Various PDP session notes

Advertising (Part 2) - Immersion and the Cinema Experience

Tracy Lannan

• Immersion is deep mental involvement in something, such as being immersed in a film  on a cinema screen.
• Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant’s awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment… and where the immersant is seemingly altogether disconnected from exterior physical space

Intro to Design and Emotion

• You need to be able to design human experiences
• Previous understanding of objects and things.
• Everything we look at, we assume something, and then we feel something about it (an associated emotion).

Perception or Illusion? - Sensory Information Processing

We are consumers of everything around us, being selective of what we take in.

As designers we should break out of that barrier and be aware of everything us so that we can take in more inspiration and influence and make ourselves more creative.

(Early 20th Century - Horse called Hans. Very good at picking up minute cues/body language of people. He tapped a certain taps every time someone was showing different body language. (Humans do the same.)

Rosenthal (a psychologist) did experiments on mice.

Don’t judge on what you see first time, challenge yourself and look again.

OPTICAL ILLUSION’S ARE GREAT TO LOOK AT FOR THIS TOPIC.

We are born with a depth of sensing danger and trying to survive (look at tests done with babies and mothers and the “mirror drop” - Nature vs Nurture, Depth Perception).

The Meaning of Life.

Art, Design & Consumer Culture

”Culture is everything we don’t have to do.

We have to eat but we don’t have to have to eat certain cuisines like Big Macs or Sushi.

OTHER NOTES ARE ON UNILEARN

• Barbara Kruger
• Consumption is what drives us and what legitimises us
• Money/Income gives us fulfilment, along with following the latest styles, music, gadgets etc: technology (in general)
• Culture is the lens in which we perceive ourselves and how we buy things in the world

Consumer Culture:

• Corporate, national, global consumption
• Fulfilment drives consumer culture and it’s what drives us to buy things all the time.
• Chris Jordan (Running the numbers - global mass culture)

Aesthetic Theory:

What is Art?

• Theodore Adorno (autonomy of art and culture)

QUESTION THE STATUS QUO IN ART

George Bernard Shaw - The ‘new unreasonable’ designer

Graphic design cannot be understood in isolation, but within a communication system

Appropriation in art.

View the clips of Shrek animated film.
How are they using appropriation?

Consider the following:

• what ideas are being referenced?
• how are they being referenced and do they differ from their original?
• to what effect are they used in the film?

Contextual Portfolio | Rene Magritte & Storm Thorgerson | Inspiration

Rene Magritte was a Belgian painter and considered one of the fathers of Surrealism. He looked at the topics of reality and twisted them in his pieces of art. Magritte experimented with Fauve and Cubist-Futurist styles. Magritte chose to create the majority of his work in a surrealist style, and it was from his works and style that Storm Thorgeson became inspired to follow. Magritte's works usually influenced others through his use of turning the ordinary into the unordinary. Elements in his images were repeated and this was probably influenced through his job of  creating wallpaper designs. This repetition in his work made viewers analyse it and forced them to decipher the messages behind his pieces. Magritte's work had reoccurring subjects, such as bowler hat topped men and floating rocks. His images also became a big influence on the Pop Art movement and has been featured in a reinterpreted manner on album covers. The image below called 'The two lovers', shows two lovers kissing while they're faces are covered with white cloth, therefore they are in an intimate embrace, however they are also at the same time  restrained from carrying out any intimate actions due the cloth. This may signify abstinence before marriage or perhaps a desire which is unfulfilled.

Moving onto Storm Thorgerson who was an artist greatly influenced by Magritte's work from a young age. Like Magritte, Thorgerson also created surrealist imagery. Thorgerson created images which were physically real, however they didn't seem to look it. His images provoked many interpretations, thus encouraging the viewers to look twice at his work. This was very helpful hen he designed album covers as it gave the band's album more "looks" and thus making the consumer subconsciously attracted to look at it. For example, with his 'Wish You Were Here' piece there are many interpretations - one being that the man on fire has made some sort of great deal with the other man and is feeling 'on fire' with how well his business is going. Another interpretation could be symbolising the man to the audience as such, and it could be that the man is actually the Devil, placed on the Earth, filling people with greed which then fuels consumerism.

