Contextual Studies | Phillipe Pareno

Phillipe Pareno | Tate

The Phillipe Pareno installation at the Tate Modern was really quite mesmerising. It took a while for the whole thing to get going but once it was working it was pretty magical. The whole installation was built around a small plate of bacteria that fed off of the atmosphere around it. The bacteria had control of every aspect of the installation from the lighting to the suspended boards, the speakers and even the fish floating in the Turbine hall. 

The Bacteria was determining what happened and when, it was organic and it was a living thing. Sometimes you would find a video being played onto a big screen because that was what the bacteria was telling it to do. The video would sometimes repeat itself and other times it would end after the first run through. I only caught glimpses of two different videos during the couple of hours I was there so I wasn't sure if there were more than two different videos that could have been shown. 

The one time I was there something amazing happened. Suddenly the Turbine hall erupted into a frantic roaring sound that turned out to be an aeroplane going overhead the building, or was it? We honestly could never tell because the surround sound was genuinely making it seem like the plane was 20 feet above you thats how loud it was. It was amazing to see such an installation grow out of the artists control. Pareno created this and allowed the bacteria to control it, trusting that it would do the right thing. 

Some photographs from the exhibition:  //// 10 PHOTOGRAPHS and 10 DRAWINGS//////

Drawings:

Contextual Studies | Tracy Vs Sarah

Tracy Emin vs Sarah Lucas

Tracy Emin and Sarah Lucas were the two artists we were focusing on for this weeks contextual lesson.

I had heard about Tracy Emin before with her very controversial installation of the bed but I had not come across Sarah Lucas. In a way they were very similar artists as they use feminism and sex very vividly in their work. It is almost an underlying theme in all of their work.

Tracy Emin:

 

Pros and Cons of Tracey Emin's Practice:

Pros:

• She challenged accepted stereotypes of women
• Her sculpture have raw energy that both provoke and amuse the viewer
• She has explored and challenged sexual attitudes

Cons:

• Her artworks are very crude and can often be seen as offensive
• She doesn't explore themes that don't revolve around sex in any way
• Her work may be seen as too explicit for the younger generation

Sarah Lucas:

Pros and Cons of Sarah Lucas' Practice:

Pros:

• Her work is original
• It has challenged the perception of Art
• She has desensitised themes such as sex and drugs through her artwork.

Cons:

• Her work doesn't get taken seriously
• The themes in her work are all too similar
• People only started to respect her once she had won the Turner Prize.

Week 8 | Graphics

   

Idea Development

Sadly I really wasn't too happy with my idea for my Zine. My Original Zine was going to be about Recycling and the effect Consumerism has upon it but I find that it may be too boring. Its a topic widely discussed and although its still a current issue it gets a lot of attention and exposure. Therefore I am now on the search of a new topic.

I drew up a little brainstorm in order to help with my idea development. I simply just thought of everything that bothered me about society nowadays. It went from things about subtle racism to my generations 'roll-your-eyes' attitude at typical, trendy things and even to peoples wrong perception of mental health. That was the nerve I had eventually struck. Mental health.

There's a lot of stigma around Mental health and whether people actually understand what it is. I feel i see far too many people simply feeling sad and jumping to the conclusion that they're "depressed" or have "anxiety" without fully understanding what these mental health conditions actually are. Depression and severe anxiety have a massive impact on the lives that it consumes, not just a day every now and then, but whole lives, full lives. Each and every day haunted by the same thoughts and worries, an endless cycle of self doubt and, in some cases, self harm.

I therefore decided to dedicate my Zine to issues about Mental health to help shine a light on what it is and how far people go to rid themselves of the pain. 

I started to do some research on Mental health and found out that 1 in 10 young people have a mental health diagnosis. I read and read across many different websites with their facts and figures and essentially concluded that Young people are most at risk when it comes down to mental health. They are the vulnerable ones, We are.

Now, having had a chance to look at a multitude of Zines I found many to be very text heavy and often rely on the reader to read huge chunks of text to get to the point. As a young person myself I don't find that particularly exciting nor would I find the motivation to take the time to read it. Once again as a young person myself, I knew the right medium to communicate to people my age. It was through memes. It came to my head almost straight away, every day I dedicate a little time to look at memes, whether its in my break periods, on my journey home or when im bored in class (guilty). They are a fast and effective way to communicate a short message or joke, they circulate and garner attention fast and they work well at tying together type and image.

Whether they're silly memes about Club Penguin or ridiculing Donald Trump, memes have been a great unit of communication throughout the internet for years. They can range from the downright disgusting to the rib tickling memes I enjoy. However as great as they may be you get memes that aren't at all acceptable, I am talking about ones that joke about suicide and self harm. Recently it has become a sort of internet trend to joke about drinking bleach, cutting wrists and plain suicide. This is something that really bugs me, throughout my life I have come across people who have self harmed and haven't been in total control of their own thoughts which have pushed them to do untold things to their body. It bugs me because these people posting these "jokes" have no real idea about the pain people go through. I want my Zine to shine a light on the subject of mental health but also firmly criticise those who joke about it. 

