#1002assessment1

[brooksadad2017]

Mark Lombardi was an artist who mapped intricate relations between individuals, corporations, governments and other institutions. Lombardi called his drawings ‘Narrative Structures’. He was interested in how networks of power inevitably operated on relationships of secrecy, fraud, conspiracy and collusion.

Lombardi is an interesting artist to consider for your poster assessment. And he’s also great for thinking about practice-led research. He shows how seemingly-unrelated aspects of contemporary life are in fact, often, thoroughly convergent. He’s also a great example of an artist whose work is the result of intense research. Lombardi’s maps are the result of painstaking study and archival uncoverings.

Remember that when we talk about practice-led research and research-led practice in this course, we’re not talking about a defined or conventional way of doing research. Research in art and design can mean literally anything; it’s different for each person, and project, and work.

[brooksadad2018]

Assessment 1 Tips

Looking forward to seeing your posters this week. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as you work toward finishing…

1. Remember that this Assessment builds towards Assessment 2: you’re working on a larger project and this is your first opportunity to produce work for further reflection as you develop your major work.

2. The research questions are designed to be suggestive, exciting, arousing: a place from which to begin and a site from which to build your work. Don’t get too bogged down by ‘answering’ the question in a literal, singular sense. Let the question guide your practice-led research but don’t let it determine or restrain your investigation!

3. A poster is a form with an interesting and diverse history. You have the freedom to push the constraints in whatever way(s) you want. Think about the material, graphic and textual components and how they interact with each other and your developing project.

4. Above all, remember that this is a studio course and this Assessment is an artwork/designed object. It’s not a report, or an ad. It’s a work that’s part of a larger in-progress project, and an opportunity to test out, map, play with and consider some ideas for your second assessment. Think like an artist/designer – what can you do with a poster? Think expansively and push the boundaries!

4. Almost anything is possible, so what matters is how you make the case in the work itself. This course is all about trying to shift the focus from the ‘what’ (what does it mean?) to the ‘how’ (how does it mean, how does its meaning change our understanding of contemporary practice?)

Have fun and good luck!

[andrewbrookscofa1002]

Mark Lombardi was an artist who mapped intricate relations between individuals, corporations, governments and other institutions. Lombardi called his drawings ‘Narrative Structures’. He was interested in how networks of power inevitably operated on relationships of secrecy, fraud, conspiracy and collusion.

Lombardi is an interesting artist to consider for your poster assessment. And he’s also great for thinking about practice-led research. He shows how seemingly-unrelated aspects of contemporary life are in fact, often, thoroughly convergent. He’s also a great example of an artist whose work is the result of intense research. Lombardi’s maps are the result of painstaking study and archival uncoverings.

Remember that when we talk about practice-led research and research-led practice in this course, we’re not talking about a defined or conventional way of doing research. Research in art and design can mean literally anything; it’s different for each person, and project, and work.

[michellehuangcofa]

Video and Audio component of artwork. NOT THE COMPLETE ARTWORK as it needs to be projected onto the textured background poster. 

Also, it’s supposed to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise but youtube wouldn’t let me upload it that way. In the final artwork, the poster is meant to be portrait, not landscape.

[michellehuangcofa]

Concept Statement

Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or commodity of sexual pleasure. This objectification is sometimes masqueraded as empowered femininity, but in reality it plays an important role in gender inequality. This hyper-sexual portrayal of women is infiltrating cartoons, advertisements, music videos and other media outlets, leading to warped views and expectations of women within society.

My poster features a video projection onto a three-dimensionally textured A2 piece, accompanied by a piece of sound art. I chose to work with glitch in my presentation as a means of exploring the creative possibilities that exist for spreading awareness regarding this pressing issue within our society. I drew inspiration from Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation, his intense and vibrant colours saturating the surrounding geometry, forming an almost tangible spectrum of hues. Laterally branching from this, I manually created hundreds of individually glitched photos and music videos, linking them together to form a fast-paced and vibrantly coloured video piece. I found this method of expression interesting as glitching forms of media can render them useless, erasing the product or brand that is subliminally being conveyed. This concept of warping inspired me to continue with how glitch can be used creatively to highlight the hyper-sexualisation of women evident in all forms of media. Most frames are unrecognisable, changing the meaning and context of the clip, which is ideal for my artwork, as with this we are unable to tell if she is clothed nor can we decipher her action. In response, our opinion of the advertisement immediately shifts as we are no longer concerned with how she is using her body in order to convey a message, be it sexually or provocatively.

I experimented with challenging the traditional 2D poster by suspending a layer of cellophane above the A2 piece of paper to create depth. This adds unpredictable effects when the video is projected onto it through the refraction and reflection of light. The cellophane acts to symbolise the distortion behind certain situations and ideas presented to society by media, with the most prominent being the sexual identification of women within a culture dominated by masculinity.

The audio component consists of snippets of moans and sexual noises spliced from popular songs commonly played on the radio that children may grow up listening to. By disguising and editing these noises through glitch, I am giving rise to the possibility of a new piece of music; one that is not inherently sexual yet brings awareness to the extent to which the sexualisation of women is embedded within our media and culture.