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JVL
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@hellomattillustration-blog
Furthering on from my appropriation work I decided to look at pieces that had themselves been the subject of appropriation, be it in lawsuits or in general. For this one I looked at Shepard Fairey and his Obama Hope poster. From which he used a PA photo of Obama to make his prints. The case that ensued was settled out of court.
My reaction was to create an image in the similar vein, an object of hope for many people, myself very much included.
Two quick pieces made during the 2017 GE. Collages using appropriated imagery. The head of May is from that awful seal like laugh she did in Parliament.
So there she is laughing with Trump and running through that field of wheat having the time of her life.
TED
In my search for discussions on wider appropriation I happened upon a TED Talk by Kirby Ferguson where he discussed the merits of what he calls ‘the remix’. He talks about folk music reusing similar song structures, be it Dylan from Guthrie; Guthrie himself from the Carter family and Apple’s Steve Jobs using the work of others to push things forward. This talk was really interesting to me as it kind of pushed the idea that nothing is truly 100% original. Everything has a start point, a previous incarnation if you will. However, just because you’re borrowing of an older thing, doesn’t mean you can’t improve upon it and create a totally unique work.
https://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix#t-27579
Reading List
Over the summer break I have a list of books and articles to read:
This Means This, This Means That by Sean Hall
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction by Douglas Davis
Appropriation by David Evans
The Reconfigured Eye by William Mitchell
In Defense of the Poor Image by Hito Steyerl
Memes in Digital Culture by Limor Shifman
In addition to all the articles and books I have also been looking for relevant stuff on the internet. Be they TED talks, news articles or journal pieces.
Summer Project Intentions
For my summer project I’ve decided to look at appropriation in art as it relates well to my dissertation which is looking at memes and the associated appropriation that goes with it. I’ll be researching the subject and looking to recreate famous pieces.
Reflective Report
During a workshop for my Variations group, Man v Rat, I had brought in all the required materials and research items, examples spot illustrations, a simple gif that I’d made. But only a couple of other people had done that as well, because of this I had to show my stuff in front of the group and show everyone how I animated my gif in Photoshop. Now, this may not sound like something worth reflecting on, but for me, it was huge. I hate public speaking. Hate is maybe the wrong word for this, I fear it. I have incredibly bad social anxiety, the thought of a presentation fills me with an incredible dread. This surprise presentation shook me to the core, when he asked me I froze, I was in shock, but I couldn’t worm my way out of it. I stepped up to the MacBook and attached TV to teach my way of making a gif in Photoshop, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye, and I think I talked way too fast, but, I did it. And after that I was speaking to my pals and I know they were probably just being nice but they said I spoke okay and got it across well. A terrifying experience for me and something I need to work on, massively. There were presentations recently for the dissertation rough project, and I was absolutely terrified again, went through my slides too fast and was almost incoherent, hopefully I will someday overcome this, but I don’t know when that’d be.
Group work is usually a fearful time for me, new people, new anxieties, fears of not being good enough, not pulling my weight. However, my group for the exhibition are fantastic, we’re all similar people and get on really well, I must say, it does help having a few friends in it too, I’m able to find my voice, give opinions, ideas and help others. In fact, my group have decided to use my idea of running a drawing workshop. I’ve never felt so appreciated and it’s given me quite the confidence boost. Like, my ideas are okay, and to not be afraid of sharing them. As a group we have overcome and ironed out all the various obstacles that creating a half hour workshop in a week throws up. Thinking about it, group work with the right people is fantastic. I’m getting pushed into making more and it gives me a great feeling. Hopefully there’ll be more group work with friends and similar minded people in the future.
The exhibition was a great success in my opinion. We all worked hard and it culminated in a good fun evening for all. There was a small amount of last minute drama with my groups workshop, two people didn’t turn up. I don’t know how I feel about it now, at the time I was annoyed. But after some sleep, I’ve been reflecting on it and the day before we were talking about how we probably wouldn’t need everybody to be there and talked about four people running it, the rest mingling. I don’t know if maybe the stress of the occasion led to some crossed wires or miscommunication, one of the two doesn’t have Facebook so wasn’t in our chat, it was my job to text him and keep him up to date. So, it could all be my fault, I mean, I asked him where he was before we were set to start but I should probably have messaged sooner. Hours sooner. I guess if I’ve learnt anything from this, it’s that close communication is key. It’s incredibly easy for things to be misconstrued and things to be missed.
Photos from the exhibition. It was incredibly busy, but it was mostly us, other students and friends/parents. There wasn’t much in the way of joe public but it wasn’t in a massively accessible location so we were never going to get much footfall, however, we did suggest going out and passing out flyers to drum up some more people but that idea got turned down. I really liked how our acetate prints look on the wall. They’re all different colours and sizes but they work well as a set, the acetate creating a unifying theme. Overall it was a good fun time.
Photos courtesy of Erica and Kirstin.