Thorgerson also had a studio with Aubrey Powell called Hipgnosis. Within the studio, there were many photos and pieces of work depicting surreal scenes formed of surreal characters, taking us into the archives of the Hipgnosis design agency that helped form the mythologies surrounding some of the biggest names in music in the 20th Century. Formed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell in 1967, Hipgnosis started art directing their buddies Pink Floyd, going on to create the now iconic, prism-based sleeve for The Dark Side of the Moon. The pair was joined by Peter Christopherson in 1974, who later became a full partner. Hipgnosis Portraits is a glorious, cohesive and exhaustive collection of some of the agency’s most famous works alongside lesser-known designs, with the work seeming as far out and intoxicating as it did almost 50 years ago. As well as showing finished imagery, the book’s first half details the stories behind them through archival materials and explanations of each work, penned by Aubrey himself. Whether it’s Voyager’s haunting images of a suicidal girl in the bathtub, Rick Wakeman flicking his big prog mane or Keith Moon reclining in nothing but a medallion and a fur stole, the images merge a supreme talent for art direction with flawless execution and ideas that few studios could top.

5 Steps to Creativity

1 - Think of multiple ideas
2 - Two heads are better than one
3 - Recognise the role of your subconscious in the creative process
4 - Break out of your established thought patterns by introducing random stimuli
5 - Don't be afraid to build on other people's ideas

Contextual Portfolio | Lori Nix

Lori Nix is a photographer and printer based in Brooklyn, NY who has been building dioramas and then photographing them since the early 1990s. She is interested in depicting danger and disaster, but tempers this with a touch of humour. She says her work was influenced by landscape painters. Her childhood was spent in a rural part of the United States which is known more for it’s natural disasters than anything else. She was born in a small town in western Kansas. Each passing season where she lived brought it’s own drama, from winter snow storms, spring floods and tornados to summer insect infestations and drought. As said by herself, she “considered these things euphoric compared to adults who viewed these seasonal disruptions with angst”. In her newest body of work “The City” she has imagined a city of our future, where something either natural or as the result of mankind, has emptied the city of it’s human inhabitants. Art museums, Broadway theatres, laundromats and bars no longer function. The walls are deteriorating, the ceilings are falling in, the structures barely stand, yet Mother Nature is slowly taking them over. These spaces are filled with flora, fauna and insects, reclaiming what was theirs before man’s encroachment. Her work on 'The City', looks at the convergence or change of a city. I really do like the way she has taken her influence from the city; looking at it and portraying a different timeline of it as truly as she can in her own imaginative and creative way. I also praise the attention to detail and scaling of her work as that is what truly brings together the whole scene. Nix said that in order to get the maquettes and models to scale, she first chooses one main item in the scene, builds it to scale, and then builds up the rest of the models around that. The main inspiration I take away from Lori Nix is the way she uses her imagination. She likes to portray things in a different perspective, and that is an area of thought I like to think about often when it comes to designing.

Seminar Notes

DADA

• https://libcom.org/files/imagecache/article/images/library/dada.jpg
• Form rather than substance
• Walter Benjamin
• The dadaists attached muss less importance to the sales value of their work than to its usefulness for contemplative immersion.
• Francis Picabia , L’Oeil cacodylate, The cacodylic eye, 1921
• Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 1918

Bauhaus

• Wassily Kandinsky - Triangle, Square Circle, A Psychological Test, 1923
• Universal font (one of the most important fonts to be produced from Bauhaus). There’s no uppercase on the font, only lower to reflect that we don’t speak in uppercase or lowercase

