Morning tutorial.

This morning my tutor took the time to give us all a tutorial as he felt we weren't working to our full capability, and I have to agree that I'm not. I seem to be producing lots of ideas but not alot of practical work and I understand that this should change, however I just don't feel settled with my concept yet. These are the notes that Steve told me to concentrate on :

• Extending from the Internet into the public. How the media portrays things, what reaction this creates.
• Question the methods of communication.
• Go outside the box, personal space.
• The way I present work - stickers, this is inspired by the Internet therefore the subject doesn't have to be about the Internet.
• Look at how the Internet changes and creates relationships.
• Dealing with the idea of graphic design, deal with the idea of the Internet.
• Life outside of facebook, world within world, why not record the unrecorded world.

After reading through these points I completely agree. He said that I wasn't being my 'normal kooky self' and I feel that it is true. I need to push my project further to find where my interests truly lie. I want to create something that excites me so I can truly get behind the idea and capture my own passions within. I need to remember that I don't need to stick to the idea of graphic design is creating images and words but rather take and run with my own interpretation of what graphic design is. I need to become excited by my project again so I feel that it may take a turn away from my initial statement, however I feel that this is necessary and healthy.

Group Crit : 1

During the first group crit we we're separated into groups. The groups were a mix of both classes and it was made so that people who wouldn't have spoke each other to or seen much of their work were now integrating. I was in a group with Vicki, Rosa, Alice and Nicky. I liked the fact that the groups were mixed in this way, it gave us the chance to figure out our own concepts as we had to explain them in detail to people who didn't already know about our work. It helped to created new fresh ideas compared to those by your close friends. It also helped us feel like we could be truly objective, knowing that we wouldn't be ruining a friendship if we gave constructive criticism, it put us all on the same page. I found making comments on other peoples work quite easy if explained well, however it was tougher if the person was being negative about their own work. The best thing about group crit is getting a chance to talk about your work. I find explaining work much easier in real life than writing it up on here. Sometimes I wish our journals could be recorded conversations. The exam board should really look into that.

Points made by Rosa :

- Interesting clever idea/concept
- I really like the progression through out project so far.
- Love the idea of gaining an insight into peoples lives.
- How we get so obsessed with out appearance. Everything's fake.
- Maybe create a profile of someone, show more evidence of your idea.
- Use flaps to create characters faces (what I explained) - this was the idea of a children's flip book using someones facebook photographs.

Question 1 : What samples/documentation are your going to create other than what you have produced already?
I'm hoping to create work with imagery, creating a wall of photos to reveal just how much we put out there, layering profile and untagged photos, layering contradicting statements onto photographs.

Question 2 : Are you interested in the idea of revealing somebodies life, personality for who they really are? Discovering them?
I am interested in the idea of revealing somebody but I think it would have to be done carefully as it may cause distress. I'm worried that the person may feel that it is a personal attack. So although I do like the idea I don't think that it is within my nature to do so but I will still continue to look into the idea as it does interest me.

Question 3 : Do you want to get a reaction out of this? Are you hoping to create something controversial? And if you do get a response how will you respond to it?
I do love controversial work and get a reaction although I think I would only get a strong reaction from the person who I was 'revealing'. Again I think its a fine line between using someone within my work or making them a 'victim' for piece of mind I would like to have the okay from the individual to use them although this would take away from piece itself. The fact is I'm not sure who I could use who wouldn't get offended or annoyed.

Overall very exciting, interesting. Passionate about your concept. Very inspiring.


Points made by Alice :

- Time appropriate subject - relevant issues for today's society.
- I like the endeavors you've already taken - good progression.
- Super interesting topic! Enthusiastic to see exhibition.