I started to draw up a plan that briefly outlined what I wanted to do. I stated what my intentions were and on each page what was going to be there along with a small diagram to visualise it.

I wanted to set up my pages so that the first thing you see is the text in the middle of the page. This text is going to be the facts and figures about mental health in young people. Hopefully as they will be eye level the reader should be naturally drawn to it. This will serve well as the main thing i want from this is exposure on the topic, that is why I have chosen it.

   

 

I didn't want to copy the direct version of the meme because I wanted to add a little bit more of my touch to it. Therefore I began to appropriate the memes, using different ways to represent them but still retaining their unique characteristics. I started to trace the memes using tracing paper and a fineliner, it still gave the same feel as a meme did although you definitely lose something when it isn't the actual meme. This might be something i'lll have to consider.

I started to implement my ideas into an actual page and found that the tracing gave the memes a really nice touch. This was making the decision difficult. It turns out my choice of layout worked really well with what i was planning to do which was really great as it saved me a lot of time.

I began experimenting how I wanted my pages to be. As i had a dilemma, this was the best way to decide whether I wanted to trace my memes or not. I started with that one above and began using a different combinations of paper, tracing paper, drawing and printing. 

I decided to use tracing paper for the whole page and also chose to photocopy the memes onto the tracing paper instead of tracing them. Despite the fact that it was probably a lot better for me to change the images i didn't want to lose the sense that they were memes. Keeping them as they were was key to keeping their nature.

With the overall design of my pages out of the way i wanted an interesting or, at least, unconventional way to bind my zine. I had a look at some of the Zines that Soofiya had brought in and it turns out that all of them except for a couple were bound the same. It seems creators don't worry too much about the binding of the zine. However there was one that had a4 pages folded into two a5 pages with an elastic band around the middle along the fold to keep the many pages together. It was interesting because it was quirky. 

I didn't want to have a standard book format so i just had a play around, stapling bits of tracing paper together

I finally settled on a notebook format. I was drawn to this because of the topic of my zine. My zine is about mental health and the journey people go on from the beginning to end. If the reader was forced to pull the page up they would seem like they are lifting up the curtain and looking onto a new scene. Scene by scene my story will be told to them and hopefully by the end they are newly informed and inspired to make a change.

Week 7 | Graphics

Lettering & Typography

This week was all about exploring lettering and typography. We did this to get a sense of the many aspects to graphics as well as to create a suitable title for our Zine.

A few artists were introduced to us to help us get started and to help us get inspired, these included Mike Perry, Kate Moross, Jessica Hische and many more. The ones in particular that caught my eye were Jessica Hische's as her font and typographical style was more to my taste. After we looked at some artists it was time to have a go at it ourselves. We were tasked with creating a new composition every ten seconds on the same page

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As you can see there is a wide range of compositions and font styles and letter sizes, I tried to be as experimental and wild as possible until my ideas ran out. Once we had amassed a load of different ideas it was time to choose three of them and develop them. The first one I chose was this one:

Which I developed into this:

After we had played around with lettering it was time to see the impact and effect type had when paired with image. We had a look at the four principles of Image, Type and Message. The four principles are Separation, Fusion, Fragmentation and Conversion. Once we had learnt about them we had to respond to them with two responses being by hand and two responses being digitally. 

This was the first one I created and it was for Separation. Although the type doesn't explicitly represent the Image it still looked and sounded very interesting and slightly humourous.

This was my second one which was fusion. I was trying really hard to search through the magasines and newspapers to find something I could fuse together, For this one I made a twist on the topic of nature and how it is being affected globally by humans.

For this one I did it digitally in Photoshop. It was a really basic idea because I was really struggling to think of ideas so i picked a word and tried to visually represent it

It was a similar story for this one, I didn't want to over complicate it, although saying that is pretty ironic because I had to create all of the individual bars myself.

Week 6 | Graphics

Zinetastic.

Zines, short for fanzines, are self-published booklets about an given subject. It is about anything you have the interest to publish. As a mini task we were required to write a list of 50 things that we simply like in order to gain ideas for a potential Zine of our own.

My first idea for a Zine was one for a mission to Mars. The topic itself has intrigued me for a while and the choice to create a Zine about it gave me the opportunity to research more into it and better understand it. I then began to research all about mars, why we were going, how we were getting there, how much it would cost etc etc. Just general facts about the whole thing.

From there i wanted to create a flat plan to visualise how my zine would look and what would go on each page. It was a quick and easy way to lay it all out and decide how to order it all. It wasn't very pretty or colourful but it allowed me to expand on my ideas a little and see the actual pages with the content on them. With that all out of the way I started to design the zine itself and a big part of any magasine or booklet is the front page. I wanted something that stood out and was bold but also reflected the topic of the zine. I looked into typography and different fonts so I could title my zine the best way possible. 

