what is research? lecture

• research isn't just in COP its a fundamental part of PPP and studio practice
• this idea of experiential learning is fundamental to research, you become better at doing things by going out and experiencing things and practicing activities
• research is about knowledge analysis understanding and comprehension, bringing everything you've learned together into a unified whole
• 'process is more important than outcome' when the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where were going, but we will know we want to be there - an incomplete manifesto for growth
• research isn't just about clarifying the world, its about problem solving and problem solving is a part of research
• 'success comes from having brighter ideas closer together' - the secret to success 
• you have to get things wrong is essential to developing a practice, making mistakes and learning from those mistakes - don't be afraid to get it wrong. fail quicker and you'll have more time to improve
• if we knew what it was we were doing, it would bot be called research, would it? - Einstein
• stupid people don't ask questions, intelligent people research
• ideas are the currency of what we do
• we all experience similar things but the way we make connections between things shows our own unique view of the world, research is looking at things that are already there but thinking about it in ways that no one else has thought about it before 
• there is a conscious or subconscious search for inspiration
• intuitive approach - the development of thought process, primarily based on internalised perceptions and knowledge. this thought process may occur spontaneously
• stimulated, intuitive and systematic approach
• what is research? research is something we have to take an undergraduate view of. research is the process of finding facts, its about collection information, source materials. research is finding out by asking the questions how, why, what if?
• types of research:
  primary research - developed and collected for a specific end use, usually generated to help solve a specific problem.
  secondary research - deals with facts, figure and measurements produces data which can be analysed.
  quantitative research - numerical data, provable fact, the gathering and analysing of measurable data, its objective and relies on statistical analysis.
  qualitative data - a way to study people or systems by interacting with and observing the subjects regularly. research that is involved in quality, it can describe events people ect without the use of numerical data.
• what is information? information is the result of processing, manipulating and organising data, its about creating meaning and thinking about strategic ways of taking that data so that it can be communicated effectively. information should be sufficient, competency, relevant, and useful
• phase 1 assimilation, the accumulation and ordering of general information specifically related to the problem in hand
  phase 2 general study
  phase 3 development, the development and refinement of one or more tentative solutions
  phase 4 communication, the communication of one or more solutions to people either inside or outside the design team

developments in the sketchbook - the colour gold

Inspired by the art in three colours documentary I've started exploring this in my sketchbook by including the colour gold in my work. I've looked at themes such as money, wealth, the gallery and religious iconography. I thought it would be visually intriguing to create black and white work just with one bold inclusion of gold really standing out and making a point of being showy and expensive. Almost like the colour is showing of to the viewer - much like how originally gold in art was used as a show of wealth and a way to impress fellow peers. In the pieces pictured below I really like the delicate line work and detail contrasted with the block colour I think it adds a new level of intrigue to the visuals of the work.

some examples of sketchbook pages:

Digital production and distribution

• the digital revolution is far more significant tat the invention of writing or even printing - Douglas Engelbert
• 
• we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us - Marshall McLuhan
• McLuhan believed that to fully grasp the impact of a new technology, one must examine figure (medium) and grounding (context) together, since neither is completely intelligible without the other. we must study media in their historical context in relation to the ones which preceded them
• where we are today will not be the end point, theres an acceleration in the way were developing new technologies which will have a fundamental impact on all of society.
• relationship between the medium and the message - we must consider 4 qualities, what does it improve, what does it retrieve, what happens when its pushed to its limits, what has it made obsolete
• 1990- globalisation of digital production, first affordable apple mac, it enhanced productivity it allowed for ultimate editability and allowed you to make mistakes and delete them. the mac brought back individual creativity and the creation of personal fonts. 
• were creating a digital aesthetic which has grown out of this use of technology and production
• nostalgia v innovation
  
  
• this idea of a digital aesthetic starts to influence the way developers create new products
• the technology we create starts to have an impact on how we imagine the world to be and how we imagine the world to be effects the new technology we create 
• digital culture is about our relationships with technology and how we engage with it
• how does technology start to define us as human? 
• starting to think about the relationships between military and technology, this idea of the hacker cyber crimes
• the analogue aesthetic - a nostalgic experience, away from the digital and back to the analogue
• how  has the digital age shaped communication management? distribution, technology going mobile and how information is being communicated
• access to broadband is a basic human right 

study task 2 - book: No Logo

I wanted to read at least some of the book that my quote is from to get a better understanding of the context and find any other helpful quotes or ideas. In general the book isn't particularly helpful for the direction I want to go with when adressing the quote but it is a very well written and interesting book so ive included both interesting and relevant quotes here

