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Modern Day Archetypes

This series was developed last term in response to the brief on memes. I felt that my original thinking on memes was too transient. Picking any sort of pop-culture or current news item just ensures that the idea will be stale in a few weeks’ time, once the interest in that thing has passed. I decided to refocus my efforts into doing something that had a little more staying power and punch.

I was already working with universal archetypes for another project. I came up with the idea of taking archetypes as they were depicted in Renaissance art, and updating them for the modern day. I already really enjoy doing style parodies of artists, so this gave me the chance to do even more of them. They’re just too much fun. The downside was that this project took a ton of time to complete. (As I said to a friend: who would have thought painting like Michelangelo would take more than two days!?) I ended up spending the better part of a month on these three digital paintings, along with three other final projects. This series was the second of three pieces comprising my end of the term Research into Practice portfolio.

The System Admin

In classical Greek mythology, the Delphic Sibyl was an oracle and keeper of arcane knowledge. The image below is the Sibyl as depicted by Michelangelo in the Sisteen Chapel. She is shown in a seat of authority with a scroll depicting her knowledge.

The modern day version of the sybil would naturally be the system administrator. In the same way she controlled access to knowledge, so too does he control access to the internet, using the arcane knowledge of the workings of computers, with his power represented in his laptop.

The Cable Installer

The Milkmaid by Vermeer depicts a young, well built woman pouring milk from a pot into a Dutch oven. At the time this painting was completed, milkmaids were already symbols of love and sex—most crassly, of lust. Some artwork from this time period depicts this more overtly, but The Milkmaid is more subtle in its insinuation. Nevertheless, the interpretation would not have been lost on contemporary viewers of Vermeer’s work.

The contemporary version of Vermeer’s Milkmaid then, would not be the housemaid who comes directly into your house with temptations of lust, but rather the workman who installs one’s internet cable—which in turn allows an infinite number of women into one’s house via the internet. The cable installer brings the same sort of temptation into the home toady as the milkmaid was thought to have done in 1658.

Christ and the Cellphone

In the gospels, the Bible describes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The image here, Christ and the Good Thief, painted by Titian c. 1566, depicts Christ in that moment as he loses his life-long connection with God. (The version below is cropped to just show Christ. The original painting has him side by side with the good thief, described in the Bible as having asked for forgiveness shortly before he dies.) In this moment, the Bible describes how a darkness fell over the land. Jesus is quoted as saying, “… My god, why have you foresaken me?” This is the point at which Christ, having taken on the sins of the world in sacrificing himself, is unable to remain in the presence of the Lord. God turns his face from Christ, leaving him in a literal and metaphorical darkness—indeed, the first time in his life that Christ has lived (if only briefly) without this connection.

In a way, this can be seen similarly to living in our modern day society and losing one’s cell phone signal. For those who’ve grown up with ubiquitous access to information and people via the cell network and internet, the loss of this connectivity can be felt in a quite salient way. When it comes to day to day affairs and the coordination of efforts with others, without a cell phone signal, we feel effectively cut off from the world. A loss of cell phone signal is, in a concrete way, the modern day equivalent of Christ’s metaphorical loss of connection with God.

The actual paintings were painted digitally. This has several advantages: it’s far cheaper, less messy, faster (no waiting for paint to dry), and easier to fix mistakes. The downside to digital work is that it can look particularly digital. It can be clean and “computery”, which doesn’t exactly lend itself well to mimicking, for example, Renaissance paintings. Fortunately I’ve had a lot of practice over the years with “dirtying up” digital work, and I have quite a number of tricks I use to make things look more traditional. Copying the traditional aspect on the computer is half the fun. To complete the look, I had them printed with a high-quality six color archival roll printer on canvas paper. The piece de resistance was placing them in frames. Over the course of several weeks, I went searching through a few antique shops, and manage to secure three gilded frames. (And for not too much money! About £30 altogether, or about $45. But totally worth it, in my opinion.) So I submitted the whole package that way: three canvas printed digital paintings in three gilded frames. They were a big hit.

2013 03 11 Pulsar Color
Digital
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Conflagration

This was one of three pieces submitted for my Research into Practice porfolio. There was a huge amount of development that went into this over the course of the term. It’s almost nothing like the original idea I had, but much stronger for it. I’ll see if I can sum it up briefly below the video.

The original concept was to put on display a series of bottles containing the ashes of burned autographs of celebrities. From the very beginning, I was dealing with the logistics of such a project: whether or not to actually acquire autographs and burn them, or simply to imply that they had been burned. After all, nobody would be able to really know what kind of paper the ash came from, or if it had, indeed, once held anything like an autograph. A lot of the project depended on the faith of the viewer to believe what the artist was presenting.

