OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - What is Research? Lecture

The Age of Enlightenment - Process of rationality and reason

• Enlightenment - Period in 18th century when scientific / philosophical thinking made leaps and bounds
• Secularisation
• Reason rather than Metaphysic 
• Belief in a unified scientific method (Scientism)
• Positivism

CP Snow, 1959 - The Two Cultures and the Scientific revolution

• The arts and the sciences were two different agendas which could never fuse together

Positivism 

• Positive outcome - definite outcome, it does something
• Facts
• Separationof fact from value (value freedom)
• Objectivity
• Measurement rather than argument
• The facts speak for themselves
• Causation
• Separation and control of variables
• Rigorous methods

Approaches to Research

• Empiricism - Scientific research, setting up and experiment and observing
• Quantitive Research - Numbers, charts
• Qualitative Research - opposite side to quantitive research, interviews etc.
• Subjectivism 

Action Research

• Academic way of carrying out research- actively taking part
• Cycle - Researcher enters, Real world takes part in, Action in the situation enables, Reflection on the involvement leads to findings/beginnings of the cycle. 
• Ongoing process, constant research, reflection and refinement

Cycle of Synthesis

• Theory, Action, Reflection - Praxis
• Unification of doing

Methodology

• Method - a way of proceeding about something in a systematic or logical manner
• Methodology - The science of method, employed in a particular activity

Epistemology

• Philosophy into knowledge

The Hermeneutic Circle

• First Grasp, Inspection of Detail, Global Inspection, Deeper Understanding
• Constant refinement
• Developed by Heidegger
• Interpretation is a process designed to clarify an experience and assign meaning to it
• This is aided by the hermeneutic circle which involves looking at different perspectives on events 

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Sub Culture and Style Lecture

Definition of Sub Culture:

• In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture (whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture which they belong.
• An introduction to writings on subculture
• Skateboarding/parkour and free running/graffiti as a performance of the city
• The Riot Grrrl Movement
• The portrayal of youth culture in film and photography

Dogtown and Z boys (2001)

• Documentary film mixes original footage and recent interviews
• History of skateboarding evolves

Skater Peggy Oki

• Not much difference between the clothing worn by the girls and boys 
• Jeans and long sleeve t-shirts for practical reasons

Ian Borden 'Performing the City'

• urban street skating is more 'political' than 1970's skateboarding's use of found terrains: Street skating generates new uses that at once work within.

South Bank Closure Threat To Skaters

• Festival wing under the Queen Elizabeth hall - Redevelopment, turn into shopping area.
• "it is utterly contrived" - Henry Edwards-Wood, spokesman for the Long Live South Bank Campaign

Lords of Dogtown (2005)

• "Skateboarders do not so much temporarily escape from the routinized world of school family and social conventions as replace it with a while new way'" - Borden, 2001

Parkour / Freerunning

• One is a more creative use of the city
• Yamakasi (2001)
• Jump London (2005)

Nancy McDonald, The Graffiti Subculture

• Here (on the street) real life and the issues which may divide and influence it, are put on pause. On this liminal terrain you are not black, white, rich or poor. Unless you are female, you are what you write.

Miss Van

• McDonald suggests that women come to the subculture laden with the baggage of gender in that her physically and her sexuality 
• Doesn't play down her female identity and does the opposite

Swoon (US)

• "In the meantime there was a lot of attention coming my way for being female, and it just made me feel alienated and objectified, not to mention patronised"

Anfela Mc Robbie and Jenny Garber

• Girl subcultures may have become more invisible because of the very term sub culture has acquired such strong masculine overtones.

Motorbike Girl

• Brigitte Bardot 1960s - suggests sexual deviance, which is a fantasy and not a reflection of the girls in the subculture at that time.

Hells Angels

• In rockers and motorbike culture girls usually rode pillion, girls where wither the girlfriend or 'mama' figure.

Mod Girl

• Springs from working class teenage consumerism in the 1960s in the UK

Quadrophenia (1979)

Hippy Girl

• Subculture arises through universities of the late 60s and early 70s
• Middle class girl therefore has the space to explore subculture for longer before family etc.
• Bad Hippy - Janis Joplin and Good Hippy - Peace and 'flower power'

Riot Grrl

• Mid 1990s onwards
• Underground punk movement based in Washington DC, Olympia, Oregon etc.
• Influenced by late 70s and early 80s 
• Political element to the movement

What makes a true subculture?