By the mid-nineties, companies like Nike, Polo and Tommy Hilfiger were ready to take branding to the next level: no longer simply branding their own products, but branding the outside culture as well

Artists will always make art by reconfiguring our shared cultural languages and references, but as those shared experiences shift from firsthand to mediated, and the most powerful political forces in our society are as likely to be multinational corporations as politicians, a new set of issues emerges that once again raises serious questions about out-of-date definitions of freedom of expression in a branded culture.

when Philip Morrisowned Altoids mints decided in January 1999 that it wanted to get into the game, it cut out the middleman. Rather than sponsoring an existing show, the company spent $250,000 to buy works by twenty emerging artists and launch its own Curiously Strong Collection, a travelling art exhibition that plays on the Altoids marketing slogan, "Curiously strong mints." Chris Peddy, Altoids brand manager, said, "We decided to take it to the next level."

Chesney considered himself a distant relative of the graffiti kids — though less a cousin than a rich uncle. The way he saw it, as a commercial artist and billboard salesman he was also a creature of the streets, because even if he was painting for corporate clients, he, like the graffiti artists, left his mark on walls

 The campaign was in the cookie-cutter co-optation formula: take a cool artist, associate that mystique with your brand, hope it wears off and makes you cool too. It sparked the usual debates about the mass marketing of rebellion

For their part, many artists now treat companies like the Gap less as deep-pocketed pariahs trying to feed off their cachet than as just another medium they can exploit in order to promote their own brands

Rather than softening its image, Mike's feminist-themed ads and antiracist slogans have only served to enrage women's groups and civil-rights leaders, who insist that a company that got rich off the backs of young women in the Third World has no business using the ideals of feminism and racial equality to sell more shoes. 

 It is not Art for Art's Sake as much as Art for Ad's Sake. In the public's eye, art is yanked from its own separate and theoretically autonomous domain and squarely placed in the commercial.... Every time the commercial intrudes on the cultural, the integrity of the public sphere is weakened because of the obvious encroachment of corporate promotion.- Matthew McAllister 

the creeping corporate capitalism of our cosmic counter-culture"' and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration.

In our final year of high school, my best friend, Lan Ying, and I passed the time with morbid discussions about the meaninglessness of life when everything had already been done. The world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of wellworn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just end up on another one — the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go travelling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let's Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the second-hand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death. Everywhere we imagined ourselves standing turned into a cliché beneath our feet

study task 2 - essay planning triangulation

what do I want to focus on in my first essay?

Cultural products are the all time favourite playthings of the powerful, tossed from wealthy statesman such as Gauis Cilnius Maecenas, who set up the poet Horace in a writing estate in 33 B.C.., and from rulers like Francis 1 and the Medichi family, whose love of the arts bolstered the status of Renaissance painters in the sixteenth century. Through the degree of meddling varies, our culture was built on compromises between notions of public good and the personal political and financial ambitions of the rich.

Are cultural products the playthings of the powerful?

Do the rich control art?

Our culture was built on compromise but does it continue to thrive on it?

Has the control of culture shifted from the powerful to the public? If it has then why?

Should artists focus on making money or making a difference? Where do we find the balance?

how to structure essay

- talk about how the rich used to control art and why, ways of seeing, claude levi straus

- has this shifted? yes - photography, print press, John Martin

- argue against john martain ideas of galleries reference white cube, how do the wealthy control the art market, guardian article land art

- compromise between public good and financial ambitions of the rich. who are the rich now? discuss how brands and marketing have taken over the rich. still one section controlling us still controlled by money - reference no logo

- we still have the capacity to create work for the public good - fuck committees, first things first, site specific art

- can we ever escape the power of money

study task 2 - book: One place after another site specific art

I read this book to explore the concept of land art and community art - art that rebels against any form of upperclass control and as an example of art that is not controlled by the rich and powerfull

'Initially conceived by Jacob in 1991, “Culture in Action” (originally titled “New Urban Monuments”)5 was intended to be a critique of two institutions: the organization of Sculpture Chicago specifically, and more broadly the field of public art.'

