It’s a vector based software that’s I find a little easier to use than After Effects.

There are 2 videos below that I made using Adobe Animate.

Ellie Goulding – Mastercard Ad

We looked at this advert as a class, and the one thing we all pulled the advert up on is that it doesn’t advertise the product. It advertises the product and a feelgood feeling.

The product is Mastercard, a credit card. Credit cards have APR on them, but there is no APR rate on this advert. The advert is focusing on the “common person” which in this case are the two girls who are singing Ellie Goulding’s song. They associate her song about happiness as they have suffered from anxiety and depression. They are best friends and the song means a lot to both of them.

The advert looks quite staged. You didn’t see her performing, and the story was told from the beginning to the end of the advert. It’s a narrative. It’s very similar to reality TV shows and makes the advert seem boring. However there is celebrity endorsements here. She is appearing in the advert for money and promotion of herself.

Introduction

One of the optional modules for this year was Advertising. I chose this because it goes really well with my final major project. This project will include things like semiotics, looking at different adverts and analysing them and identifying myths, denotations, connotations and all other aspects of advertising within them.

Introduction

Alongside my Advertising module, I chose Advanced Animation. The reason I chose this was because I would like to develop my skills with animation as having that skill can lead to lots of different jobs. Even without the knowledge of any 3D software, 2D animation can be a good skill to have.

In this module I will look at how a story is made, and eventually make my own story using Adobe Animate, or other means of animation be it stop motion, or After Effects.

As a class, we looked at different examples of animation, both good and bad.

What is animation?

“Anything that is not live action which is actuality, but is drawn, is animation and the thing about it is that there are no rules with it. People in animation don’t have to walk, they don’t even have to have legs, they can just float. There is no gravity in animation, it is free, it can fly.”

Those are the most important words in this video to me because it says that anyone can animate. Judging by the looks of the characters in the video as well it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have the ability to draw either.

You can tell a story with any kind of animation, and Disney is a great example of this. Disney & Pixar movies work because of the story and they attract an audience because it is something not of the norm. They give characteristics to things that shouldn’t be able to talk or walk or even move by themselves. Good examples of these are The Lion King, Aristocats, Shark Tale, Toy Story, and many many more.

Another good example of telling a story with anything is the animation called “A Dot and a Line”. It features a dot, who is happy and bouncy, and a line who is in love with the dot, but because they are so different from each other they cannot be together, so he is depicted as sad at the beginning of the story. By using hand-drawn stop motion, the story has been captured well with the use of colour, and making the line and the dot move in certain ways.

What is the FMP?

During the last year of my course (which starts in a week!!!) I am to complete a major project which will be the final project that we submit for the year and will signify the end of the three year course! Over the summer break I had to come up with ideas for what I wanted to do for my project, and to be honest I was stumped. I had absolutely no idea what to do, but I knew which area I wanted my project to be in.

My passion is branding, I can’t get enough of it! Going through the process from start to finish with something that you have created from scratch and being able to see it in all it’s glory at the end is just amazing and makes me feel proud of myself. Branding is something that I believe I am very good at so will use that to my advantage when it comes to choosing what to do for my project.

Hamburger Menu – Java Script (Lesson Notes)

Flex nav is a hamburger menu Jquery website. Download the zip file from github / flexnav

On the website, it tells you to name the navigation – we hold it in a list in Dreamweaver, just give it an extra class (flexnav) and also something called data-breakpoint. Java script uses this attribute.

The script recognises that it is our navigation.

“menu-button” is the hamburger button. once this is all done, we need to start linking the css and the js files.

Didn’t work, no button, not clickable. Why?

We put java script in by using script tags. They are type tags, but we havent put anything in the middle, we just put a source file in which lives inside that tag. There is no content, we will put content in when we initialise it.

By adding script tags we can make the code see that it is js and we need to.

Go to Google to find Jquery CDN (content delivery network) and copy and paste the Jquery link for the js to communicate to its Jquery server.

Now I want to style it because it looks horrible and doesn’t match the colour scheme.

 

I want all of the tabs to move across the page, so for styling we need to target the list items. By going to main CSS and scrolling to the media queries, notice that we set it to 800 so when we put the data attribute in, it was the same thing. If you want to change it for navigation only, you need to go to the list to do it.

 

Britvic Redesigns

I decided to have a go at redesigning some products for Britvic. These products are sold at my place of work, J D Wetherspoon.