A lot of the inspiration came straight from the Nasa font as they are the world leaders in space exploration and will be fundamental in the journey to mars. I also found their font to be really smooth and easy to draw, the curved corners were a nice change from the san-serif typefaces. I decided to leave the stroke on the letters instead of having them filled as to not completely copy the Nasa typeface.

After I had the lettering done I wanted to add something else so that it wasn't just a title on the front page, it needed more colour. I wanted a planet to be on the front, the red planet to be exact.

 

I started to research existing planets created by designers on Pinterest and collected a few examples to create my own version from. For this i used pencil but ink pens would have worked even better as the strokes wouldn't be as visible and it would look more printed. I tried a couple of variations whilst also copying out the two I sampled as practice.

This was the result. Mars is simple enough to be made easily and can be simply recognised. I did end up taking part of the title out as it would have been too big, forcing me to either work over the planet which I tried here and didn't like. That was my first page done and out of the way.

The rest of the pages were to be filled out with facts and figures about the mission to mars.

Overall i don't think the success of my pages were that high. They weren't very colourful and they were very text heavy. Despite them saying a lot and giving very vital information to a budding Mars enthusiast it doesn't look very exciting. I could have drawn some more planets or space related things so that it has more of a space feel to it.

WORD PLAY

The next task allowed us to explore typography and manipulate words in relation to what they mean, we had to choose two words from a list and arrange each word so that it expresses its meaning. We could vary the size, spacing, placement and orientation of the letters. We could use tracing paper, we could cut them up and stick them back down and we could photocopy them but we weren't allowed to change the nature of the font. My two words were repetition and expansion.

For the repetition one I photocopied the word to get the right size and then traced over it making sure to retrace over the two letters I repeated so that they were definitely identical. I then traced it onto the paper and inked over it in fine-liner pen. For the expansion one i had to once again photocopy the original word multiple times at different ratios to get a scale of sizes to work with. I then worked out which ones i wanted to have huge and cut them out with a scalpel and stuck them down. I cut them out because it wasn't as tough as tracing. I took the shortcut.

We then made a brainstorm about ideas for a Zine so that we could create one that was far more developed and to a better standard now that we know a little more about the process.

We put our idea down in the middle and started to expand upon our idea, asking ourselves questions and providing alternate ideas. Then we swapped with someone and they had a look and started asking questions and giving me other options and ideas. It was a way of getting a fresh unbiased mind to look at our idea and try to avoid having a generic idea like our "favourite band" or something similar.

My idea was originally "Recycling" but that was a really broad topic and it has already been covered excessively by tabloids and newspapers all over the world for years now so I narrowed it down.

CAN CONSUMERISM HELP RECYCLING

Contextual Studies | I AM A GENIUS

I am a Genius

Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol were artists iconic for their use of Modernism and represent 3 Key turning points: Cubsim, Abstract Expressionism and Pop art.

Picasso:

Jackson Pollock:

Andy Warhol:

Research Tasks:

Task 1: 2 Minute Automatic Writing

//   in Spain, Sympathy for the people and an artists representation of what war is. It is in Picasso's famous style and represents multiple things. What is conflict? Does this show the bad side of conflict or the good side? who's side is he on? //

Task 2: 2 Minute Information Drawing

Week 5

Presentations

This week required us to create a Pecha Kucha presentation. The presentation was based around our knowledge and thought on what place was. A Pecha Kucha is comprised of ten slides which run at a pace of 20 seconds per slide, so it is very fast paced and you have to make sure you're either talking quick enough or saying enough to cover the 20 seconds.

The days at school building up to the presentation were reserved for workshops on delivering presentations and improving our ability to deliver speeches. The workshops themselves were fun but I don't feel they touched on the process of giving a presentation or speech in front of a group of people we have only briefly known. It was more focused on famous speakers and what techniques they may use which was really hard to adapt into our own work.

The questions we were required to answer were fairly straight forward and it provided me with a solid starting point for each of my slides. The questions we could base our slides on are as follows:

1. What did place mean to us at the start of the project?
2. What does it mean to us now? Has it changed?
3. What artists have inspired us?
4. What is our place?
5. How do we represent our place?

I felt that my Presentation went very well, I was able to communicate my sense of place effectively from what I initially believed it to be to what I now believe place means to me. Though despite all of that it would have been a more fun presentation had I took my eyes off of my cue cards. I had a lot to say and remembering it all didn't seem very realistic so I created basic cue cards to read from. This was my first presentation in front of my new class so I felt nervous at first but I was forcing myself to be confident. However the nerves did eventually kick in and I found myself with my face buried in my cue cards avoiding the vigilant stares of my audience.