Wikipedia - Outline of Communication [link]
'Communication - purposeful activity of exchanging information and meaning across space and time using various technical or natural means, whichever is available or preferred. Communication requires a sender, a message, a medium and a recipient, although the receiver does not have to be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space.'
Oxford Dictionary [link]
1. [mass noun] 'The imparting or exchanging of information by speaking, writing, or using some other medium.'
1.2 'The successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings.'
2 (communications) 'Means of sending or receiving information, such as telephone lines or computers.'
Sunday, 10 December 2017
Practical | Zine Test
This zine test is a more refined alternative to the cut-up zines I've made previously. It compiles a selection of the collages and images I've made, giving them a context of their own once placed together in a booklet.
It includes a mixture of final collages, as well as scrappy sketchbook pages which have been cropped. The zine/publication format elevates them slightly, hopefully giving them (a little) more importance because of it becomes a standalone artifact (not just existing as a notebook in a drawer, for example.)
Publications are effective because, generally speaking, the content they are made up of is usually curated - sharing a thread of meaning, context, themes, or at the very least are visually related in some way.
Even if the content within this zine isn't immediately clear, because they form a small 'collection' in the form of a publication, readers will assume that the pages all link somehow.
It includes a mixture of final collages, as well as scrappy sketchbook pages which have been cropped. The zine/publication format elevates them slightly, hopefully giving them (a little) more importance because of it becomes a standalone artifact (not just existing as a notebook in a drawer, for example.)
Publications are effective because, generally speaking, the content they are made up of is usually curated - sharing a thread of meaning, context, themes, or at the very least are visually related in some way.
Even if the content within this zine isn't immediately clear, because they form a small 'collection' in the form of a publication, readers will assume that the pages all link somehow.
Wednesday, 6 December 2017
Marshall McLuhan Speaks
Marshall McLuhan in conversation with Norman Mailer, 1968 [link]
5:13 - 'The environment is not visible. It's information. It's electronic.'
6:21 - 'The present is the enemy. The present is the - and this will delight you, Norman - the present is only faced in any generation by the artist.'
6:31 - 'The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it's anti-utopian. It's a world of anti-values.'
PATTERN RECOGNITION
10:25 - 'When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition - in other words, to structuring the experience. And I think this is part of the artist's world.'
10:41 - 'The artist, when he encounters the present....is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven's sake...'
11:03 - 'He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. He's more important than the scientist.'
The Future of Man in the Electric Age, 1965 [link]
1:40 - 'The effect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 BC.'
'the effects of rearranging one's experience, organising one's experience by these new extensions of our powers, are quite unexpected. Perhaps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specialising of our powers.'
3:10 - Kermode: 'How would you describe the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of it.'
McLuhan: 'It created - almost overnight it created what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that the print was able to do - unified, homogenous, reading publics.'
3:39 - 'Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of individualism, separatism, and of unique point of view and private judgement - all of those factors are highly favoured by the printed world, and not really favoured by other forms of culture like radio or earlier by the manuscript.'
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
7:51 - '...any medium, be it radio or be it wheel, tends to create a completely new human environment.'
8:09 - 'The unawareness of the environmental is compensated for by the attention to the content of the environment. the environment as merely a set of ground rules and as a kind of overall enveloping force gets very little recognition as a form, except from the artist.'
The Medium is the Message, New York University seminar, 1977 [link]
'The ground is the message, not the content.'
'It's not what you say on the telephone, it's the fact that the telephone service is environmental.'
5:13 - 'The environment is not visible. It's information. It's electronic.'
6:21 - 'The present is the enemy. The present is the - and this will delight you, Norman - the present is only faced in any generation by the artist.'
6:31 - 'The artist is prepared to study the present as his material because it is the area of challenge to the whole sensory life, and therefore it's anti-utopian. It's a world of anti-values.'
PATTERN RECOGNITION
10:25 - 'When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition - in other words, to structuring the experience. And I think this is part of the artist's world.'
10:41 - 'The artist, when he encounters the present....is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven's sake...'
11:03 - 'He alone has the sensory awareness necessary to tell us what our world is made of. He's more important than the scientist.'
The Future of Man in the Electric Age, 1965 [link]
1:40 - 'The effect of script and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 BC.'
'the effects of rearranging one's experience, organising one's experience by these new extensions of our powers, are quite unexpected. Perhaps one way of putting it is to say that writing represents a high degree of specialising of our powers.'
3:10 - Kermode: 'How would you describe the impact of the invention of the printing press? Give us some instances of what happened as a consequence of it.'
McLuhan: 'It created - almost overnight it created what we call a nationalism, what in effect was a public. The old manuscript forms were not sufficiently powerful instruments of technology to create publics in the sense that the print was able to do - unified, homogenous, reading publics.'
3:39 - 'Everything that we prize in our Western world in matters of individualism, separatism, and of unique point of view and private judgement - all of those factors are highly favoured by the printed world, and not really favoured by other forms of culture like radio or earlier by the manuscript.'
THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
7:51 - '...any medium, be it radio or be it wheel, tends to create a completely new human environment.'
