History of Type (part 1) lecture

This week we had a lecture on the history of type, font, and all that jazz.

It really wasn't as engaging as I would have hoped. While I have interest in typeface and learning about how it was developed, I found the content on how language itself has developed less than enlightening. However, some parts were very interesting - such as discovering how the letter A developed, coming from the pictorial representation of an ox.

Additionally, I found it interesting to see how important general education in terms of being literate was. It's strange to think that it wasn't expected of many people to be able to read - something that is now almost taken for granted, given you have the ability.

Interesting also to learn how the way we make type influences the ultimate look of it - something painted with a brush ultimately has a whole different aesthetic to something punched with a stick. Pretty fascinating to see how the means of production shape an entire language visually.

Overall though, this was probably my least favourite lecture so far. It wasn't engaging, it felt a little repetitive or drawn out at times, too. Maybe that's just because I'm not super into type and typefaces, but it was just not up my street. Maybe the next one will be better!

Context of Practice Research

CoP Theme: AESTHETIC

Search terms/key words:  POST-DIGITAL, POST-MODERN, POST-INTERNET, META-MODERNISM, GLITCH, INTERNET ART, AVANT-GARDE.

LCA Library	1: You are Here: Art After the Internet – Omar Kholeif 2: Internet Art (World of Art) – Rachel Greene 3: Glitch: Designing Imperfection – Iman Moradi and Ant Scott 4: The Fundamentals of Digital Art – Richard Colson
Google Books (preview)	1: Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art – Virginia Hefferman 2: Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art – Katja Kwastek 3: Cinematic Cuts: Theorising Film Endings (Resolution, Truncation, Glitch) – Shelia Kunkle
Google Scholar	1: Web.Studies (Arnold Publication) - David Gauntlett, Ross Horsley 2: The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music - Kim Cascone 3: Art in cyberspace: The digital aesthetic - Andrejevic, M.
Websites	1: An Essay on the New Aesthetic – WIRED – Bruce Sterling 2: How seapunk went from meme to mainstream – Vox 3: Waving at the Machines – James Brindle
JStor	1: Ontology and Aesthetics of Digital Art – Paul Crowther 2: Making Things Our Own – The Indiginous Aesthetic in Digital Storytelling – Canice Hopkins 3: Ten Myths of Internet Art – Jon Ippoloto

Seapunk in the mainstream

Vox: How Seapunk went from meme to mainstream

Found this video about seapunk, a sub-culture of digital aesthetics and design. Very interesting to see how the art is not standalone, but a part of musical culture as well, and how it became "mainstream". 

Week 3 - BOOKS!!! Oh boy!! Learning!

Following my decision to study the digital aesthetics quote, I took out a few relevant books from LCA's extensive library. This post is a bit of a mishmash of quotes that I find useful or interesting. Let's go.


Rachel Greene - Internet Art - THAMES & HUDSON - London - 2004 (note: i really like this book, i should renew it)

• Internet art has also been critiqued for a perceived elitism, a reclusive position within the world and concerns of cyberspace. [Page 13]
• Internet and software artists, often self-identified as programmers, are not "real" artists. [Page 13]
• Many net artists feel a strong connection to the work of French artist Marchel Duchamp and to the participants in Dada, all of whom helped to shift art practices away from traditional forms of pictorial representation. [Page 19/20]
• Unique economies of attention exist, in which international web traffic and email forwards and downloads are the indexes of the public consumption and success of the art, as opposed to conventional means of valuation, such as visits to a museum show, magazine reviews of monetary worth. [Page 31]
• The grand spectacles these artists created as experiments were unable to reconcile the tensions between the aesthetic and commercial, but they isolated some of the net's more desirable and glamorous possibilities. [Page 67

Week 2: History of the Image and Further Research

Today I discovered that Richard says the word "groovy" with little irony.
This has been my favourite lecture so far (although it is only the second). The power of the image is that it can evoke primal, sensual, and spiritual feelings within us.

There are two sides to art that uses cultural symbols. One is that it can channel the spirit of the world through image making - a union of humanity. The other is of cultural appropriation, the first world hijacking third world culture. This marriage then seems rocky, yet evocative.

The emotions behind art, if well known, can produce interesting results in the viewer. For example, Rothko's work can drive those who see it to tears, but is that a genuine reaction, or just them going through their expected reactions? It is almost performance art in this way, I think.

I went to the Tate Modern on Saturday to see a Rothko or twelve.

The idea of a cult value also was interesting - that going to an art gallery to see, say, the Mona Lisa, was a similar experience to going to church to worship. 

Interestingly, the concept of Social Realism I think ties closely in to ideas of revolutionary art - the two polar opposites allow each's others extremes to be noticed in further detail. The fact that the CIA founded Pollock as an artist who represented everything the Soviet Union wasn't (Pollock was messy and abstract) highlights the difference between government and art. A problem we have today with arts funding being cut and cut.

During the seminar, I decided to go with the following quote for my research:

• 'In one sense, post-digital refers to works that reject the hype of the so-called digital revolution.  The familiar digital tropes of purity, pristine sound and images and perfect copies are abandoned in favour of errors, glitches and artefacts. [...] This valorisation of what previously would have been seen as noise: a by-product, bearing an external relation to the work, would be one of the characterising marks of a post-digital aesthetic. An aesthetic made up of minuscule stabs of sound, clicks, glitches, buzzes, light airy drones and hisses, mangled ring-modulated tones and grainy clouds of noise/pixels.
  Then, can we say that this aesthetic is preceded by a “digital aesthetic?”

I love the idea of a "digital aesthetic" and pushing myself slightly out of my comfort zone, into an area I'm familiar but not totally at home with. Perhaps this challenging will lead to further development in not only my learning and research, but my art. 

Week 1 - Visual Literacy and Module Overview

Visual communication turns out to be quite a complex process. Not only does it involve a seemingly simple process of exchanging messages, but also a shared understanding, affected by audience, context, media, etc.

Being affected by context, a combination of universal and cultural symbols. A plus sign + can be anything from an addition in mathematics, to the Swedish flag, to a Christian symbol. The variety and diversity of a simple symbol makes me think that perhaps simpler is better, and the less complex something is, the more meaning can be derived from it.

Then again, more symbols being added brings more clarity and context to the initial symbol - making it very clear what it means.

Having experience with looking at syntax and semiotics, I understood the structure of pictorial organisation and the relationship between form and meaning. By using culture's social cues when looking at a picture, as well as the context of the image, more meaning can be derived.

Egg - fertility - chicken - breakfast - food

Synecdoche = part being used to represent the whole

I am considering looking at the cultural side of COP, with the "fairytale" themed quote enticing me.
It seems relevant to my interests in character design, as well as my love of animated films such as Rise of the Guardians, which deals with the subject of imagination and belief.

I would also like to look at the way meaning develops over time and adapts, allowing me to look at the way children have been treated in animation through time.

• 'In order to master the psychological problems of growing up [...] a child needs to understand what is going on with his conscious self so that he can also cope with that which goes on in his unconscious. [...] It is here that fairy tales have unequaled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child's imagination which would be impossible for him to discover as truly on his own.'