Question 1 : How do you intend to develop the idea of writing on a white board?
I'd like to develop the live twitter feed by placing the whiteboard in a public area which isn't in college. Although is sometimes hard as security guards have often popped up when other people have tried to do public pieces within Warrington. I would also like the feed to be more regular, maybe I would sit by the board for a working day, 9 to 5, and tweet everything that comes up, having more than one tweet on the board at a time. However I see that my project is developing and new ideas are coming about, I'm not sure if taking the time to do this piece again would be worth it, maybe it would be time better spent doing something else?

Question 2 : How will your project be relevant to you? Will you document your twitter feed, show your facebook profile publicly?
I like the idea of using myself as an example as I feel comfortable doing this. But perhaps the fact that I do feel comfortable doing this means that I'm not the best example to use.

Question 3 : Is it the insight into peoples lives that you wouldn't necessarily speak to in 'the real world' a concept that interests you? Would you exploit strangers?
Yes I love this idea, however I personally don't tend to do this which is a problem. If I had an Internet friend of which I had never met in real life then I would consider making work on this and documenting our relationship, however I don't feel that any of my relationships that are purely Internet based are strong enough to make work from, they are often just exchanges of small comments. I wouldn't call any of these people friends in a true sense.

More emphasis on documentation of personal work? I'm really interested to see the accumulated outcomes.


Points made by Vicki :

- Like how your using inspiration from life and peoples communication to influence your project - e.g. Twitter, facebook, and other information from the Internet.

Question 1 : Where are you planning to project/display otherwise unseen information from the Internet? e.g. locations?
I was planning to display information around town, however I was unsure of how to do this. During the Liverpool Biennial I visited it once again after the college trip, it was during the nighttime and was called something along the lines of the long night out. Since as you walk from place to place we often saw a car which held a strong projector in the back, they used this to project information on the Biennial onto the streets that people were using to walk to and from events. I thought this was a refreshing way to display information and was exciting. I would love to do something along the same lines of this and Jenny Holzer's work however I feel my project may have already developed past these pieces. I understand the importance of carrying out physical work but I personally see the development of thoughts perhaps more interesting, seeing how the mind works.

Question 2 : How could you now respond to the college repeatedly blocking twitter from your account and reflect it within your work?
I responded to this during my twitter board piece and putting it in one of the busiest areas of college. I also sent emails to the computer technicians asking for it to be turned back on, I was allowed access but only with an email from my teacher saying it was for a project. Perhaps I should start a protest? Bombarding them with emails, letters, texts, phone calls.

Question 3 : How could you begin to develop more graphical developments within your work using twitter and facebook as inspiration - looking at how people make judgement from photographs?
I could develop graphical pieces by using imagery and text. However I am seeing this project being graphically based in the concepts as conceptual thinking is important within the graphics industry. I am also trying to make work which is out of my comfort zone, this is why I am trying to move away from making things such as posters which I have previously done.

- You could also explain how people interact and communicate with each other face to face and contrast the difference with how they communicate over the Internet.

Sadly Nicky went home ill so wasn't available for group crit.

Causing havoc for the Sudoku players.

This piece was focused on the website Wikileaks. It was a piece highlighting shocking/controversial information which has been revealed by the site. Yes this information is reported on by journalists on the radio, TV and in the papers, however this is often only chosen stories and alot of information goes unreported. As a society a large portion have never actually entered the website. I wanted to find an unusual way of communicating this information to a different set of people, focusing on the elderly. Within my community free Metro papers are provided on the local buses, these can either be read on the bus or taken away. Since as the elderly are entitled to a free bus pass they often use this public transport and make up a large portion of the users. I often see these elderly people taking a metro off the bus. I decided that one way I could try to reach then was by adding a crossword as it is often stereotyped that the elderly take part in such activities.

I created the crossword on Illustrator and took small interesting snippets of information from Wikileaks. This was sometimes hard to find as alot of the information is in a military written form and is very impersonal. I wanted to find information the public would be engaged by and not just another statistic. It was also hard as the site was often unavailable, I'm guessing that this was because of the multiple parties which are trying to close the site down. It is said that we have freedom of speech, but with this site under constant attack it makes you wonder just who decides what can be said and what gives them this right?

