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.