October | 2015 | SALOMÉ GAUTIER

MUSEUM, MEDIA, MESSAGE

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Salomé's Blog

Thursday 22nd October – CTS Lecture

COLLECTING AS MEDIUM AND MESSAGE

SUSAN PEARCE

In this lecture we looked at medium and message as one entity and how objects are selected, how and why they are classified (time, subject, media,etc..) and therefore how characteristic groups (collections) are created.

In this chapter, Susan Pearce looks ‘to the ways in which we relate’ to the object, our relationship with them, and considers the ‘open nature of collections as part of the political world of perceived value’. She explains that objects are implicit in social action and ‘explicit in that social practice can be ‘read’ from them’. Objects are both active and passive, our world revolves around them and their value, we make them and they influence us. When it comes to value, objects are only significant in groups or sets to which meaning can be attached, be it monetary or sentimental.

What is a collection? They derive from the object world but they are, never the less separate from it.

‘Collection (is) ‘an obsession organized.’ One of the distinctions between possessing and collecting is that the latter implies order, system, perhaps completion. The pure collector’s interest is not bounded by the intrinsic worth of the objects of his desire; at whatever cost, we must have them.’

-Aristides 1988:330

In a material culture, objects are organized in sets which embody genuine human social experience and are therefore capable of transmitting that experience to other people. Pearce explains that the understanding of selection and process of selection is crucial when creating a collection because when beginning to recognise this, a collection can start to take shape. Collections or selecting objects majorly depend on how society ascribe value; through knowledge or experience. What is ‘important’, ‘fine’, ‘authentic’, ‘historical’, purely ‘sentimental’? How do we differentiate? How do we select?…

Collections provide us with our own private world, it is a physical projection of our mind, experiences, beliefs, passions; our passage through life. They are an extension of our bodies and souls. The objects in them have come to us from the past (personal souvenirs/family heirlooms), or belong to an important moment, or the finding itself is the important moment. It means a lot to us for our objects, these collections to stay intact, as they may be passed on; they are ‘our hope of a little immortality’.

VAROOM!

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Salomé's Blog

DRESCHER-Postal-Seance-2004-book-page_web

Thursday 22nd October – ISHE Lecture

REAR VIEW MIRROR

In this peer reviewed paper, Stephanie Black compares newer forms of illustration to older forms. She discusses how older forms of illustration provide a ‘truly engaging sense of time’, arguing that developers of New Media should look to older forms of navigation in media that can engage and involve readers in much richer ways.

Black tries to explain that in a fast moving media world, traditional illustration often manipulates time with more grace than digital devices such as smartphones, iPads, digital billboards,etc… Her objective is to extract very relevant lessons from non-digital illustration in order to gain a deeper understanding of how illustration negotiates time.

She mentions that digital illustration tends to be insensitive to its content and that it should use the possibilities it is afforded by the technology, to enhance the relationship between image and viewer. Black examines how illustration achieves such temporal manoeuvring and identifies methods and principles that may be transferable to other media. Methods and principles such as ‘sequential illustration’ which provides examples of how time can be made multi-directional within the form of the book. She discusses various and different principles used by David Hughes and Andrzej Klimowski. Such as stratifying time by presenting simultaneous events separately and simultaneously; or merging past and present times by employing an unsettling memory of events shown in other sections of the book ‘to accompany the events pictured’.

In her paper Black explores many different methods and principles and discusses ‘time’ in illustration and the issues it presents, and by doing so Stephanie Black challenges the modern time media and modern illustrators to reconsider what we can learn from older forms of illustration and to see how these lessons can indeed be applied and/or merged to our modern day methods and media.

To arrive at a conclusion I leave you with a quote from Black that I believe summarises well the purpose and discussion of her paper;

‘’Scrutinising and articulating the methods and principles used, equips illustrators for pushing the perceived boundaries of illustration and creating provocative pieces of work that extend the debate surrounding the time we live in.”