For various reasons I won’t go into, the project evolved away from only using autographs to other types of artefacts, and away from celebrity, to the artefacts left by everyday people. There are plenty of antique shops around Norwich, and it was much easier to go out and find, for example, handwritten letters from the victorian era than it would have been to get some minor celebrity’s autograph off of eBay. (And cheaper, too.)

I had several conversations about whether I should actually burn these things, or just pretend like I burned them. It kept coming down to having faith in the artist to do what they said they did. Over the course of these discussions, I realized that even if I filmed it happening, it would still be no proof that I actually destroyed the originals. And so I decided to make this a key focus of the narrative.

The original narrative is straightforward: in destroying artefacts, we feel as if we’re somehow destroying a part of the person who made them. Even if this item was something lost in the back of an antique shop for decades, we feel a loss when it’s burned. This was the crux of my original idea, going all the way back to celebrity autographs.

However, the real story (in my mind) has always been about how we can know that anyone would actually take this step. Yes, you can see me burning it, but this really means nothing, because everything in filmmaking is so easily faked. (In fact, even if I did it as performance art, you still couldn’t be sure I destroyed the originals. All of sleight-of-hand and stage magic relies on just this thing: that by seeing something real and in person, it must be what actually happened. This is by no means guaranteed. So though it’s outside the purview of my expertise, this narrative could be adapted to work equally well as a stage presentation.) In any case, I’ve been fascinated with this idea of hyperreality (the inability to distinguish what is real and what is set up for the camera) for as long as I’ve been making films, and so made that the metanarrative which encompasses the entire film.

The ending is left intentionally ambiguous.

2013 02 05 Pulsar Color
Digital
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Function Follows Form

As mentioned in the previous post, the opposite concept for this task was a take on “function follows form.” The function—in this case a pencil—is completely secondary to the form or shape of the pencil. I did it in the style of a 1950′s ad, like something you might find in the back of a comic book or a rag magazine from that era. I had a lot of fun coming up with all the bullet points listing how this is superior to a pencil, while the ad completely misses the point that this fails at the most basic level of being a pencil. This one was a lot of fun.

2013 01 25 Pulsar Design
Digital
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Form Follows Function

This task involved two parts: one demonstrating an example of form following function, and one where function followed form. Typically it is said that “form follows function”. This means that something should first operate as intended, or accomplish some goal. The form or shape of the thing comes secondary to this. Not to say that the design isn’t important, but if something doesn’t work as intended, making it well designed doesn’t make it better. Going to the opposite extreme, then, leads to something in which its very design inhibits its proper operation—what is called “function follows form”.

For my “form follows function” task, I designed a visual recipe. This was an interesting challenge because—in the spirit of the brief—it first has to function as a usable recipe before all the fancy design is added to it. In this case, the design rather significantly departs from a traditional recipe, adding a visual diagram to the usual written instructions. The diagram acts as a visual aid, or shorthand way to reference how the steps of the recipe comes together, while the recipe itself is still reproduced on the page for clarity.

Although perhaps not a practical design in all respects (for example, long or extra complex recipes would need several pages of diagram, where just a few paragraphs of written instruction could fit on one page), it does still adhear to the “form follows function” philosophy. It (hopefully) works as a recipe, while bring a new design form to the idea.

2013 01 23 Pulsar Color
Design
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Harmony Corporation

I have a lot of work from last semester to get caught up with posting. I’ll be getting my feedback from the evaluation board this week, and spring semester starts next week, so I should start getting some of this stuff posted.

This video was in a response to a brief about Simplicity. We had to come up with a product or service that helped simplify life in some way, and then create a brand or ad to advertise it. I came up with an idea to simplify relationships by physically and mentally altering oneself or one’s partner in order to be better compatible. It’s quite a dystopian take on it. I also found out after I did this that there’s a dating site called Harmony. Makes sense for a company that deals with relationships, I suppose, even one as science fiction-ey as mine.

2013 01 22 Pulsar Design
Digital
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Headliners

This was a response for my Award Specific Unit task “Headliners”. We were to respond in some way to an event making headline news. I chose Felix Baumgardener’s jump from the edge of the atmosphere as my event. I didn’t respond directly to the event itself, but to the particular opinion a lot of people have about how this sort of exploration is a waste of money.

2012 12 05 Pulsar Color
Design
Digital
Landscape
Political
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Pop Culture as Meme

Note to my readers: I’m cross-posting this article onto my personal blog from the school’s internal Virtual Learning Environment, since the forum engine there contains a number of bugs and auto-formatting issues that prevent it from displaying properly on that site. It’s a quick exploration of what makes memes, and how they can be harnessed to convey different messages. The first task associated with this project was to write a sentence explaining our concept, and then to link each word in that sentence to some other page, image or video on the internet.