• Zines revived from 1970s DIY punk aesthetic
• In turn was influenced by posters and graphic design from Dadaism 
• Raoul Hausmann - Dada
• Media attention turns to Grunge movement, Courtney Love and Hole, Style without the subculture
• Distorts even further as the 90s continue into the more media friendly Spice Girl 

Spice Girls

• Band styling presents a set of visual types that are easily consumable by the target audience.
• No empowerment for young Women

Dick Hebdige Subculture: The Meaning of Style

• Subculture represents noise

The Commodity Form

• Subculture signs like dress styles and music are turned into mass produced objects
• E.g. Clothing which is ripped as a anarchic anti-fashion statement becomes mass produced

Zandra Rhodes 9ct White Gold Diamond Safety Pin Brooch

• Although punk seems to challenge eventually and surprisingly quickly it goes mainstream/high end and is turned into "To shock chic".

21st Century Demonisation

• "style in particular provokes a double response. It is alternately celebrated and ridiculed or reviled

Bricolage: Edwardian Style 

• Savile Row
• Teddy Boy

Roger Mayne (1956)

• escape from the claustrophobia of the family, into the strew

Chris Steele-Perkins, The Teds (1979)

Racists give Nazi Salute in London, 1980 - Skin head culture

Gavin Watson, Skins, 1980s

This Is England (2006) Shane Meadows

• The new kid on the estate transforms into a British Skin
• His dad has been killed in the Falklands War and his new friends become his family
• Explores the differences between the skinhead style and the politics of the National Front skins as they infiltrate the working class estate of the 1980s
• The subordination of Milky as 'other' by Combo

Post Subcultures?

• In global society with a rapid proliferation of images, fashions and lifestyles, it is - unsurprisingly - becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint what 'subculture' actually means.

OUGD501: Context Of Practice 2 - Censorship and 'Truth' Lecture

Overview

• Notions of censorship and truth
• The indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth
• Photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth
• Censorship in advertisements
• Censorship in art and photography

The notion of rendering truth

• Ansel Adams, Moonrise Hernandes New Mexico, c. 1941-2 
• Ansel Adams, Moon over Half Dome, 1960
• Ansel Adams, Aspens - Dark room manipulation

Communist Russia, Pravda a Russian Newspaper 

•  One sided truth
• One side that the government wants you to see
• Removal of photographs in history

Rise of digital photography 

• More common for photographs to be manipulated

• Kate Winslet on the cover of GQ Magazine, with legs elongated in photoshop - Is the representation off truth a important factor? Can You manipulate to sell?

• Can combine two photographs to change the message it is communicating

Robert Capa, Death of a Loyalist Soldier, 1936

• Robert Capa is a pseudonym 
• Built up a mystique of the photographer
• Is it set up?

Jean Baudrillard - Successive Phases of a image

1. It it a reflection of a basic reality
2. It masks and perverts a basic reality
3. It makes the absence of a basic reality
4. It bears no relation to any reality whatsoever

Peter Turnley, The Unseen Gulf War, 2002

• There was a censorship in the first gulf war
• Photographers in the first gulf war were controlled by the US forces and had restrictions on what they could photograph and represent
• Get away from 'simulated war' which is like a media event

Ken Jarecke, Iraqi Soldier, 1991

• One of the first truly shocking image captured in colour and put on the front on news papers
• Many news papers were criticised 
• Image is almost 'too true'

Do you want an accurate representation of truth with all the gruesome details?

An-My Le, Small Wars

• Hiding the reality of war?
• Creating art through images of carnage and destruction

Censorship

• To ban or cut portions of (a film, letter or publication) 

Morals

• Principles of behaviour

Ethics

• A code of behaviour

Cadbury Flake adverts

• Sexual ambiguity - says more about the individual and their mindset?

Oliviero Toscani, United Colours of Benetton adverts, 1992

• Shocking images relating to racism and religion
• Does getting a advert banned create as much publicity and a advert which is not?

Opium advertisemnt, Stephen Meisel, 2000

• Most complained about adverts in the past five years (2001)
• Sexualised image
• Banned as a landscape image, acceptable as a portrait image

The Miller Test, 1973

• Asks three questions to determine if a piece of work is seen as obscene 
• Whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards'

Obscenity Law

• To protect art whilst prohibiting trash'
• The dividing line between speech and non-speech
• The dividing line between prison and freedom

Sally Mann

• Candy Cigarette, 1989
• Immediate Family, 1984-92
• Is it damaging to the children?

Tierney Gearon, untitled 2001

• Gallery was shut down whilst police investigated the photos of the children
• News Of The World - Upper crust art lovers are paying £5 a head to ogle degrading snaps of children plastered across the walls of Britain's art galleries

Nan Goldin, Klara and Edda Belly-Dancing, 1998

Richard Prince, Spiritual America, 1983 (after Garry Gross)

Richard Prince, Spiritual America IV, 2005

Final Thoughts

• Just how much should you believe the 'truth' represented in the media?
• And should we be protected from it?
• Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a capitalist consumer society?

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Globalisation, Sustainability and The Media Lecture

Definitions of Globalisation

Socialist
The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.

