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.