8:09 - 'The unawareness of the environmental is compensated for by the attention to the content of the environment. the environment as merely a set of ground rules and as a kind of overall enveloping force gets very little recognition as a form, except from the artist.'
The Medium is the Message, New York University seminar, 1977 [link]
'The ground is the message, not the content.'
'It's not what you say on the telephone, it's the fact that the telephone service is environmental.'
Practical | Deconstructed Collages
Examples from my sketchbook where I've taken existing large scale posters and images that I've made, and have cut them down and rearranged them even further.
They create something new yet again, and act as a way for me to see how far I can push the same images / phrases / content in order to generate something separate.
The last pages, which are cut-ups of large ink type posters, deconstruct the phrase itself until it becomes an abstract graphic arrangement of shapes and forms.
By chopping and selecting smaller elements images and putting them into a composition, they become images in their own right.
They create something new yet again, and act as a way for me to see how far I can push the same images / phrases / content in order to generate something separate.
The last pages, which are cut-ups of large ink type posters, deconstruct the phrase itself until it becomes an abstract graphic arrangement of shapes and forms.
By chopping and selecting smaller elements images and putting them into a composition, they become images in their own right.
Tuesday, 5 December 2017
Marshall McLuhan | Daniel Savage
• Commented on a changing media landscape
• Theories on the medium
• Writing about the effects of mass media on our lives. He wasn't talking about the content - the information itself, but the form - the technologies that provide you with content.
• He wasn't saying that content is inconsequential, but when we pay too much attention to it we ignore the power of form in shaping our experience.
• So if you don't understand the medium, you don't fully understand the message.
• Once books were all handwritten, put someone invented the printing press and mass media became a reality.
• The form changed our collective experience, it informed identity, how we imagined ourselves.
• Same with electronic media, telegraphs, telephones, television - devices that redefined time and space, and extended our experience beyond our boundaries.
COP Tutorial
TUTOR FEEDBACK
Introduction
• Rules of visual communication (legibility, composition, purpose, function...)
• How they can be broken - and why that's done
- Political
- Reaction against mass media
- Personal agenda
References
• Dada
• Punk flyers
• Zine culture, underground publications
• Post-modernist graphic design (Ed Fella, David Carson...)
• Authenticity of a message
• Recycling reusing existing information
Reflective Practice
• McLuhan and 'The Medium is the Message'
• Your work is a vehicle for delivery, open to interpretation
Specific Essay Changes
• Define what a message is (link artists, and how they visually communicate messages)
• Information Theory - relates to packets of data, how are messages sent and received?
• Change title - 'What is subversive communication?'
AUDIO FEEDBACK
• Think about altering the structure of the essay, subverting the structure? As long as academic conventions are met, this could be done. Re-constitute the pro-forma that you have been given.
• Shorten question "What is subversive communication?" - opens question out, engage better
• Introduction - touches upon areas that should be in chapter 2. Talking about lo-fi, cost effective, make references to zine culture...could also be in chapter 2.
• Legibility as a theory could also be in chapter 2, a rejection of the establishment, of capitalism, of consumer-oriented society..follow these lines of enquiry.
• Your research encompasses quite a lot of things and theories that come together to create this reaction, and the reaction is this subversive communication.
• Outcomes are more authentic and meaningful to the artist. This could be the rationale for your project, put in the introduction.
• Introduction could describe what the project is about, and how you may explore it, the structure of the essay itself, and things you may touch upon.
• In Themes and Contexts, could talk about Fluxus, and the New York Correspondence School, also talk about the status of artworks - ephemera as artworks, think about mail art as a form of art.
• Rules of visual communication (legibility, composition, purpose, function...)
• How they can be broken - and why that's done
- Political
- Reaction against mass media
- Personal agenda
References
• Dada
• Punk flyers
• Zine culture, underground publications
• Post-modernist graphic design (Ed Fella, David Carson...)
• Authenticity of a message
• Recycling reusing existing information
Reflective Practice
• McLuhan and 'The Medium is the Message'
• Your work is a vehicle for delivery, open to interpretation
Specific Essay Changes
• Define what a message is (link artists, and how they visually communicate messages)
• Information Theory - relates to packets of data, how are messages sent and received?
• Change title - 'What is subversive communication?'
AUDIO FEEDBACK
• Think about altering the structure of the essay, subverting the structure? As long as academic conventions are met, this could be done. Re-constitute the pro-forma that you have been given.
• Shorten question "What is subversive communication?" - opens question out, engage better
• Introduction - touches upon areas that should be in chapter 2. Talking about lo-fi, cost effective, make references to zine culture...could also be in chapter 2.
• Legibility as a theory could also be in chapter 2, a rejection of the establishment, of capitalism, of consumer-oriented society..follow these lines of enquiry.
• Your research encompasses quite a lot of things and theories that come together to create this reaction, and the reaction is this subversive communication.
• Outcomes are more authentic and meaningful to the artist. This could be the rationale for your project, put in the introduction.
• Introduction could describe what the project is about, and how you may explore it, the structure of the essay itself, and things you may touch upon.
• In Themes and Contexts, could talk about Fluxus, and the New York Correspondence School, also talk about the status of artworks - ephemera as artworks, think about mail art as a form of art.
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