Capitalist
The elimination of the state-enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result.

Globalisation

• Consciousness, the way of thinking about the world and each other
• Spread of the western way of life

Cultural globalisation

• Western cultural values

"McDonaldization" - 

• Big companies are all over the world
• taking over the markets all over the world
• particular american idea of organising the world
• Fast food vs. Slow Food - Not bonding over food
• "McJob" - Meaningless work

Marshall McLuhan

• 'Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing space and time as far as our plant is concerned' (1964: P.3)
• Rapidity of communication echoes the senses

Global Village Thesis

• 'As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.'

The Internet

• We live mythically and integrally... in the electric age, when our central system is technologically extended to involve the whole of mankind.

• Centripetal forces - Bringing the world together in uniform global society
• Centrifugal forces - Tearing the world apart in tribal wars
• Slow creeping of dominance of one culture over the world

Three problems of Globalisation

• Sovereignty - Challenges to the idea of the nation-state
• Accountability - Transnational forces and organisations: Who controls them?
• Identity - Who are we? Nation, group, community

• Businesses can act out of the control of the government.
• Multi-national business are more powerful than the government

• 'Does globalisation make people around the world more alike or more different? A group of commentators we might call "pessimistic hyperglobalizers" argue in favour of the former.

Cultural Imperialism 

• if the global village' is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as a assimilation of one

Rigging the 'Free Market'

• Media conglomerates operate as oligopolies (giant clusters of businesses in control of one central business/individual) - All of which are American
• Effectively five or six oligopolies are controlling the worlds media
• Time Warner  - One company that controls a vast majority of the world media. An american take on the world, by proxy.

News corporations divide world ino 'territories' of descending 'market importance'

1. North America
2. Western Europe. Japan and Australia
3. Developing economies and regional producers (India, China, Brazil)
4. The rest of the world

US media power can be thought of as a new form of imperialism

• Local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shaped, mirroring old school colonialism
• Schiller - Dominance of the US driven commerical media forces US model of broadcasting onto the rest of the world but also inculcates US style consumerism in societies that can ill afford it. Eg. Big Brother, packaged all over the world, presented as something uniques

Chomsky & Herman (1998) 'Manufacturing Consent' 

• Argues that the media is a form of propaganda

• This is how you should act, this is the 'good' way of life 

Propaganda - 5 basic Filters

Ownership  

• Most of our newspapers are owned by one man, who has a political agenda. 
• Most of the newspapers run stories which are presented as factual but are in fact written in the interests of New Corp. 
• Rupert Murdoch boasts that The Sun influenced the UK general elections. 
• Made deals with Labour in order to be able to but more companies etc.

Sourcing 

• Things that are reported are only what is 'allowed' to be reported
• Stories in the interests of politics

Funding

• Advertiser will withdraw their advertisements
• Have to keep the advertisers happy

Flak

• US-based Global Climate Coalition
• Comprising fossil fuel and automobile companies such as Exxon, Texaco and Ford. The GCC was started up by Beurson-Maarsteller, one of the world's largest public relation companies, to rubbish the credibility of climate scientists and 'scare-stories' about global warming
• Flak is characterised by concerned and international efforts to manage public information
• Propaganda disguised as news

Al Gore, (2006) 'An Inconvenient Truth' Dir. Davis Guggenheim

• The media is a powerful way to influence the consciousness 
• Retreat of glaciers
• Since 1880 temp on the rise
• Solutions to the worlds problems? Buy more stuff, make money for the capitalist businesses

'Flat Earthers' - Deny global warning

• Jim Inhofe
• Nigel Lawson

Sustainability

• 'sustainable development is the development that meets the need of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' - Brundtland Commisssion. (1987) 'Our Common Future)
• Needs (particularly of the poor)
• Limitations of technology

Erin Balser, 'Capital Accumulation, Sustainability and Hamilton, Ontario: How Technology and Capitalism can Misappropriate the Idea of Sustainability

• BIOX - Largest production plant, 2004
• Situated in the poorest area of Ontario, Hamilton
• Negative social and environmental outcomes
• Causes more problems than it solves

Greenwashing

• Market products to make it seem more ethical
• Companies make 'green' products. Consumers will buy things if they are green
• That you can buy something eco is a myth

'Most things are not designed for the needs of the people but for the needs of the manufacturers to sell to people' Papanek, 1983, p46

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Ethics: What is Good? Lecture

First Things First Manifesto - By designer Ken Garland, published in 1964

• Less of a manifesto in a political sense
• Signed by designers
• Produced in a 'boom' time
• Frustrated that creative, talented designers were wasted their talent producing marketing for pointless products
• Sigh of the waste and exploitation of creative talent in a capitalist society
• Proposing a ethic turn 
• Designers should use their talent in a more productive way

First Things First Manifesto 2000

• Re-published by Ad Busters, a explicit anti-capitalist magazine
• Re publish and re-draft the first things first manifesto
• More critical and more venomous, advertising gets a lot of stick

• Sub-verts

• Making people buy things they don't need with money they don't have
• Complicit in a system of global exploitation

• If you work to market any sort of consumer product, you are unethical 
• Should be using your talents to start a revolution 

• Culture Jamming

• To be a ethical designer, must be fundamentally anti-capitalist

• Famous, rich Graphic designers such as Milton Glaser signed the First Things First Manifesto 2000, easy to have ethics when you don't have to worry about money etc.