The workshop from our event, it was great fun! We abandoned the differently timed rounds after the first play-through as we got some feedback saying the 3 minutes was too long. She was right. With 1 minute rounds it managed to be a really quick bit of fun and we managed to get 4 games done in our time. I originally worked the timer and put up the post-its but on the fourth round I took the reins as the other members of our group wanted to have a go. It was a fun experience! We ended up with more doodles than you could shake a stick at. My favourite one was Kirstyns way of drawing “Long Tail”, she drew one tail over five post-its, so technically it was five drawings, just great thought process.
Not all our group turned up to the workshop, however, there could be a few reasons as to why, crossed wires, maybe? We were talking about how many people needed to be there the day before so maybe they thought too many cooks and all that, it would have crowded with all of us up there in my opinion anyway. I’m writing about this because I know it annoyed some people in my group, I was kinda annoyed at the time, but after thinking it through I’m really not that bothered. But they’re saying about not sharing images from the workshop and I don’t know if that’s entirely fair as they had contributed up to it.
The photos here are Kirstin’s and Ericas, my phone was the timer aha. Kirstin also recorded a video of the workshop. What a legend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaoSD7dmBjY&feature=youtu.be
Prep for the event, we split up the jobs between us, me and our curator printed our work on acetate to link it all together even though the images are of varying sizes and colours, it works well, even Emily’s small square image, reminds me of a film cell. Emily then printed the words using one of the fonts on my font sheet (ADAM.cg Pro) on pink for the adjectives and yellow for the nouns and verbs and Matthew cut them out. Kyle printed out our project work for the support work table. Kyle, Matthew and Erica then worked on other things for that table. We had a test run of our game and it was quite fun. Let’s sell it to Hasbro! We are ready for the exhibition!
For the printed off words, the original consensus was to just use Calibri, the default Word font. I wasn’t happy with this, not at all. It’s one of the few things in our event that we really have any real design control over since we have abandoned the lab theme. So anyway, I made this to test fonts and put it to the group. At the moment I’m favouring the 3rd one down on the far left. Hopefully the others will agree....
It’s only words
We had a group vote on the presentation of the printed out words. The choices were having them in beakers or laid out on the table. My concerns were that if they were laid out the people doing the workshop at the table wouldn’t be able to reach to choose, the beakers, however, could be passed round. During our online chat we had a small vote and the laying out of the words had it. There were some crossed wires on my part however, I didn't realise that when they’re laid out, one of us will turn them over for everyone. A cracking good idea!
Discussion in our group chat. We have a good list of things to do but I feel with our group we can manage it, there are a couple that are distracted with their submissions but that is kinda understandable as it’s important. But I can take the slack there! I came up with a potential layout and a few thoughts with regards to the words, be they beaker or laid out on the table. I personally think beaker is a better idea as they can be accessed by people easier. I also think that the table should be white instead of just plain brown MDF. It’d fit better with our lab test aesthetic.
To submit our gif it had to be in mp4 format, however, we all found that as it’s a video it doesn’t play forever. You can extend how long it plays by adding more slides though. One of my group mates wasn’t sure how to do it so I made a quick tutorial for her showing her the steps to doing this. I know this isn’t really related to the exhibition but I feel it’s an important part of my development and a good example of great group mentality.
Blurb
I decided to write the blurb for my group project.
"Over this project we have learnt to look at texts and extrapolate visual imagery from the more unexpected parts of the work. Our topic was rats, and one of the ways we used to find new avenues to illustrate, was drawing many images in a small time limit."
It will probably be updated when other info from the tutor becomes available but I think it’s a very good base for the blurb.
Further meetings
We have a curator! And it’s Amber, she is doing a fantastic job keeping us all ticking forwards and updated with what we need to do. Great leader and a great team! After our meetings with Rob and each other we have a more refined idea of what we are putting on. The plan is to have groups of about 6 to 8 people doing our workshop at once, during which they will pick two words (verb/noun and an adjective) from the text at random (either from a beaker or from two lines of them on the table) that have been cut up. They will then have varying amounts of time (1, 2 and 3 minutes) to draw as many variations on their words as possible. They’ll be drawing on post it notes and they’ll be placed on the wall sorted by time after the drawing is all done. Whilst they’re being put up they’ll have a nice cup of (hopefully cold) strawberry milkshake! The whole thing will hopefully have a lab/test theme.
Event Meetings
Met my group for the event and they are amazing, so much energy and great ideas from all of us. We decided to follow my idea to run a drawing workshop akin to the first one that we had with Rob. It’s about getting people to do quick drawings using text from the rat stories but not allowing them to draw rats at all. I think it’s an engaging idea and ties back to our previous work, it also gets them to think of creative ways of avoiding the prevalence of rats.
Finals for my Man v Rat editorial project. The colours are really work, they’re bright, but as they are placed over a black and white dot halftone image, it dulls them to a nice extent.
Note: The circular image is transparent, tumblr doesn’t seem to show it well though.