Effective memes contain surprising and interesting juxtapositions—for example: I plan to take the recently retired, kitschy pop-culture Americana icon, the Twinkie, using its sudden disappearance from the marketplace as a vehicle to communicate philosophical discourse on the temporality of existence.

Although I’m not the sort of person who really stays up to date on the internal workings of the pastry industry, it seems the bankruptcy of Hostess (who owns the Twinkie brand, among many others) was not a surprise to those in the know. Apparently the company took a bad turn under new management about eight years ago, and it’s been down hill ever since. The latest round of union talks was a last ditch effort to save the company, and when the baker’s union decided not to compromise, the entire 15,000 person operation had to fold.

It seems like kind of a silly thing, and in a sense it is. The Twinkie is a quintessential bit of American pop food culture, like the potato chip*, Tang, or apple pie. It’s a small, oblong yellow cake filled with cream. It’s not actually that good. And yet, it’s taken on almost legendary status. It’s the whipping boy responsible for obesity. It’s often cited as the poster child for the survival of the nuclear holocaust: a foodstuff so devoid of actual ingredients that it will never spoil, even through the long nuclear winter. It is, for all practical definitions of the word, a meme.

More importantly, it’s also a guilty pleasure. Americans eat them by the millions—or at least they did. Even if you were never the type to eat them, they were always there: a dependable mainstay on grocery store shelves everywhere. So depsite its disappearance—and despite the fact I think I may only have had one in my entire life, and I don’t even really remember it that well—it’s still kind of a bummer. The brand will live on, obviously; capitalism will see to that. But even aside from the brand, the meme is still there. In our collective memories, we’ll always have that little indestructable, nutrition-free yellow cake as the go-to butt of jokes.

* “Crisp” in British, though the term “crisp” seems to refer to a broader range of products in British than the American “chip” does.

2012 11 20 Pulsar Art and Design
Philosophic
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Manifesto Responses: Metahaven and Glaser

These are the other two of the set of three manifesto responses I did. The first is a response to Metahaven, a studio and design research firm in Europe. They wrote an essay about the apparent impotence of manifestos. On the one hand they talk about a manifesto as a utopian form of thought, but then deride some (namely the First Things First 2000 manifesto) as being ineffectual. I guess that makes this a response to a response. So it goes with art theory.

[A manifesto may be an ideal—a Utopian form of thought. And like all ideals, the actions of those who espouse them always fall short. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the validity of the message.

The First Things First 2000 manifesto may not have led to change in the behavior of its adherents, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile message. The ideas of a manifesto stand, regardless of the hypocrisy of their conceivers. Furthermore, merely because the undersigned haven't changed, it could still be that somebody has changed. And then there is the degree of change. Perhaps it brought about a push in the right direction. A manifesto can be influential, without being life-altering. Dogme 95 is famous for not having been followed completely once by anyone, but that doesn't mean it hasn't inspired filmmakers to be more purposeful and straightforward in their approach. More generally, Al Gore is well known for living an ostentatious, consumerist lifestyle while preaching the necessity of conservation and environmental stewardship. He may be hypocritical, but this doesn't make him wrong.

While we should aspire to be better than hypocrisy, manifestos have myriad reasons to exist other than as a statement of principle of the undersigned.]

The remaining poster is a response to Milton Glaser’s The Road to Hell. It’s his take on the ethics of design, and how one can bend rules in progressively more sinister and underhanded ways, surely putting the designer on the road to hell. I decided to do the flip side of that, with the path to redemption. Things designers can do to make themselves feel better if they’ve gone a bit too far in the wrong direction.

I agree with Milton Glaser: we do need to start by acknowledging what we do. There will always be the concern of misrepresenting the truth. But as far as professional ethics go, there’s more to the picture. There are also things we can do right. We may have gone down the road to hell, but there are also things we can do on the road to redemption.
1. Design for charity.
2. Design a PSA.
3. Volunteer—not necessarily something design-related.
4. Do work for yourself.
5. Help the competition.
6. Don’t underprice your work.
7. Don’t apologize for your work.
8. Respect yourself.

2012 11 13 Pulsar Art and Design
Design
Digital
Monochrome
Philosophic
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Manifesto Response: Futurism

One of my classes is Research into Practice, an in-depth look at different art movements and the philosophies behind them. It’s a kind of advanced, very theoretical art history course. It can be quite dense at times, but so far I think it’s a valuable look into art practice, particularly contemporary practice and movements. Our first assignment was to do three responses to three art or design manifestos. I did three typographical responses because I ended up writing the responses first, then figuring out a way to design them later. It ended up being a nice set, with an exaggerated drop-cap on each one and a smaller block of response text.