• System which allows this to happen is in fact unethical

• To be an ethical designer, aim to do more with your life and with you talent

Meme

• Something that sticks in your head
• Circulates around the world virally

• Meme Warfare - What happens if creative advertisers use their power to create a revolution? 

Victor Papanek

• Design For The Real World
• Believed most design is wasteful
• Most design made the world worse
• Beer Can Automobile Can Bumper - cost $5, drove it into the Senate Building, people are ignoring design solutions for the sake of profit.
• Designers make things look prettier 
• We are just touching the surface, there are more important things

How do we determine what is good?

Ethical Theories

• Subjective Relativsim - There are no universal moral norms of right and wrong, all persons decide right and wrong for themselves 
• Cultural Relativism - The ethical theory that what's right or wrong depends on place and/or time
• Divine Command Theory - Good actions are aligned with the will of God, bad actions are contrary to the will of God
• The holy book helps make the decisions

Kantianism

• Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) a German philosopher
• People's wills should be based on moral rules
• Therefore it's important that our actions are based on appropriate moral rules.

To determine when a moral rules is appropriate Kant proposed two Categorical Imperatives:

1. Act only from moral rules that you can at the same times universalise - If you act on a moral rule that would cause problems if everyone followed it then your actions are not moral
2. Act so that you always treat both yourself and other people as ends in themselves, and never only as a means to an end - If you use people for your own benefit that is not moral

Utilitarism (John Stuart Mill)

Principle of Utility (also known as the Great Happiness Principle) 

•  An action is right to the extent that it increases the total happiness of the affected parties
• An action is wrong to the extent that it decreases the total happiness of the affected parties 
• Happiness may have many definitions such as: advantage, benefit, good or pleasure

Social Contract Theory

• Thomas Hobbes (1603-1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
• An agreement between individuals held together by common interest
• Avoids society degenerating into the 'state of nature' or the 'war of all against all' (Hobbes)
• We trade some of our liberty for a stable society

Criteria for a workable ethical theory?

• Moral decisions and rules:
• Based on logical reasoning
• Come from facts and commonly held or shared values
• Culturally neutral
• Treat everyone equally

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - First Things First Seminar

Our fifth seminar of the Context of Practice 2 module differed from the seminars we have had previously in the sense that we past using the lecture as the subject of the seminar.

In order to prepare us for the essay element of the module, our seminar this week focussed on analysis of texts on the same subject but from a variety of sources. This would help us to understand how to apply triangulation in order to produce a high class piece of academic writing.

The text we were given to analyse the themes discussed in Ken Garland's 'First Things First' Manifesto from 1964. As a class we were split into four groups and each assigned a text to analyse.

Our group was given the 'First Things First' Manifesto from 2000 and were asked to pay particular attention to the differences between 'First Things First 1964' manifesto and the 'First Things First 2000' manifesto.

• "We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators" which is from the 2000 manifesto is appealing to a broader target audience than "We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students" from the 1964 manifesto.
• "Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do"
• "Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. - In the 2000 manifesto their is a sort of shift to the commercial, the message is more urgent.
• Aim of the first manifesto was to create design with more of a purpose however, in the second manifesto, 36 years later they still haven't achieved this.

Task: 

• Produce a critical, triangulated analysis of the 'First Things First' manifesto based on two works of design - Your take on the ethics of that design.
• Triangulation - When making a point, refer to three sources to create a conclusion

Themes For Essay:

• Globalisation and international perspectives 
• Social changes and design 
• Sustainability - Eco Issues
• Consumerism - Consumer system
• Form / Function - Style over substance 

• Propose a idea for a synthesised project, an subject of investigation - could be from a lecture or from one of the seminars
• You will need a question which can be investigated and something which can be made (practical element).