' art in the public interest forges direct intersections with social issues. It encourages community coalition-building in pursuit of social justice and attempts to garner greater institutional empowerment for artists to act as social agents. Artists engaged in such art “aspire to reveal the plight and plead the case of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, and to embody what they [the artists] view as humanitarian values'

'9 Rather than an object for individual contemplation, produced by a distant art specialist for an exclusive art-educated audience equipped to understand its complex visual language, new genre public artists seek to engage (nonart) issues in the hearts and minds of the “average man on the street” or “real people” outside the art world. In doing so, they seek to empower the audience by directly involving them in the making of the art work, either as subjects or, better, as producers themselves.'

' By extending the hitherto specialized privilege of art-making and art appreciation to a larger number and broader range of people (not restricted to the privileged minority of the dominant class, gender, race, and sexual orientation), new genre public artists hope to make art more familiar and accessible (because it is now not only for the “public” but by the “public”)'

'Such temporal, issue-specific artworks are a form of artmaking that grows out of the desire of artists to reach audiences in ways that are more direct and unexpected than is possible in a museum or gallery setting.”'

'the term “community” is associated with disenfranchised social groups that have been systematically excluded from the political and cultural processes that affect, if not determine, their lives. It defines coalitions of people seeking to counter such processes of exclusion and repression by collectively demanding equal rights, greater social recognition, economic support, and political power'

study task 2 - book: Inside the White Cube

I decided to get some books out of the library that I thought would be relevant to my quote and read some of them during our COP week starting with 'inside the white cube'

I've read this book to find more information and understanding about the idea that the rich and powerful control art in the sense they control galleries and it gave me some amazing ideas and insights into the gallery space.

'a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth century art; it clarifies itself through a process of historical inevitability usually attached to the art it contains.'

' This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics. So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status. Conversely, things become art'

'the gallery itself becomes, like the picture plane, a transforming force. At this I point, as Minimalism demonstrated, art can be literalized and 1 detransformed; the gallery will make it art anyway.'

'At its most serious, the artist/audience relation can be seen as the testing of the social order by radical propositions and as the successful absorption of these propositions by the support system -galleries, museums, collectors, even magazines and house critics -evolved to barter success for ideological anesthesia. The main medium of this absorption is style, a stabilizing social construct if ever there was one. Style in art, whatever its miraculous, self-defining nature, is the equivalent of etiquette in society. It is a consistent grace that establishes a sense of place and is thus essential to the social order.'

' Each art licensed a premises where it conformed to and sometimes tested the social structure- concert hall, theater gallery.... Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution.'

'For many of us, the gallery space still gives off negative vibrations when we · wander in. Esthetics are turned into a kind of social elitism -the gallery space is exclusive. Isolated in plots of space, what is on display looks a bit like valuable scarce goods, jewellery, or silver: esthetics are turned into commerce - the gallery space is expensive. What it contains is, without initiation, well-nigh incomprehensible-art is difficult. Exclusive audience, rare objects difficult to comprehend -here we have a soda!. financial. and intellectual snobbery wh1ch models our system of limited production, our modes of assigning value, our social habits at large. Never was a space, designed to accommodate the prejudices and enhance the self-image of the upper middle classes, so efficiently codified.'

'Was the white cube nurtured by an internal logic similar to that of its art? Was its obsession with enclosure an organic response, encysting art that would not otherwise survive? Was it an economic construct formed by capitalist models of scarcity and demand?'

'Is the artist who accepts the gallery space conforming with the social order? '

'Museums and galleries are in the paradoxical position of editing the products that extend consciousness, and so contribute, in a liberal way, to the necessary anesthesia of the masses- which goes under the guise of entertainment'


interesting side point: Tate galleries were built on slavery (Tate and Lyle sugar plantations)

Print culture and distribution part 2

• theres been a return to mechanical methods of production in the modern age, its getting taught now whereas in art school in the 90s it was all digital focus
• why do people maintain an interest in these methods of production when there are easier quicker more reliable methods of production available
• in a world where so much happens through computer screens, touching the raw materials, engaging all the senses can be a soothing release.
• people are discovering that doing things more slowly often means doing them better and enjoying them more. It means living life instead of rushing through it.
• our obsession with speed, with cramming more and more into every minute means that we race through life instead of actually living it.
• slow design - about focusing not on the product itself, not on the output but how your practice relates to the rest of the world. its stopped being fast but is about thinking about the consequences of you actions. It proposes a way of life completely different to the culture of capitalism and you could read contemporary print culture in these terms.
• it adds human and social value to creative practice
• Nicolas Bourriaud 1998 - theres a tendency in contemporary art practice to move away from creating things symbolising a particular word view to artwork that is about forming human relationships which he calls relational art. its about creating a participatory world, based on equality, networking, sharing, participation.
• how many places are there where you can hang out with your friends without having to buy something? even relationships are being comodified.
• Barbara Kruger - I shop therefore I am
• the Glastonbury free press - political newspaper, authored and designed by the people for the people. people come up talk to nick and they include it in the newspaper and teach people how to type set and
• how to print. It's all free. its a relational piece its about cooperation. relational design.
• post print culture? new technologies could create the possibilities for mass sharing of knowledge
• a return to handmade production could be argued to be a re introduction of the idea of 'aura' doing small print runs adds an auratic value and allows you to sell things for much more money.
• what is wrong with creating a world where anyone can be an artist an illustrator a designer, if were angry at the idea of that then are we all still elitist?
• perhaps were in an era now where we've moved beyond print culture again and new understanding and innovation is to be found in  digital print.
• mongrel - hack of the Tate website
  