This is the information I decided to use and turned into my questions and answers :

1 - Which prisoners did the U.S authorities want any foreign country to take off their hands that they were willing to strike any deal? Including millions of dollars and meetings with Obama? (10)

Answer - Guantanamo

2 - Which countries Vice President was discovered to be carrying $52 million dollars on him in cash whilst travelling. The U.S. Embassy allowed him to keep it ‘without revealing the money’s origin or destination’? (11)

Answer - Afghanistan

3 - Suspects were shipped to Guantanamo Bay because they were wearing a certain brand of a daily popular accessory, with most being quickly realised because of the lack of evidence. What was this accessory? (5)

Answer - Watch

4 - The Chinese government was found trying to hack into not only Google but the U.S and Western allies’ computers, but which religious leader did they also try hacking? (5, 4)

Answer - Dalai Lama5 - The President of Yemen covered for which country saying "We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,"? (6,6)

Answer - United States 6 -It has been reported that Guantanamo Bay prisoner’s re-enact the 9/11 using what art form? (7)

Answer - Origami

7 - Who’s Prime Minister has been shown to be ‘feckless, vain and ineffective’ with details emerging of his ‘frequent late nights and penchant for partying hard’? (5)

Answer - Italy

After making my crossword I sized it to fit the sudoku section as this was the most logical place. I used an old issue to get the measurements. I then got the bus at 9 o'clock, knowing that most of the metros are gone by midday. I took all of the metros from the tray and stuck my crosswords in place during the journey to town. Once they were finished I left some on seats and put the rest back into the tray. 

Filippo Minelli

Filippo Minelli’s ‘Contradiction’ series plays with contradictions in today’s society. His work tells of how large corporations have intervened nature and the human world, therefore Minelli intervenes with public space to comment on our relationship with the earths ecosystem. We have intruded the natural world therefore Minelli intrudes the public space to make his own work, travelling great lengths. The pure genius of these pieces stops the public and even the high art circles from viewing it as merely graffiti and rather a display of public art. It gains its power from its clever location use, letting man laugh at its own wrong doings. His work draws attention to the fact that the countries who do the research and the book work are the ones who gain, whereas the countries doing the manual labour, creating these products for us are in fact the ones who suffer. Its our gain and their loss. The fact that he does these pieces in a public space, with a simple cheap can of spray paint is a economical statement itself. It is the gesture and location choice which creates the meaning. A simple concept which is visually strong.Minelli's work definatly makes me consider the locations I would like to work in. I love the contrast of the statement against the location yet you can not say that it is out of context since as it is these areas which power these sites, allowing us to fufill our desires.
 

http://www.filippominelli.com/index.php?/speech/contradictionsongoing/

Sebastian Errazuriz

Sebastian Errazuriz is a New York based artist who 'seeks to create works that can remind people of their mortality, invite them to look again at their lives and question at their daily routines.' It is his public works which most interest me with their large stricking scale.

'Rescued from its inevitable death in a slaughter house, and taken to a recreated farm on the top of a ten story building in the center of Santiago. The cow has a second chance to live, this time on top of the city as an impossible reality. Its newfound life opportunity as a rural icon challenges our own urban daily routines. The cow's building is strategically located within view of Chile's religious, political and economical powers. Forcing both the local authorities and population to stop and look again.' - The Day Cows Fly (pictured above)



'Like an 'Espanta Cucos' (literal translation 'scare monster') a twenty-story crane is wrapped in three kilometers of cable and connected to 1200 light bulbs. A giant night-light to keep away our fears; an enormous religious cross, towering above the buildings looking after the sleeping city. The crane was constructed in a low-income area of the city, where a large part of the population works exhausting hours in a series of surrounding construction sites.'