Draft Deadline: 10th February 2014

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Cities and Film Lecture

• The city in Modernism
• The beginnings of an urban sociology
• The city as public and private space
• The city in Postmodernism
• The relation of the individual to the crowd in the city

George Simmel (1858-1918)

• German sociologist
• Writes Metropolis and Mental Life

Dresden Exhibition 1903

• asked to lecture on the role of intellectual life in the cit but instead reverses the idea and writes about the effect of the city on the individual
• (Herbert Bayer Lonely Metropolitan 1932)

Urban Sociology

• The resistance of the individual to being levelled swelled up in the social-technological mechanism

ArchitectLouis Sullivan (1856-1924)

• Creator of the modern skyscraper
• An influential architect and critic of the Chicago School
• Mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright
• Guaranty Building was built in  1892 - Influence from the arts and crafts movement, form follows function applies 

Carson Pririe Scott store in Chicago (1904)

• Skyscrapers represent the upwardly mobile city of business opportunity
• Fire cleared buildings in Chicago

Manhatta (1921) - Documentary Film by Paul Strand and Charles Scheeler

• Celebration of the city skyline

Charles Scheeler

Fordism: Mechanised labout relations

• Coined by Antonio Gramsci in his essay "American and Fordism" of 1934
• "The eponymous manufacturing systme designed to spew out standardized lost cost good and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them" (De Grazia: 2005:4) - Irony

Modern Times (1936), Charlie Chaplin - Critique of the production line

• "In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him"

Stock market crash of 1929

• factories close and unemployment goes up dramatically 
• Leads to "The Great Depression"

The man with a movie camera

Flaneur

• The term  flaneur comes from the French masculine noun flaneur which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer".

Charles Baudelaire

• 19th century French poet Baudelaire proposes a version of the flaneur - that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it"

Walter Benjamin

• Adopts the concept of the urban observer as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle as seen in his writings
• (Arcades Project, 1927-40), Benjamin's final incomplete book about Parisian life in the 19th century
• Berlin Chronicles

Photograph as flaneur

• The photgrapher is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes - Susan Sontag

Daido Moriyama (1970s) Shinjuku district of Tokyo

• Drunken flaneury, stumbling from one location to another

Flaneuse

• The invisible Flaneuse. Woman and the Literaure of modernity
• Janet Wolff
• Theory, culture & society November 1985 vol. 2 no. 3 37-46

Susan Buck-Morss

• The dialectics of seeing: Walter Benjamin and the arcades project

Arbus/Hopper

• Woman at a counter smoking, N.Y.C (1962)
• Automat (1927)

Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne (1980)

Venice

• City as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost but at the same time will always end up back where you begin
• Don't look now (1973) Nicholas Roeg

The Detective (1980)

• Wants to provide photographic evidence of her existence
• His photos and notes on her are displayer next to her photos and notes about him
• Set in Paris

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980)

Here is New York book/exhibition

Weegee (Arthur Felig)

• Press photograph (1930-40s)
• Reporting on emergencies in the city

The Naked City

• Book of Weegee's images - 1945
• Naked City Film - 1948

L.A Noire 2011

• First video game to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival

Cities of the future/past - Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1929)

Ridley Scott, Bladerunner - Made in 1982, set in 2019

Lorca di Corcia, Heads (2001) - Form surveillance

Public/Private

Walker Evans - Many are called (1938)

Postmoden City / Bonaventure Hotel, Ed Soja 

Postmodern City in photography: Joel Meyerowitz, Brpadway and West 46th Street NY (1976)

• Eye is overwhelmed
• A lot of detail/information
• Polar opposite of Weegee's work

9/11 citizen journalism: The end of the flaneur?

• Adam Bezer (2001)
• Recording my ordinary people of extraordinary events

Surveillance City

• Everything is recoded by CCTV

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - The Gaze and The Media Seminar

Our fourth seminar of the Context of Practice 2 module, focused upon the topics and themes which we discussed in the  lecture.

We began the seminar by discussing the main topics within the lecture.

• Voyeurism (Freud)
• Sexual desire
• Visual culture (Art and Media)
• Looking is not neutral
• "Men act, women appear" (Berger 1972) - Men have a purpose and power, women are more like objects than people, there to be looked at
• In our society, visual representation is skewed 

Vanity

• It's alright to look at the woman because she is looking at herself.
• Impossible view of the woman

• Men were in charge of wealth
• Art was produced by men, for men - as all art was

• Male fantasy of a woman, make the man feel more secure about his own sexuality
• Woman never argues back or confronts you
• Never meets your gaze but has a sideways glance, to invite you to keep looking
• Having it both ways - Sexualising a woman, but laughing at her for being vain

Birth of Venus, 1863

• Most popular picture in the 'Salon'
• Figure is passive, is looking away
• Everything is on display 
• Flirtatious 
• Fantasy
• Myth of sexual fantasies

Manet, Olympia 1863

• Cause Scandal 
• Figure is more confrontation than the figure in Birth of Venus
• Figure is covering herself up
• Prostitute
• Image represents the sordid reality
• Reality of sexual fantasies 
• To challenge the world view
• Black cat - shows independence

• Repression
• Pigeon holing women into certain roles, how to act - it is the womans job to look good for the man

• Tradition of women being sexually available , encouraging the man to look at her - 21st Century visual culture

• Surrounded by the images of the ideal female beauty

• To be naked is to be oneself, to be nude is to appear naked and yet not to be seen as yourself, to be a nude is to be a object.