  
• digital culture kills aura my taking art out of the galleries and delivering it to our homes
• the Tate family were one of the biggest slave owners, their wealth and status is written in blood and oppression
• 
  

Print culture and distribution lecture

print culture and distribution part 1

'late age of print' term comes from theorist Marshall McLuhan beginning around 1540 with the Gutenberg press, taking the ownership of knowledge from the few and to the many. Kick starts the enlightenment, the dawn of a new civilisation.

somerset house - the sight of the first art school in the country opened in 1780, aristocratic institution, the arts at this point are really for the ruling class. art schools at this time taught the beavx arts. only men were allowed to go to these art schools and only men allowed to be life models. that was the function of art in pre modern society when people had fixed class identities

in the industrial revolution (1780-1832) production becomes mechanised, people start taking shift labour, the cities and new technologies boom. the whole nature of our society is changed, for the first time a very clear and noticeable distinction between the classes - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the workers and the owners of the means of production. for the first time in British history you get a kind of sense of your place in the world and a sense of what your class is about. because of this segregation the working classes start to commune together and create new forms of popular entertainment like the music hall and forms of art, creating their own organic culture.  it gets sneered at by the rich as low art. it doesn't just revolve around music and imagery but around an identity struggle, things like chartism starting to evolve and the working class demanding for the vote

John Martin (1820) Belshazzar's feast - rather than work for a king or a queen, John Martin put this painting on sale in a commercial exhibition and said people could pay a small amount to come and see it, this was unheard of at the time. Because of the new technologies of production and engraving he sells engravings of it and sells hundreds.

for the first time you can just be your own entrepreneurial artist, you can make money by reprinting and distributing art. People make careers as etchers and reprductionists. you get the birth of  a culture where art isn't just kept in a gallery but its everywhere, recycled by print culture.

Matthew Arnold - culture and anarchy, culture is a study of perfection, culture is about ministering the diseased spirit of our time. anarchy is a synonym for the working class rising up, thinking for themselves, demanding to vote.

you get a snobbishness emerging saying that working class culture isn't acceptable, political prejudices against the working class start to arise, they claim they're batting for the side of culture against commercialisation but really they're just trying to preserve the class interests of the working class

what we really need is an elite, an intellectual minority who can set the standard of culture - the minority cant understand

'popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation' 'this form of compensation...is the very reverse of recreation, in that it tends, not to strengthen and refresh the addict for living, but to increase his unfitness by habituation him to weak evasions, to the refusal to face reality at all' (Leavis and Thompson, 1977:100)

schools of designs start to emerge, government school of design also opened at Somerset house, after the first one opened in London they spread everywhere. They are the fathers/mothers of art schools today. Theres only three left today one of them is us (LCA) we were never actual a school of rt we started as a school of design.

two different cultures, a culture of art and a culture of design

Walter Benjamin - the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction 1936,

fine art has aura = creativity, genius, eternal value, tradition, authority, authenticity, autonomy, distance, mystery.

what happened when people can knock of the Mona Lisa and recycle and re contextualise an image? It threatens that auratic status. Art has a cult value people adapt their behaviour as if they're worshipping something it mirrors the way the upper class try to make the working class admire and bow down to them.

the battle is still being fought today between the art of the people and the art of the 'eleite'

in neoclassical architecture you often have to go up steps to access a place, its deliberate its to make you feel inferior, you are on a level below what you are about to see, you have to ascend. Art galleries constantly employ this tactic