-Stephanie Black

Media is the message…

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Salomé's Blog

Thursday 15th October – CTS Lecture

MEDIUM SPECIFITY (ART CRITICISM)

TECHNOLOGICAL BIAS (MEDIA ECOLOGY)

(INTER) DEPENDENT ORIGINATION (BUDDHISM)

1.MEDIUM SPECIFITY:

Medium Specificity is a consideration in aesthetics and art criticism. Clement Greenberg, who helped popularize the term, medium specificity holds that “the unique and proper area of competence” for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are “unique to the nature” of a particular medium. For example, in painting, literal flatness and abstraction are emphasised rather than illusionism and figuration. So according to him the artist should use techniques which manipulate to produce objects that the media in question particularly lends itself for.

When is the medium is/isn’t relevant to what you are depicting? When is it/isn’t part of it? When is the medium the main focal point of the creation? Or when does it take over?

These were the questions we were thinking of when looking into medium specificity. I found this subject really interesting, and asked myself these questions whilst thinking about my own projects as they were questions I had never really thought about. Until this lecture I hadn’t realised the importance of the medium to your creation, how much it brings to it and how much you can use it to your advantage when trying to depict the reality/surreality/vision of your chosen matter. So most of what I have to say about medium specificity comes in the form of a question because that’s what medium specificity is also about, to question and criticise art.

So here comes more;

When does your creation become more about experimenting with the medium? And does this affect whether or not you are transmitting the reality of what you are depicting? Can both work together, or are they completely unrelated?

2.Technological Bias:

Medium is the message…

Marshall McLuhan proposes that it is the medium itself that shapes and controls ‘the scale and form of human association and action’. Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he states that the ‘content of any medium is always another medium’. Mediums as a message also means that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. This takes us to ‘media ecology’, a term introduced by by Neil Postman in 1968. Media ecology is a study of how media and communication processes affect human perception and understanding. It can also be defined as “the study of media environments, the idea that technology and techniques, modes of information and codes of communication play a leading role in human affairs. It is the media of the epoch that defines the essence of the society and it is the media that acts as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change.

From discussing the medium and looking at Marshall McLuhan’s work I have come to understand that people tend to focus on the obvious which is the content, to provide us valuable information but by dismissing the medium we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs. I now have a new found respect and understanding for the mediums and its implications. The conclusion of all this, being;

Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?

3. (Inter) Dependent Origination (Buddhism)

We didn’t have much time left to discuss this part of our lecture so unfortunately I can’t say that I grasped much from what we did discuss. I really didn’t get a clear understanding as I did with the two other parts of that lecture.

What I did understand or my interpretation was that everything is interconnected. Everything affects everything else. Everything that is, is because other things are. So, everything is connected, one thing doesn’t happen without another, therefore if we are discussing ‘thinking’, as we were in this lecture, we can acknowledge that thinking doesn’t exclusively occur within the brain. As Mark Rowland proposes in ’The New Science of mind’, thinking extends between internal and external processes of information transformations and manipulations.

That’s all folks!

CTS & ISHE

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Salomé's Blog

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1ST LECTURE

Thursday 8th of October – CTS Lecture

CTS and CTS ISHE lectures consist in introducing us to the theoretical and practical world of Art and Design, to understand it’s history and adaptation to time and society. We will learn to broaden our perspectives by gaining knowledge on art and design’s position in society and the impact they have on it, how both are affected by one and other and how they work and evolve together.

We looked at two different books about Illustration, focussing on the index’s of one and the exhibition of the other. We understood how the presentation of work, both grammatical and visual, directly affects how we perceive what we are looking at. As well as how important it is to have knowledge on what you are talking about, as the more you know, the better you express your idea and the better others understand your work. Talking about knowledge we spent some time looking into understanding how you can get that knowledge through primary and secondary research.

I really enjoyed these exercises and discussions because I can see that I am going to learn a lot about how to guide my ideas and thoughts so that in the end my work will have meaning and purpose which is something I felt I always lacked. What I take with me from these lectures is definitely how knowing what you are talking about and why will do so much for the quality of your work. Enriching your mind with history and research from everything and everyone that surrounds you will give your work depth. If you work only from your own opinion, your work will only be pretty pictures.

Knowledge is power people.