• To confirm our own sense of self we tend to look at people as objects.

Task:

Choose and analyse any one image which represents the system of gender relations, power and domination discussed in the lecture and seminar, use five quotes from 'The Look' in support of your analysis.

One advertisement which demonstrates the system of gender relations within the media is the 2013 campaign for the video game, Grand Theft Auto V which features a female rumored to be American actress and model Kate Upton posing on a beach wearing only a bikini.

One of the themes discussed in Rosalind Coward’s ‘The Look’ is the theory proposed by Freud that females are the more narcissistic sex “Freud casually added to his account of the development of all humans that women were, however, ‘more narcissistic’”. In fine art paintings, such as Hans Memling’s ‘Vanity’ a mirror would be used as a symbol of this vanity. This trait is almost mimicked within the advertisement for GTA V in which the model is holding a mobile phone, with her body language and pose suggesting she is taking a photograph of herself.

Another trait used with many paintings is this idea of the female ‘gaze’ with the suggestion that if the female is looking away she is not challenging the ‘gaze’ and is therefore inviting the audience to look at her. “Those women on the billboards, though; they look back. Those fantasy women stare off the walls with a look of urgent availability”. Although the figure in the advertisement is not looking away completely, she has this sideways glance, almost as if to see if we are still looking at her, and inviting us to do so.

Due to the widespread availability of these images, which feature some sort of ‘fantasy figure’ seemingly inviting men to look at them and not challenging their gaze there is a preference towards the fantasy over the reality. “Thus the profusion of images of women which characterizes contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women, a form of voyeurism. Voyeurism is a way of taking sexual pleasure by looking at rather than being close to a particular object of desire, like a peeping Tom. And peeping Toms can always stay in control”. This idea of “sex-at-a-distance” as discussed by Coward, comes from this need, by men, to be in control. By distancing themselves from the woman and instead admiring her from a distance she can be thought of as an object, not a person.

In order to sell products, the industry takes advantage of this preference for the fantasy over the reality in to fuel consumer culture. “Advertising in this society builds precisely on the creation of an anxiety”.  Video games, such as Grand Theft Auto, are particular example of this, as the premise of the game if to live this fantasy lifestyle where you can get any woman you want rather than engaging in real life.

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - The Gaze and The Media

• Ways of Seeing - John Berger, 1972 - Women see themselves in the way they see images around them.

• Hans Memling - 'Vanity' (1485) - Mirror, blames the woman, because she is looking at herself it is okay for us to look at her
• Also in 1485 - Statue, hammering of the witches, time of harsh judgement on women

• Mirror - Device appears in contemporary advertising, can't see the gaze, she is preoccupied looking at herself, we are spying on her

• Alexandre Cabanel 'Birth of Venus' 1863 - About to go to sleep, we are invited by the artist to gaze upon the figure, no challenge from the woman

• Sophie Dahl for Opium - Recling pose, too sexual? When printed the image was changed to portrait to give more emphasis on the face

• Titan's Venus of Urbino, 1538 - Spying?

• Manet - Olympia, 1863, The woman's gaze, Figure looks us directly in the eye challenging our gaze

• Ingres 'Le Grand Odalisque' (1814) - Met Mueseum

• Manet, Bar at the Folies Bergeres, 1882 - Using the mirror, spewed vision, painter is conversing with the figure

• Jeff Wall 'Picture for Women' 1979 - Mirrored wall behind her which is divided into three. Camera is in the centre third 

• Coward, R - "The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the streets" - Model is wearing sunglasses, she is prevented from returning our gaze

• Eva Herzigove, 1994 'Hello Boys' - No return of the gaze

• The profusion of an images which characterises contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women... a form of voyeurism

•  Peeping Tom, 1960 - Photographer who spies on women

• Eyes are closed - We are not able to look at his body

• Dolce and Gabbana ad (2007) - Males return our gaze, body as a machine

• Marilyn: William Travillas dress from 'The Seven Year Itch' (1955) - Females in the film are never the drivers of the film, passive

• Cinema - Dark room in which we are invited to fantasise

• Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (1620) - Females in an active role

• Wants to reposition the role of women in art history

• Pollock, G (1981) - Women 'marginalised' within the masculine discourse of art history

• Cindy Sherman "Untitled Film Still #6" - challenges the gaze, holding a mirror but it is face down on the bed, denied, refusal for the viewer, looks staged

• Barbera Kruger, 'Your gaze hits the side of my face' (1981) - reference to violence, challenges