Philip James de Loutherbourg - came up with the eidophusikon exhibition in Leicester square and charged people exhibition fees. It was a dark room and you look through a glass window, behind this are moving images being moved with string with actors behind the screen moving about in the set. Its like the first moving image piece of work, people loose their minds about this its a sensation

the panorama - set up in regents park, people started showing these panoramas created by taking photos of the city scape and putting it in the roof of this rounded building

new ways of making art are totally changing art and what art is and destabilising it. you get the popular illustrated press, newspapers being able to use images in their publications and publication developed that are led by the images not the text. Often magnificent etches, pieces of at that come to you in our living room, you don't even need to go to galleries anymore.

with the invention of photography there was no need for portrait paintings anymore, its more realistic and massively cheaper, now anyone can have a portrait not just rich people.

the name for this period is print capitalism, you get a glut f images made for profit, these markets overtake traditional fine art markets, they make a lot more money. the myth that artists are somehow outside of capitalism certaintly comes from here, from this period.

print capitalism replaces culture with popular culture, for good or for bad. Whats good about it is its not answering to any elite force. the elitists HATE it because its 'mindless' and its 'cheap'

William Morris is regarded universally now as middle class, but he emerged from this moment of print capitalism, his position is from a position of romantic anti capitalism. what he was trying to do is produce really complex and interesting craft design and mechanical design the equivalent of fine art practice and fight against the reduction of a craft worker to just a were labourer. he was actual a radical revolutionary, it wasn't just about raising the status f the crafts and the popular art, he wanted a level culture he wanted to overthrow capitalism and welcome in socialism. his work focuses on nature so much because they strive for an ideal of human and the world and nature that's beyond the grip of capitalism. He opened an idependent craft studio, a collective studio that wasn't just run by him but all the labour was shared out equally, a combined effort not an owner and a worker. sadly they could never compete with these massive factories spitting out shoddy goods and paying shoddy wages. William Morris wanted an alternative to mass production within print culture.

the making of the English working class - E P Thompson

typography lecture - part 2

Type - production and distribution

• Bauhaus started to feed through all areas of practice, textiles, jewellery. New ideas emerged about the connections between form and function
• the idea emerged that form follows function as opposed to the decorative. Key principle of modern design
• reductionist view, less is more. On the left here is a Bauhaus fashion piece and bowie on the right shows the influence they had on mass culture
• focused on the clarity with which something can communicate an idea - this is counterpoint to any argument  we have as designers
• the first time graphic design/illustration was applied as a promotional tool
• first time the industrial age had a visual language
• commerce started to drive design, birth of modern graphic design
• 1933 - Hitler shut down Bauhaus because they had too many ideas
• 1957 - Max Miedinger, created helvetica. The epitome of the modernist idea of type. designed for mass production, mass communication, focusing on the function of type. So simple it can be interpreted by the viewer it doesn't have to offer its own narrow interpretation. The most dynamic type face ever created,
• Arial was released exactly 25 years later after Helvetica by Microsoft. 25 years is the amount of time before a type face goes into the public domain, you still cant copy it but Microsoft did the bare minimum to change it into Arial so they wouldn't have to pay for helvetica.
• post modernism = anything goes, anything can be a type face, language is fluid and in a state of flux.
• 1977 - Jamie Reid created the visual culture that surrounded punk, anti graphics, the reinvention of type, a completely destructive approach to modernism
• however punk didn't just appear it was evolutionary it ha its influences in, John Heartfeild (30s) Hannah Hoch (20s)
• the language of protest started to arrive, social critique within a fine art context
• 1992 - David Carson, Ray Gun often described as post modernistic but he was actually redefining a modernist view of typography, still about communication, about appealing to an audience
• 1990 - Steve Jobs, the first apple mac made available for under $1000, creatives could now own their own computers. also the first computer to have a mouse. First small computer that designers could have in their own personal studios, it freed up the individual to create type faces. First time we had digital type design and development, the computer became a design tool.
• 1994 - Vincent Connare, created comic sans. Nothing more needs to be said..
• 1990 - Tim Berners Lee created the world wide wed and gave it to the world for free!
• 1995 - Bill Gates introduced the first globally accepted browser, Internet explorer. He restricted the web into a series of rules and templates using only 6 fonts which included arial and comic sans.
• today even SMS text messaging is dropping off because we use twitter, instagram, facebook. We have started to replace letters words and ideas with emojis. It is a global language
• we have almost gone full circle back to the first hieroglyphics 
• so what is our role today as the designers of the future? its not just about making a type face or designing a page. The role of visual culture is not about can or cant but should?