My first is an open letter to Futurism, an Italian art movement in the early 20th century that glorified (at the time) futuristic stuff like cars, airplanes, speed and technology. The Futurist manifeso (see here) is a very passionate, bombastic bit of writing that often conflates artistic avant garde ideas with what are considered today to be very politically incorrect social stances. It states that “beauty exists only in a struggle”, then uses this as a starting point to “glorify war” then “fight morality [and] feminism” and considers itself to be a “manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence”. It equates museums with cemeteries where outmoded art goes to rot. Actually I think they’re on to something with that. But in reading it, one gets the impression that they were trying to come up with something so inflammatory, so politically incorrect that it would somehow allow them to avoid this fate. Indeed, they write, “When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” That the younger generation (and here, it can be argued that they are speaking directly to me, my peers) will be “clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.” And then they say, “But we will not be there.”

Ah, but they are. That’s the thing. I don’t get the impression from the text that they recognized this would be some kind of an irony 100 years in the future, when the passion faded away, and the world moved on, and now here I am, checking out a book on Futurism from the library that hasn’t been touched in several years. I can’t even be mad reading their subversive prose. I’m not angry. I’m not anything at all. And I think, for them, that’s a fate worse than death.

O Futurism—

For as forward thinking as your name implies, you couldn’t have been more of your time. You’ve specifically said, “When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket…!” Well, you’re dead, and I’m not yet 30, so I guess that means me.

The thing is, you’re expecting rabid, accusatory critique. People, “panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage…” You might have had that at one time. The 50′s perhaps, with Senator McCarthy deriding you as Communists from the pulpit of the peoples’ representative. But in fact, I think you’ve ended up with a fate even worse than criticism. The fate of apathy.

See, an angry response is validation. It’s clearly what you want, anyway. People all fired up, pissed off, enraged, all from your little movement, so carefully crafted to be passionate. Sure, it’s nice to have a few people agree with you. Not too many. An enlightened few. But angry people means perversely interested people, means attention.

I don’t come to angry, accusing or enraged. Mostly curious. And maybe a little sad. You’re in that cemetery/museum you so hated. Maybe that’s unavoidable. It’s just how the arts work. Nobody gets angry over you these days. Today you’re a footnote in the dusty tomes of art history. Most of the world has never heard of you. Those who have pick and choose. They take the imagery because it’s “cool”, and shrug off the passion, the misogyny, the intentionally incendiary. But that’s if you’re lucky. Mostly you’re forgotten.

2012 11 12 Pulsar Art and Design
Design
Digital
Futurism
Monochrome
Philosophic
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Guide to Beating Procrastination

As you might suspect, I’ve been producing a lot more work than I’ve been posting. Ironically enough, this one is a guide to beating procrastination—the very thing that keeps me from updating here more regularly. I promise to do better!

The brief for this project was called “Scenarios and Lifestyles”. Using any media we chose, we had to observe and record and everyday scenario and/or our life for a day. Then using design, come up with a way to improve that aspect or scenario in our lives.

After getting moved in, I found it didn’t take long to fall back into some old habits, namely the problem of getting motivated to do basic, rather unpleasant household chores. I noticed that many of these chores took hardly any time, and that the problem was starting them, not necessarily doing them. I decided to do a little chart showing just how long these things take, in an effort to overcome the feeling that they take a lot longer than I expect, which leads to putting them off. I wrote a brief for the project (which I also included on the poster itself), which explains the concept more fully:

One source of procrastination is the planning fallacy: a psychological quirk where we significantly over- or underestimate the amount of time required to complete a task. In doing my research for this task, I decided to focus on everyday activities which I procrastinate on, due to overestimating the amount of time required to do them. I’ve found I put off chores such as cleaning, firstly because they’re not fun, but also because I expect they’ll take me all afternoon on my day off, so I never get around to starting them. This chart was designed as a physical, visual motivator and reminder of the true length of time mundane tasks take.

For several days, I timed myself doing chores, which I then recorded on this chart. This serves two purposes. First, it acts as a reminder as to how long these things actually take. Rather than wondering when, at some nebulous point in the future, I’ll finally be done and be able to pop off down to the pub for a pint, I can get a much more precise estimate of how long I need to work. Secondly, it acts as an extrinsic goal-keeper. Unlike my own brain, it’s not something I can argue with, plead with, or rationalize with. I can set my timer for the length of time indicated, start work, and know that after that time has elapsed I’ll be done (or nearly so). This makes it easier to get started on mundane tasks, and ensure they’ll be completed more regularly. Rather than something that save energy or materials, it’s a tool designed to save time.