• Sarah Lucas ' Eating a Banana' (1990) - Humorous work with a serious message, returning the gaze, what are you looking at?
• Sarah Lucas - 'Self portrait with fried eggs'

• Tracey Emin - 'Money Photo' (2001)

Importance of challenging the gaze

• Caroline Lucas MP in June 2013 'no more page three'
• Still have page three in 2013

• Craido - Perez argued that as the equality act 2010 commits public institutions to end discrimination, she received up to 50 threats a day including rape and murder, also started the campaign to represent women on British currency

• Social networking is used to perpetuate the male gaze / the gaze of the media - The body is broken into fragments, could be female, plays on teenagers body issues

• Susan Sontag (1979) 'On Photography'  - To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed, not just passive observing

Reality Television

• Appears to offer us the position as the all seeing eye - Power of the gaze
• Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption of a type of reality 
• Editing means that there is no reality

• The Truman Show (1998), Sir Peter Weur - Born into a reality tv programme 

•  Big Brother 2011 - Seems to offer equality, male and female, infact makes voyeurism an everyday activity, we are the 'peeping tom'

• Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking' - Victor Burgin (1982)

OUGD501: Context of Practice 2 - Identity Seminar

Our third seminar of the Context of Practice 2 module, focused upon the topics and themes which we discussed in the Identity lecture.

We began the seminar by discussing the main topics within the lecture.

• Can't escape
• Essentialist Thinking
• Societys impact on Identity - Nature vs. Nurture debate
• Digital Identity - Escape your own identity, become someone else, reinvent themselves, 'Second Life'

When then looked at the topic of Identity and 'The Other' in visual representation in more detail which is something that was touched upon in the lecture.

• Creation of identities
• Concepts of 'otherness'
• Analysis of visual example

Then, in pairs we discussed 'what makes you, you?'

Essentialist

• Physical features
• Hair colour
• Eye colour
• Physical build
• Height

Anti-Essentialist

•  Clothing / shoes
• Hobbies
• Interests
• Where you are from
• Family / friends
• Money
• Socialisation
• Institutions
• Environment
• Marital status
• Era you were born in
• Diet
• Physical
• Social
• Education

We were then asked to discuss; How do you express your identity?

• Mannerisms
• How you treat people
• Personality Traits
• Possessions - Fashion, Brands
• Social interactions
• Accent
• Hobbies
• Interests

• Individual Subjectivities - Sense of self, complex

Identity Formation

• Process from psychoanalysis 
• Jacques LACAN
• The 'Hommelette' - Stage in which babies do not understand / are not aware of themselves
• The 'Mirror Stage' - Stage which usually occurs between 6 and 18 months in which the baby will see itself as an individual

'Mirror Stage'

• Sense of self (subjectivity) built on: A illusion of wholeness and receiving views from others

RESULT = Own subjectivity is fragile

Constructing the 'other'

• Problems: Relies on the assumption of opposition and radical otherness
• In the same way that we create our own identities - In opposition to what we are not - So does a society 

Identification

• Shores up unstable identities through the illusion of unity 
• Shared fashions, belief systems, values

Task:

Analyse one image from the media, a news story etc. which attempts to secure an identity for the audience, what it promises you by 'othering' at the expense of others. (minimum of 300 words)

This theory of ‘othering’ refers to the process of securing an identity for the an audience at the expense of the ‘other’, this could perhaps by using a contradictory message or image thereby showing them what they are not and reinforcing what they are.

The 2010 advertising campaign for fashion retailer, French Connection UK is an example of how the theory of ‘othering’ has been incorporated within the media to secure an identity for it’s target audience and ultimately sell a product.

The campaign itself is split into two aspects, ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ and is targeted at young, aspirational men and women.

Each design for the advertising campaign incorporates a simplistic, bold statement in attempt to secure a identity for its target audience as being these ‘trendy’ young things.

Across the campaign there is a whole series of statements such as “man should be brave” which ultimately build up the identity for the imaginary “man” character, showing the audience what he does, what he says and how he acts.

By associating these actions and feelings of the “man” or “woman” with their brand, French Connection in turn secure the identity of the target audience. If they too act or feel this way or do these things they are this ‘hipster’ character French Connection have invented and are unique and ahead of the crowd.

In contradiction to this if perhaps a member of the target audience who sees these adds do not do these things or act this way, it will secure their identity as someone who is not part of this ‘hipster’ crowd and therefore not able to shop at French Connection?

I believe it to be quite ironic that French Connection have created this ‘hipster’ character through the use of their advertisements, ‘hipsters’ are supposedly this group of people who are unique and yet French Connection have managed to create a identity of this ‘unique’ person which appeals to a large target audience whom are now secure in this identity for themselves.