'TIRED OF LIFE Time Square, New York due 2010

A continuous yawn is projected repeatedly on Time Square. The bored character, that appears on a screen, as an omnipresent head looks down from the skies yawning between the masses of market imagery. Below a now contagious epidemic of yawning people, suddenly appear bored, tired or un-amused in spite the ongoing attack of media advertisements. The masses of yawning tourists unconsciously continue to carry their contagious message and spread it throughout the city.'

At the minute im not too sure how I will use Errazuriz's work to inspire my own but I purely love his use of public spaces. I creates truely unique and unusual pieces. I want to be able to do the same thing, to let my personality come through within my own works.

The Social Network.

The Social Network is a film about the founding of the social networking site Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. I thought by doing a project based upon social networking sites that it would be a crime not to watch the film. Alot of the film is based upon the friendship of the creators and this was in fact no use to me however it did explain how and why Facebook was created.

It began with a site called Coursematch, this was a website that helped you find what courses your friends were taking via the Kirkland (dorm) Facebook. One night Mark Zuckerberg decided to hack into this site and create Facemash a site that let you compare the girls who attended this college and rate whether they were hot or not. He then created an mp3 app that recognised your taste in music. He was then invited to listen to a concept called the Harvard connection, where you could create your own page, interests, bio, friends, pics, people can go online and request to be your friend, different from myspace because of Harvard.edu, the difference is exclusivity.

Zuckerberg then created  The Facebook. Where people could check out their friends, to browse around. Taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online. It would be exclusive, you would have to know the people on the site to get past your own page. ‘People provide their own picture, their own information and people had the ability to invite or not invite their friends to join. See in a world where social structure was everything, that was the thing.’
-Its clean its simple.
- ‘Relationship status…this is what drives life at college, ‘Are you having sex or aren’t you? Its why people take certain classes and sit where they sit and do what they do. And at its centre, you know, that’s what The Facebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon, there’s a chance they’re actually gonna’ ‘-gonna get laid’ -’…meet a girl. Yes’

The film was interesting as it highlighted the core reasons we find facebook so interesting. It also highlight just how much we want to know about other peoples lives and how invested we are in this information. It also highlighted how we use facebook to portray ourselves.

I'm not sure just how much I can take away from this film as I don't want to end up creating work solely based upon facebook but never the less its always helpful to expand the field of research away from artists.

'The internets not written in pencil Mark its written in ink.'

.

Jenny Holzer and Martin Firrell

You Are My Own 1996

Jenny Holzer is known mostly for her large scale projections, focusing her work on the use of words in public spaces. She often wrote her own text but then started to use other peoples, before using secret US army documents exposing American soldiers human rights violations. Her work often speak of violence, oppression, sexuality, feminism, power, war and death. Bringing light to something which is hidden, yet remaining silent.

I love her sense of fearlessness. And her ability to exposing horrid information in such a beautiful way. The scale of her work adds impact to the harrowing words that are shown making the piece more and more powerful. It is the simplicity of the plain white text against the beautiful buildings that she chooses. And when she is not exposing information it is her choice of text which speaks for itself. She picks sentences which hundreds of people can take something from. I also appreciate her use of public spaces, taking art outside of the gallery and giving it to the everyday person. Her use of space questions just who should art be for much like her questioning of what information should be kept from the public.

I would like to create work using Holzer's projection style, however im afraid that my initail thoughts of using Wikileaks information would just be too simular to her own work.

Martin Firrell's work is also very simular to Holzers as they both use public spaces, text and the use of projections to create public debate. Firrell focuses on the power of ideas and tries to create a positive social change. I get the sense that Firrell is much more passionate about why he is creating his work and the statements that he reveals. Which makes me question my own level of passion towards certain ideas. I want to find a avenue which I am also as passionate about as I can see the difference it makes to a persons work. He also makes me question what reaction do I want to prevoke within society? Do I want to make people think? How will the text that I reveal make people feel? Do I want it to create a positive feeling or a negative?

Advertising reality.