Since I’m already updating this, I’ll go ahead and throw in a few more observations and thoughts about the program so far. It’s interesting to experience exactly how theoretical the work is. Firstly, the briefs are extremely open-ended. To compare things to the undergrad work: typically we’d assign (as a teacher) or be assigned (as a student) some specific design problem to solve, e.g. a brochure. Sometimes there are additional restrictions, such as only use two colors, or must include one photograph, things like that. As a teacher, there was often some specific technical thing (or several) I wanted my students to address, and so would tailor the assignment appropriately.

The work we’re expected to do here has quite literally no technical limitations, and by extension, the critiques focus very little on technical execution and almost exclusively on the success of communicating whatever it was we chose to try and communicate. I’ll admit that’s a bit unsettling for me, as someone who likes to have a well-defined plan and specific goals to shoot for. If you’re assigned a brochure to design, it’s easy to see whether or not you’ve done that. But if the assignment is “record your life for a day”, who’s to say that doing it in braille isn’t appropriate, so long as it supports whatever the idea is that you’re trying to convey? Things are very much about the ideas, and not as much about the execution of the ideas.

What this has led to are several people in the cohort who do the very bare minimum in thinking and effort. They may have an idea, but there is always a ready excuse as to why it’s not finished as a tangible work of design, or why it didn’t get printed, etc. We talk about the ideas, certainly, but I’m under the distinct impression that, even though the technical aspects of the work aren’t really discussed much, they really do matter—even if it’s only in the demonstration of a serious effort. Not to mention, a mediocre idea gets more traction when it’s well produced than does a brilliant idea not done. As Bill Watterson (the artist of Calvin and Hobbes) once said: “if the joke isn’t funny, go for broke on the illustration.”

Of course, I have no intention of doing mediocre ideas; I want to do brilliant ideas and execute them fantastically, to the best of my ability. It not only requires a serious amount of very concentrated thinking (and a certain amount of the ever-illusive “inspiration” never hurts), but also the ability to define one’s own terms, set up one’s own limitations, and basically decide what, how, and why you’re going to do anything at all. And it’s tough. But it’s also really exciting.

I’m extremely fortunate that I have such an incredibly solid grounding in the use of the software, and in the general principles of design and art. It’s really easy to take that stuff for granted. Because the course focuses on “communication design” as a general concept, anybody with the capacity to do the right kind of thinking is accepted. This doesn’t automatically mean they also know how to use the tools to execute their ideas. This has been a real struggle for a few of the folks who either don’t come from an art background or (in the case of one lovely older woman in our group), has her degree in design from 1987, before any real use of computers to do the work. That I’m able to sit down at the computer and not have to think for one iota about any aspect of how I’m going to execute my idea is something that I am quite grateful for.

I’ve had a lot of really good feedback on my work so far, too. There hasn’t been much that’s been a big surprise. The only real major criticism of my work is that it’s often just extremely literal—something I’m quite aware of, but do need to be reminded of in order to stay focused and working on it. It’s not really in my nature to be very metaphorical or abstract in what I’m trying to say (in writing, art, or anything), so it’ll be interesting to see what develops out of that. I’ve also gotten a lot of praise for my style and execution and overall pixel-perfect professionalism. (One comment on a motion graphics piece of mine was, “This is better than almost everything on the telly.”) So again, I know that I have that going for me.

This is also a good time to mention that there is no formal grading on each piece that adds up to a final grade for the course at the end of the semester. There are a series of learning outcomes and criteria by which students are judged. Unfortunately these can be nebulous, as subjective art-speak often is. (One LO reads: “We will be looking for resolution of ideas into final outcomes.” Well yes, one should hope so. I suppose it’s stated for completeness, but it’s so self-evident as to be a bit meaningless.) More to the point, there are no real ongoing progress reports, but even in the absence of that, I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job.

Finally, in other news, I’ve also been selected as the MA student representative for the 2012-13 year. The position is mostly a liaison between students and faculty, as a way to address needs and issues within the student body by having a point of contact to communicate with the appropriate faculty and staff. Although it’s extra work (and by the looks of it so far, may actually be quite a significant amount), I’m really excited to be involved. I regret not stepping out and being more involved with extracurricular activities when I was an undergrad, so I’m making a point to not let opportunities slip by while I’m here.

2012 11 09 Pulsar Color
Design
Monochrome Comments (1) Permalink