OUGD504: Design Production - Design For Web Research

In order to meet the criteria for the 'Design For Web' brief we were asked to produce a fully functioning four page website. As web design is something I have not done on previous courses I began by researching into the basic requirements a designer will need to consider when designing for screen.

WEB SAFE FONTS

The most safe fonts are; sans serif typefaces Arial / Helvetica, serif typefaces Times New Roman / Times and slab serif typefaces Courier New / Courier.

Other options for designers which usually work are; Palatino, Garamond, Bookman and Avant Garde.

Fonts that work on Windows and Mac OS are; Verdana, Georgia, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Arial Black and Impact.

WEB SAFE COLOURS

Web safe colours are the colours used when designing web pages and the methods for describing and specifying those colours as a RGB triplet or in hexadecimal format.

Web colours have an unambiguous calorimetric definition RGB which relates to the chromaticities of a particular phosphor set a given transfer curve adaptive white point and viewing conditions.

SCREEN SIZES

The display resolution of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed it is usually quoted as width x height with the units in pixels.

IMAGE FORMATS

JPEG

• JPEG stands for Joint Photographic experts group 
• The filename extension for JPEG or JFIF is JPG OR JPEG
• It is a compression method
• Most of the digital cameras we use save images in the JPEG / JFIF format
• The format supports 8-bit greyscale images and 24-bit colour images, 8-bit for red, green and blue
• The JPEG format applies lossy compression to images to give a significant reduction of the file size
• The amount of compression can be specified and the amount of compression will affect the visual quality of the image when not too great, the compression does not noticeably detract from the image's quality but JPEG files suffer generational degradation when repeatedly edited and saved (JPEG also provides lossless image storage but the lossless is not supported)

GIF

• GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format is limited to an 8-bit palette or 256 colours.
• This makes the GIF format suitable for storing graphics with relatively few colours e.g. diagrams
• Also uses a lossless compression that is more effective when large areas have a single colour and ineffective for detailed images.

PNG

• PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics
• The PNG file format supports 8-bit paletted images with optional transparency for all palette colours and 24-bit true colour (16 million colours) or 48-bit true colour and without alpha channel while GIF supports only 256 colours and a single transparent colour.
• PNG is very effective when an image has a large uniformly coloured areas.
• PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF 
• Indexed colour, greyscale and true colour images are supported plus an optional alpha channel
• PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications like web browsers so it is fully streamable with progressive display option.

WEBSITE HOSTING SERVICE

A web hosting service is a type of internet hosting service that allows individuals and organisations to make their website accessible via the world wide web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server owned or leased for use by clients as well as providing internet connectivity, typically in a data centre.

FREE WEB HOSTING

Free web hosting service is offered by different companies with limited services, sometimes supported by advertisements and often limited when compared to paid hosting.

SHARED WEB HOSTING

Placed on a server with many other sites, which could be up to hundreds or thousands all domains may share a common pool of server resources. The features available are quite basic and not flexible in terms of software and updates resellers often sell shared web hosting and web companies often have reseller accounts to provide hosting for clients.

VIRTUAL DEDICATED SERVER

Divides server resources into virtual servers where resources can be allocated in a way that does not directly reflect the underlying hardware. Users have root access to their own virtual space and customers are sometimes responsible for patching and maintaining the server.

DEDICATING HOSTING SERVICE

User gets his or her own web server and full control over it, however the user does not necessarily own the server.

MANAGED HOSTING SERVICE

The user gets their own web server but not full control over it. They are however allowed to manage their data via FTP or other remote management tools. The user is disallowed full control so that the provider can guarantee quality of service by not allowing the user to modify the server.

COLOCATION WEB HOSTING SERVICE

Similar to the dedicated web hosting service but the user owns the Colocation serve. The company provides the physical space that the server takes care of the server. This type of hosting is most powerful and experience. In most cases the Colocation provider may provide little to no support directly for their clients machine providing only electrical internet access and storage facilities for the server. In most cases for Colocation, the client would have his or her own administratorvisit the data centre on site to do any hardware upgrades or changes.

CLOUD HOSTING

A new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. A cloud hosted website may be more reliable than alternatives since other computers in the cloud can compensate when a single piece of hardware goes down. Cloud hosting also allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed by the user rather than a flat fee for the amount the user expects they will use or a fixed cost up front hardware investment.

CLUSTERED HOSTING

Having multiple server hosting the same content for better resource utilisation. Clustered servers and a perfect solution for high availability dedicated hosting, creating a scalable web hosting solution a cluster may separate web serving from database hosting capability (usually web hosts use clustered hosting for their shared hosting plans as there are multiple benefits to the mass managing of clients).

GRID

Form of distributed hosting is when a service cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes.

HOME SERVER

Usually a single machine places in a private residence can be used to host on or more sites.