I created these adverisments quickly after deciding I wanted to work with images, revealing the true nature of facebook. I started by taking images which wouldnt normaly be used for an advertisment but are very common sights to the daily users of facebook.

Missing Person.

missing [ˈmɪsɪŋ]
adj

1. not present; absent or lost

2. not able to be traced and not known to be dead nine men were missing after the attack

go missing to become lost or disappear

Missing person boards are used mostly in times of emergency, when a large disaster has taken place. At these times technology is venerable and can fail, leaving the disaster stricken area venerable itself. During these times the most efficient way of communicating is face to face. However when looking for a loved one it is not possible to speak to every person face to face, therefore missing person boards are a way to post and display information. I found this interesting as its a more unusual way of posting information, thinking about it now its much like a notice board I guess which is now ofter overlooked as technology has taken over.

It was actually during a tutorial with Steve when this method was brought to my attention however it was quickly dismissed as I couldn't see just how I could make it link. A week or so later I decided to think about the method in more detail as I find appearance wise these boards are bold and noticeable. After thinking about it for awhile I started to think about Twitter. Twitter - A place to share information or views. These tweets are ofter throw away thoughts that are posted and forgotten about, an instant outlet, often random in nature. So I started thinking about rather than a Missing Persons board I could play on the idea with a Missing Thoughts board.

As a regular twitter user I could create a piece where rather than tweeting I could write my thoughts on paper and use a notice board in a public place to post these. I also like the idea of then putting these back into the virtual world by posting a twitpic of the note. I could also invite people to use this posting their own thoughts and a twitter account set up for this piece would then be used to post the thoughts online.

With time constrants im not sure if I will manage to carry out this piece but atleast the idea is there.

Thinspiration.

The Internet is often looked at to be a great tool, something which makes our lives a little easier and somewhat better because we have a world of information at our finger tips. But what we sometimes overlook is what some of that information actually is. Within our daily lives we may come across groups of people that hold views we feel are wrong. Extremes such as people who have no tolerance of homosexuality and people who support the acts of terrorism; or the more common sexist work colleagues or the classroom bully. Either way within England the majority of the country holds similar views, and within our society these extremists and bullies may find it hard to express their thoughts and spread their views. However anyone can find a way to say what they like on the Internet. As a regular teenage social network site user I was surprised at what I found on some teenagers Tumblr blogs. One thing that holds a strong presence on this site is 'Thinspiration' and 'Pro-ana' blogs.
Pro-ana is the promotion of anorexia and Pro-mia is the promotion of bulimia (this holds less of a presence). Ana and Mia are sometimes thought of as a girl, these 'girls' are the viewers role models and friends, offering them advice. 'Thinspiration' sites often show photos of thin women, these are seen as inspiration and the driving force to help the viewer loose weight. There is also reverse thinspiration which shows fatty foods or obese women, these are there to disgust the viewer and therefore inspire them. These sites also give tips and quotes. I found it shocking just how easy these sites are to find and the content that they hold :

1. Keep your hair in good condition so no one will suspect anything.
2. Say you are going to eat at a friend's house and instead go for a walk. You will be burning calories instead of taking them in.
3. If you start to feel hungry do sit-ups or punch yourself in the stomach. You will not feel hungry anymore.
4. Make yourself a snack, but instead of eating it throw it away. Leave the dirty dishes where your parents can find them. They will think you ate.
5. Take anti-heartburn pills if you're really hungry. They neutralize the acid that builds and makes you hungry.

My idea was to display these unhealthy messages within public areas. Simply taking a canvas and painting the sentence on, then finding a busy public area where I can quickly leave it. This was to draw attention to the shocking message. Or perhaps taking a Thinspiration photograph and applying the message. Surely if these images and messages were brought to the publics attention they would react, possibly removing the item; yet a lot of us know that these sites exist and we do nothing to remove them.
However after talking to my tutor I raised the issue that it could be seen as promoting thinspiration as the message would not be clear, he agreed and said that because the subject matter was so strong it could take away from the work itself.