Form and function

• Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School (1890s) - “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognisable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law”.
• Adolf Loos Ornament and Crime - “The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects”.
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - “less is more”. ‘We use the German word ‘Baukunst’ that is two words, ‘Bau’ (building) and kunst’ (art). The art is the refinement of a building. We hated the word ‘architecture’ because architecture is something from outside.
• Walter Gropius
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-KeLk1sECI
• Conclusion:
• Form can be made to follow function if the function is clearly defined
• no law compels it to do so
• A law of nature is not a law of culture
• A law is discovered, a rule is applied
• Evolution is an ideological metaphor 

Uncanny

• Cindy Sherman - Black & white film still - creating something which looks like it belongs to a film but doesn’t actually exist
• Margitte
• For an uncanny effect we can distinguish:
  something strange about something familiar from
  something strange
• Uncanny likeness… a likeness that is strange, but not complete (‘complete’ likeness would be identity rather than likeness)
• We are used to thinking of people as unique, so it is unsettling to see twins, and twins can be used to create an unsettling effect in photography and film. Freud says the ‘double’ is an element in the uncanny - the closer the resemblance the more we see the difference. Any one of these girls on their own would seem quite normal
• Masahiro Mori, The Uncanny Valley (1970) - this idea is concerned with the question of likeness or resemblance. (Note that where the characters are more or less like humans, a human isn’t ‘like’ a human, so a ‘real person’ doesn’t represent the goal of realism)
• FREUD ON THE UNCANNY:
  Freud thinks this question of likeness is not very interesting and not the real meaning of the uncanny.
  He thinks it is more about repressing a disturbing memory though repeated behaviour.
• ‘Return of the repressed’ - Louis Bourgeois
• The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1816) - THE KEY REFERENCE FOR ALL STUDIES OF THE UNCANNY

Postmodernism (Part 1: constructivism)

• Linear perspective: was it invented or was it discovered? - A postmodernist would say invented.
• Relativism: denies, ‘that any standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.’
• We would not privilege linear perspective as ‘true’. It is merely a different kind of visual representation.
• Constructivism: ‘The most radical postmodernists do not distinguish acceptance as true from being true; they claim that
• Examples: Culture Nature, Rich Poor, Rational Emotional, Wake Sleep, Man Woman, Line Colour, Mechanical Organic.
• The dangers of supplement - Jeans Jacques Russo: Essay on the Origins of Languages
• Russo thinks SPEECH is authentic, and that WRITING is merely a supplement to speech.
• Examples of dangerous supplement:
• Prosthesis (body)
• Civilisation (nature)
• Clothing (body)
• Superstructure (base)
• Mask (face)
• Masturbation (sex)
• Copy (original)
• Colour (line)
• Harmony (melody)

Simulacrum - An image or representation of someone or something

In today's PDP session, we learned about the word 'simulacrum', and the application of simulation to reality. We looked several films such as The Matrix, Avatar, Inception etc. all of which include the theme/idea of virtual reality. It's a concept which takes unrealistic possibilities, and places them in a realistic (or realistic looking/alternative) world. For example,  in the film 'The Matrix', depicts a dystopian future in which reality as perceived by humans is actually a simulated reality called 'The Matrix', created by sentient machines to subdue the human population, while their bodies' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Computer programmer 'Neo' learns the truth and is drawn into a rebellion against the machines, which involves other people who have been freed from the 'dream world'.

In the session we also looked at how the concept of a simulated reality branched out to different industries such as the fashion and game industry as well as the film industry, and how the concept of a more interactive and virtual reality can help to make the industry move forward and become more modern. New technology such as 3D goggles have been introduced i the game industry which allows the user to immerse themselves in the gameplay, in the sense of looking at all angles of the game in a 3 dimensional view compared just a 2 dimensional view. A popular company which uses this technology is Oculus in their Oculus Rift goggles. We saw many examples of a simulated environment and the concept of interactivity being used - below are a few: