A person's Identity can be one of many things depending on where and when you live. In the lecture we talked about how there have been many different kinds of Identity throughout history. There was the pre-modern Identity, where the institutions of various forms of power determined the identities of the populace. Things like Marriage, The Church, Monarchy, Government, The State, and Work all had a say in the overall identity of the individual. Some examples of these identities are the farm worker, soldier, factory worker, housewife, gentleman, and the idea of Husband and Wife.
During Modern times, Identity evolved into something different. There were a few different ideas behind it. Some of it was based on social class and fashion that dictates one's outer identity. In this instance, people were more able to "choose" their own identity, meaning people became more outwardly self conscious about how they acted and looked within a group. People were no longer born into an identity that stuck with them throughout the rest of their life.
In the post-modern setting, ones Identity is completely constructed for an by the person. It accepts a fragmented form of oneself, with various discerning points to flesh it out. Examples of these would be Education, Age, Income, Nationality, Ethnicity, Sexual Orientation, Gender, and many other things. In art, many of these ideas have been explored these identities through various mediums.
“The notion ‘you are who you pretend to be’ has a mythic resonance. The Pygmalion story endures because it speaks to a powerful fantasy: that we are not limited by our histories, that we can be recreated or can recreate ourselves... Virtual worlds provide environments for experiences that may be hard to come by in the real”
Sherry Turkle (1994), Constructions and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality
Within the internet as a whole, online communities have become more and more popular, and with that comes the possibility of a completely constructed persona, one that might not be anything like the person sitting behind the desk. This has resulted in a very new kind of Identity, where you don't even have to meet the person or be anything like the real you in order to show an identity.
Identity has been one of the defining traits in humanity since the start of civilisation, and has become more and more broken down as time has gone by. Its an interesting phenomenon to see.
Saturday, 28 November 2015
Friday, 27 November 2015
Panopticism
In the early 1600s there was a thing known as the Great Confinement, where tons of "houses of correction" were erected to curb unemployment and idleness. It was the birth of the asylum, where someone who wasn't a boon in life was sent to a place where they would be "corrected" to fit back into society. The birth of the forms of science and knowledge like biology, psychiatry, and medicine legitimised the practices of various doctors and psychiatrists. It rationalised the various correction institutions like prison, the asylum and the hospital, and conditioning institutions like the school. Michel Foucalt, a philosopher responsible for Madness & Civilization, and Dicipline & Punish, said that it was these institutions that 'internalized our responsibilities'. He said that
"Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’"
(Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)
The Panopticon was an Architectural Design made by Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 to help discipline and condition people into learning a certain way. Its a large circular design with cells going around the outer edge, with the person in power being in the centre of the building. This design made it so that the only person you could see was the person who was either holding you or teaching you. It was supposed to internalize in the individual the conscious state that he is always being watched. It was supposed to make the individual more productive. The idea was that this building design could help reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct schoolchildren, help confine, but also study the insane, supervise workers, and put beggars and idlers to work.
Foucault described that there was a new mode of power called panopticism. It is the idea that the person in power is always watching, a sort of "big brother" mentality to keep the people in check and always working. That way the people would turn into 'docile bodies' who were self monitoring, self correcting, and obedient. He stated that power was a relation between individuals and groups, and only exists when it is exercised.
"Discipline is a ‘technology’ [aimed at] ‘how to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour, his aptitudes, how to improve his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him where he is most useful: that is discipline in my sense’"
(Foucault,1981 in O’Farrrell 2005:102)
The Panopticon was an Architectural Design made by Jeremy Bentham proposed in 1791 to help discipline and condition people into learning a certain way. Its a large circular design with cells going around the outer edge, with the person in power being in the centre of the building. This design made it so that the only person you could see was the person who was either holding you or teaching you. It was supposed to internalize in the individual the conscious state that he is always being watched. It was supposed to make the individual more productive. The idea was that this building design could help reform prisoners, treat patients, instruct schoolchildren, help confine, but also study the insane, supervise workers, and put beggars and idlers to work.
Foucault described that there was a new mode of power called panopticism. It is the idea that the person in power is always watching, a sort of "big brother" mentality to keep the people in check and always working. That way the people would turn into 'docile bodies' who were self monitoring, self correcting, and obedient. He stated that power was a relation between individuals and groups, and only exists when it is exercised.
Wednesday, 11 November 2015
The Flipped Classroom
The flipped classroom is the somewhat liberal idea of having a non-hierarchical, student centred classroom in which the students actively engage in the ideas presented, and peer assess themselves according to their different points of view. Instead of a traditional classroom, where the teacher gives assignments and homework in a hierarchical structure that is teacher centric where the students follow instruction.
There have been a few instances of this type of classroom, mostly during the 60s and 70s, but one dates back all the way to the 1700s. Joseph Jacotot was an exiled teacher from france that went to the Netherlands to work at a job for half pay. The main problem with that setup was that Joseph and his students could not understand each other. He gave his students a flemish and french copy of an assigned book, and by the end of the book the students could understand the book and speak french as well. From that it was surmised that all men have equal intelligence and that we can teach what we don't know, as well as every person having the ability to instruct themselves. Also that the idea that "everything is in everything."
There are a few schools nowadays that grew out of these types of philosophies, such as Universite Paris 8, which grew out of a student revolt from 1968. Their battle cry was "Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!" and they were for student autonomy and education for all.
There is also The School Of the Damned in London, which is a completely autonomous student driven university.
Overall the idea of turning the traditional educational spade on it's head is at least somewhat appealing. I feel as though it would be a little chaotic, but some people thrive on chaos.
There have been a few instances of this type of classroom, mostly during the 60s and 70s, but one dates back all the way to the 1700s. Joseph Jacotot was an exiled teacher from france that went to the Netherlands to work at a job for half pay. The main problem with that setup was that Joseph and his students could not understand each other. He gave his students a flemish and french copy of an assigned book, and by the end of the book the students could understand the book and speak french as well. From that it was surmised that all men have equal intelligence and that we can teach what we don't know, as well as every person having the ability to instruct themselves. Also that the idea that "everything is in everything."
There are a few schools nowadays that grew out of these types of philosophies, such as Universite Paris 8, which grew out of a student revolt from 1968. Their battle cry was "Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!" and they were for student autonomy and education for all.
There is also The School Of the Damned in London, which is a completely autonomous student driven university.
Overall the idea of turning the traditional educational spade on it's head is at least somewhat appealing. I feel as though it would be a little chaotic, but some people thrive on chaos.
Saturday, 31 October 2015
Death of the Author
An auteur is someone who creates a body of work, usually writing, which is what the word author is derived from. In the lecture we went to about this subject, we went over what it meant to be an auteur, how it related to not just writing, but filmmaking and having a style as well. This message was brought home for us by looking through Roland Barthes 'Death of the Author'. We looked at several excerpts from the book and talked about how cynical he was about the credit of authorship and how too much emphasis was placed upon the author, rather than the reader. Some of the ideas we went over were fairly confusing, as my mindset was not prepared for this type of in depth conversation. The general idea I got from what I heard and understood was that Barthes said that the author was that he believed the reader was more of an integral part in how the book is perceived. He believed that it wasn't the author that brought meaning to the written work, but that it was "language which speaks, not the author" (Barthes. R, 1968, pg. 143). The author is merely there to refacilitate already created works and recycle them into something that is new. In animation this can be related to how many things nowadays are recreations of already made works, and its up to the audience whether or not to accept these new works into the already known body of information.
He also believed that the modern author was a product of a modernised capitalist society, wherein the ideas of the author are held in higher praise than the readers. Where an individual cares more about the money involved rather than the actual creation of the text. In popular culture, this can be seen in Hollywood with people making movies and films with the sole reason of producing a profit out of it.
In another text, a man by the name of Landow, said "hypertext... infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting that portion to the reader"(Landow, G. P, 1992, pg 90). This predicts that through the act of reading a work, the power structure between author and reader changes in favour of the reader. In that text it talks about how hypertext can help the reader acquire more information and ideas through the act of reading and writing along with it. In the case of animation, I can see how the idea of response is very important within our modern society, seeing the many critics and movie reviewers of todays age. They tend to provide a deeper meaning to the animation by giving context a regular viewer might not have noticed. A deeper meaning which, even the creator of the animation might not have meant to create by any actual sense.
I can see how many of these peoples ideas an predictions about the modern age can be construed in todays society as both correct and false. Later in Landow's text, he quotes another man while refuting that Digital writing, because it consists of electronic signals, puts one willy-nilly on a network where everything is constantly published. Privacy becomes an increasingly fragile notion. Word processing manifests a world in which the public itself and its publicity have become omnivorous; to make public has therefore a different meaning than ever before” (ElechicLunguuge, 215).
The key phrase here, of course,is “in a sense,"…. The answer must be in some bizarrely inefficient dystopic future sense-”future” because to- day few people writing with word processors participate very frequently in ... information networks that already exist, … the billions and billions of words we would write would all have equal ability to clutter the major resource that such networks will be. " (Landow, G. P, 1992, pg 94-95). We can see that in todays internet culture there is a huge amount of information that can tend to clutter our perceptions of what the overarching point would be. There is so much information going around that privacy HAS become more and more fragile. There have been countless leaks of information from various celebrities to other bodies, even the CIA. Today there is more and more information being put through more and more filters and interpreted in many different ways. In some ways this is very good but in others it does in fact risk privacy and general well being. It also does a very good job at making the reaction to stigma and various works much more important than the actual work itself.
In closing, I would say that these two people had very interesting ideas considering most of them had no idea about what kind of landscape we have ourselves in today. I can see many of their points would be correct in terms of the animation industry and many creative industries, as well as how their ideas might be incorrect in terms of general pop culture and the ideas of the masses.
He also believed that the modern author was a product of a modernised capitalist society, wherein the ideas of the author are held in higher praise than the readers. Where an individual cares more about the money involved rather than the actual creation of the text. In popular culture, this can be seen in Hollywood with people making movies and films with the sole reason of producing a profit out of it.
In another text, a man by the name of Landow, said "hypertext... infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it and granting that portion to the reader"(Landow, G. P, 1992, pg 90). This predicts that through the act of reading a work, the power structure between author and reader changes in favour of the reader. In that text it talks about how hypertext can help the reader acquire more information and ideas through the act of reading and writing along with it. In the case of animation, I can see how the idea of response is very important within our modern society, seeing the many critics and movie reviewers of todays age. They tend to provide a deeper meaning to the animation by giving context a regular viewer might not have noticed. A deeper meaning which, even the creator of the animation might not have meant to create by any actual sense.
I can see how many of these peoples ideas an predictions about the modern age can be construed in todays society as both correct and false. Later in Landow's text, he quotes another man while refuting that Digital writing, because it consists of electronic signals, puts one willy-nilly on a network where everything is constantly published. Privacy becomes an increasingly fragile notion. Word processing manifests a world in which the public itself and its publicity have become omnivorous; to make public has therefore a different meaning than ever before” (ElechicLunguuge, 215).
The key phrase here, of course,is “in a sense,"…. The answer must be in some bizarrely inefficient dystopic future sense-”future” because to- day few people writing with word processors participate very frequently in ... information networks that already exist, … the billions and billions of words we would write would all have equal ability to clutter the major resource that such networks will be. " (Landow, G. P, 1992, pg 94-95). We can see that in todays internet culture there is a huge amount of information that can tend to clutter our perceptions of what the overarching point would be. There is so much information going around that privacy HAS become more and more fragile. There have been countless leaks of information from various celebrities to other bodies, even the CIA. Today there is more and more information being put through more and more filters and interpreted in many different ways. In some ways this is very good but in others it does in fact risk privacy and general well being. It also does a very good job at making the reaction to stigma and various works much more important than the actual work itself.
In closing, I would say that these two people had very interesting ideas considering most of them had no idea about what kind of landscape we have ourselves in today. I can see many of their points would be correct in terms of the animation industry and many creative industries, as well as how their ideas might be incorrect in terms of general pop culture and the ideas of the masses.
Barthes, R. (1968) "Death of the Author" in Image Music Text, (1977), London, Fontana Press
Landow, G.P. (1992) "Re-configuring the Author" in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Landow, G.P. (1992) "Re-configuring the Author" in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tuesday, 24 March 2015
Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism is the subjective artistic response to the world during the industrial revolution and modernity. As the city developed, the artists within those cities evolved with it, and it shows within their art. It doesn't just show in art in general, it shows in things like fashion at the time and peoples surroundings in terms of design. The art movement stopped looking backward and started to look foreword in a sense. People incorporated new ideas into art rather than sticking to conventional means.
Postmodernism, in contrast, can be seen as the refusal of modernity. At this time art was broken down into its essence. Art became contrary to the norm, and took on a whole new role in society. Postmodernism broke the rules in saying what was and wasn't art.
Postmodernism, in contrast, can be seen as the refusal of modernity. At this time art was broken down into its essence. Art became contrary to the norm, and took on a whole new role in society. Postmodernism broke the rules in saying what was and wasn't art.
Responsive to COP Essay
For my responsive i created a propaganda poster advertising the show Squirrel and Hedgehog, a North Korean Propaganda Cartoon.
I used the art style used in the television series, and this was especially difficult because of the low budget nature of the show.
I had to ignore depth and correct proportioning in order to do this. Im pretty sure I became a worse artist after finishing this poster. If I had the choice to do this again, I wouldn't. This responsive hurt me spiritually.
I had to ignore depth and correct proportioning in order to do this. Im pretty sure I became a worse artist after finishing this poster. If I had the choice to do this again, I wouldn't. This responsive hurt me spiritually.
Animation
Animation is derived from the word animate, which means "to give life to". Its usage has not only been constrained to the 1900s, many forms of classical usages of animation have been created, such as the Thaumatrope and the Magic Lantern. It is a form in which stories and ideas can be told. During the 1900s when modern animation was invented, it was originally used as a form of advertising in a match commercial. After that it became more widespread and common. By 1928 animation had developed enough technically, artistically and importantly commercially. It became commercially viable and extremely popular. From then on it just became more and more widespread in its usage and more and more ways of creating animation were created and put into the mix. Nowadays you can turn on any television and see at least some form of animated sequence in 10 minutes of watching.
Photography
Photography is used in both a sense of documentation and art. What is best is when both are used in combination to give a sense of depth to the subject you are photographing. People have used photography to show the horrors of war, great revolutions, and moments in history. It can capture individualism and the power of the masses. It can show the beauty of nature and the ingenuity of the human condition. In its early history it was only considered a tool to document, and not as a form of expression, but over time it became well accepted within the art community.
Advertising
Advertising is often considered a tool used by capitalism to change established values within society, Advertising has gotten slack for being considered evil. It has influenced us in what we believe we need and want, and use stereotypes of sexes and races to sell a product. But many good things about advertising has come to the forefront. It can drive entire economies, it can show creativity, and it create persuasive communication to fufill peoples dreams. It is a very powerful form of art. It can influence pop culture, in many entertaining ways. It can enlighten and inspire ideas and revolutions. It reflects values, hopes and dreams for many individuals. So advertising is like anything, it has good sides and bad sides to it.
Mass Communication
Mass Communication is the method in which ideas are spread throughout the masses. In an art context, it is widely used in Graphic Design, Advertising, and Communication Design. Whether or not those ideas are communicated with words or shapes is up to the creator of each piece. People throughout the years have used mass communication in things like propaganda campaigns, advertising for a product, graphic design, and many other things. The reason graphic design cant be clumped in with advertising is because instead of creating a piece to communicate a product, Graphic designers use mass communication to show ideas and philosophy.
Illustration
Illustration has been used in Hundreds of formats since its beginning. Believed to be started with Illuminated Manuscripts, Illustration has helped guide our imaginations in the written format for many years. Since then it has evolved into a way to portray ideas through still image to people. It is the combination of Concept, Context, and Image, meaning you make an image with a concept within a context. It's used in many forms of Advertising as well as propaganda. It could be said that Animation is Illustration but in movement. Which is like next level Illustration in a way. Still, there is something to be said with being able to get across an idea with using 2-d still images.
The History of Print
In our COP lecture we went over how print has changed over the years. Print can be dated back to prehistoric times, since cavemen used to make negative space prints of their hands. Print is used in a multitude of ways, from making books and writing to making woodblock print paintings like Albrecht Durer and the Japanese style woodblock prints. It is used mostly in the form of mass communication. Graphic Designers in the 1900s used Woodblock type to form typographical paintings. It is an interesting art form, and I cant help but think that somewhere it has been used in animation.
Sunday, 11 January 2015
The Disney Studio At War
This text was about how Disney Studios had to adapt their work to be able to stay afloat during the events of World War 2. IT talked about how Disney Studios was overtaken and used as an ammunition storehouse during the events of Pearl Harbor. It went over how they all had to be Identified to be able to work there. They explained how both Pinocchio and Fantasia bombed in the box office in 1940 because of everyone's focus on the war.
Disney barely even survived during the war, they went into a tremendous amount of debt because they did a lot of their animations and things related to the wartime for a lot less than usual. They weren't able to hold a profit because of it, and they ended up going into a deficit of 3.4 million dollars.
They also made a large amount of insignias and logos for the war effort. These logos cost their studio about 25 dollars a piece, but they were all given away for free, because Walt Disney felt he owed something to the people serving in the war because of their war propaganda animations.
Even though their studio was in a deficit, they ended up turning out more than 5 times their usual work output. These people worked to the bone for their country and ended up going into debt because of it. They made animations that were in the 5-30 minute range, but a few specific animations went on for an hour or longer. Disney studios managed to put out as many as 19 cartoons a year.
One specific animation called Victory through Air Power was an idea that was being kicked around in the pentagon for a while until a man named Seversky described it to Walt. Walt thought it was an amazing idea and he ran with it. It was a 65 minute film about the history and conception of the airplane. It ended with America being pictured as a eagle defeating an octopus, which stood for the japanese empire. However the film was a bust, losing almost 500,000 dollars in the box office. They almost made a story about Gremlins, which were mythical creatures that caused problems in the engines of airplanes, but Walt Disney Dropped the idea, not after producing extensive storyboards that cost about 50,000 dollars.
Disney studios has had a lot of hardships, but the most notable one is during the wartime. It shows the amount of work that his studios did just to be able to stay afloat and survive until now. Disney was one of the few studios that was able to adapt itself to work alongside the war effort, and because of that they now have a huge history relating to propaganda and wartime efforts.
Disney barely even survived during the war, they went into a tremendous amount of debt because they did a lot of their animations and things related to the wartime for a lot less than usual. They weren't able to hold a profit because of it, and they ended up going into a deficit of 3.4 million dollars.
They also made a large amount of insignias and logos for the war effort. These logos cost their studio about 25 dollars a piece, but they were all given away for free, because Walt Disney felt he owed something to the people serving in the war because of their war propaganda animations.
Even though their studio was in a deficit, they ended up turning out more than 5 times their usual work output. These people worked to the bone for their country and ended up going into debt because of it. They made animations that were in the 5-30 minute range, but a few specific animations went on for an hour or longer. Disney studios managed to put out as many as 19 cartoons a year.
One specific animation called Victory through Air Power was an idea that was being kicked around in the pentagon for a while until a man named Seversky described it to Walt. Walt thought it was an amazing idea and he ran with it. It was a 65 minute film about the history and conception of the airplane. It ended with America being pictured as a eagle defeating an octopus, which stood for the japanese empire. However the film was a bust, losing almost 500,000 dollars in the box office. They almost made a story about Gremlins, which were mythical creatures that caused problems in the engines of airplanes, but Walt Disney Dropped the idea, not after producing extensive storyboards that cost about 50,000 dollars.
Disney studios has had a lot of hardships, but the most notable one is during the wartime. It shows the amount of work that his studios did just to be able to stay afloat and survive until now. Disney was one of the few studios that was able to adapt itself to work alongside the war effort, and because of that they now have a huge history relating to propaganda and wartime efforts.
Animation in the Commercial Realm
This lecture went over how animation is executed within the commercial realm with things like commercials, education, film title sequences, and music videos. We went over the difference between Autership and the Avant Garde vs. the commercial Realm of Animation. Again he showed us the Animation Matches:An Appeal and explained how it was the first commercial use of animation and the first use of actual animation. He showed us a piece called Potcha which was an animation advertising the post office in Uzbekistan. After this he showed us an animation for Lloyds Bank which had nothing to do with actual banking. I found it interesting that even this type of persuasion in advertising can be used in animation. After this he showed us various christmas ads and explained how holidays are commercialized. He also explained how games like Animal Crossing can introduce commercialism to the very young. This lecture was really interesting, because it showed various types of persuasion that can be used in tandem with animation. Since this is the last lecture i'll be going to I hope that I'll be able to identify commercialism being used in the real world in the future.
Gender in Animation
This lecture was about Gender and Gender Stereotype in animation and art in general. He began this lecture by showing us various paintings and portraits that were made throughout history relating to women and explained each as we went through them. Then he showed us some Performance Art and photography pieces like Interior Scroll, which depicts a woman pulling a scroll out of what seems to be her pelvis. He also showed us a piece that was a tent and on the inside it showed names of everyone the artist has slept with, giving no context to the situation of those people in relation to her. He then showed us a contest called the miss digital world contest, in which 3-d modeler sent in 3-d modeled women as a beauty pageant. He also showed us an animation about women objectifying men and how a reverse roles situation changes some peoples viewpoints. This lecture went into great detail about gender in relation to art, but not a lot of it was relating to animation, save the few pieces he showed us. Nevertheless, it was an interesting lecture to experience.
Animation in Politics and Propaganda
This lecture was about how Animation had been affected by politics and how it was used as propaganda in history. We were shown various animations relating to this subject. The first one we were shown was one of the first animated pieces. It was a commercial for matches, called Matches: An Appeal. Its a stop motion animation of a stick figure made out of matchsticks writing on a chalkboard to advertise matches. I found it interesting that animation was originally a gimmick for an advertisement, and how it's evolved into the art form we see today. The next animation we were shown was a visual representation of the sinking of the Lusitania. Since there wasn't actually any footage of this event someone hired a group of animators to make some that gave a description of how it happened. The film itself lasted about 8 minutes, which i thought drew it out a bit too long, seeing as how a lot of the footage is repeated throughout the film. After this he showed us various Disney animations that were made during wartime to fuel the war effort, in both the eastern and western theaters. This Lecture was really interesting to me, moreso than any other that I've been to. Hopefully more of my lectures will be this engaging in the future.
COP Breifing
For the first Lecture, we were shown various things that were in and out of context. First we were shown a cover of TIME magazine that covered September 11th, 2001. The Instructor asked us to recall what we were doing when we heard about this even in history. I talked about how i was in kindergarten taking a nap when my teacher turned on the television and they were covering it live. after he showed us this picture, he then showed us a picture of a album cover depicting the two towers blowing up with people posing in the foreground. We were asked to respond to this, and after we all did he told us that this cover was made before 9/11 actually happened.
After all this, he went onto show us how the context around the Volkswagen Beetle had changed since its original conception. Originally it was a car made and funded by the nazi warmachine, for its citizens. During the 60s it changed into a symbol of hippie culture, and nowadays people just think of it as a car.
This lecture was interesting because it showed us that things can change out view according to the context in which it is presented.
After all this, he went onto show us how the context around the Volkswagen Beetle had changed since its original conception. Originally it was a car made and funded by the nazi warmachine, for its citizens. During the 60s it changed into a symbol of hippie culture, and nowadays people just think of it as a car.
This lecture was interesting because it showed us that things can change out view according to the context in which it is presented.
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