OUGD501 Lecture Notes: The Gaze and The Media

OUGD501
LECTURE NOTES
THE GAZE IN THE MEDIA

According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been over come- men act and women watch them selves being looked at BERGER 1972

HANS MEMLING
VANITY
1485

He is apportioning a type of moral judgement, because she is looking at her self its ok for us to look at her.

1485 is round about the time the catholic church made the statue of witches.

Gives us permission to look at her as she is preoccupied at looking at her self. Its voyeuristic, as if we are staring at her


The women in this image is partially covering her eyes, because of this there is no challenge at looking at the women, we are invited by the artist to gaze at the figure, but also the lady in the picture is also allowing us to gaze.


SOPHIE DAHL for opium

This advert was deemed to overtly sexual, there is a concentration of the hand on the breast, They turned the image to a vertical format which adds emphasis to the face rather than the hand on the breast.


TITANS VENUS OF URBINO

The look in this womens face is a flirty invitation to look at her body. There is still a motion of spying voyeurism. The position of her left hand could be viewed as the lady protecting her modesty or exuding sexual


OLYMPIA Manet

Here there is a challenge to the gaze. She is looking straight at is. In this painting there is a definite difference in the hand position as she is definitely protecting her modesty and hiding her self from us.


LE GRAND ODALISQUE

'any artist that is not in my show should rethink his career' Note use of the word 'his' 85% of the nudes are female 

BAR AT THE FOLIES BERGERES

The mirror behind the bar reflects her image but not how it should be. It reflects the paris society, something she was not what she is part of.

PICTURE FOR WOMEN Jeff Wall

Coping the look of the bar made. But what he has done is quite complex. Using thirds the camera represents Manet in the original painting. There is a complex use of space that refers to the use of space used in manets picture. Wall makes the camera return the gaze.

Coward R 1984

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at the women on the streets. The model is wearing sunglasses, this is a common trait as it means the gaze can not be returned and we don't feel as though we are being watched back.

The profusion of images which characterise contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women... a form of voyeurism. 
peeping tom 1960

Male body can also be objectified 


Marilyn: William Travillas dress from the seven year itch

Studies spectatorship in hollywood cinema. She looks at the way the bodies are chopped up during film. Making the body partial removes us from character of the film and allows us to fantasise. The female characters are also reactive and passive. Cinemas are darkened rooms inviting us to fantasise, the darkened room is sexually charged and allows us to watch with out being watched our selves.


uses it as an unusual image as the women are shown as very active and aggressive. It is referencing a more active role for a female, Griselda Pollock argues that women have been left out by art history. Her work is about repositioning women and tries to make them stand out in history.

OUGD501 Design Context: Identity

OUGD501
DESIGN CONTEXT
IDENTITY

Concepts of otherness in visual representation, the core concept when discussing identity.

IDENTITY CREATION:

What makes you you?

• Environment
• What you wear
• Way you look
• Education
• Personality
• Diet
• Family
• Class/society
• Friends/socialisation
• Age
• Name
• Religion
• Money
• Where you work

How do you assert your own identity?

• Fashion
• Music taste
• Make up
• Hair
• Cars you drive
• Mobile phones
• Accent
• Hobbies
• Political views
• Social interactions
• Friends and who you associate with

Culture is the framework within which our identities are formed, expressed and regulated.

IDENTITY FORMATION

• Process from psychoanalysis
• Jacques LACAN
• The 'Hommelette'
• The 'Mirror Stage'

When you are born you don't have any idea that you are separate from your mother, you don't have any conception of your self being a separate being.

MIRROR STAGE

sense of self (subjectivity) built on:

• an illusion of wholeness
• receiving views from others

RESULT=OWN SUBJECTIVITY IS FRAGILE

CONSTRUCTING OF THE OTHER

Problems: relies on the assumption of opposition and radical otherness.

In the same way that we create our own identities-in opposition to what we are not-so does a society

IDENTIFICATION

• Shores up unstable identities through the illusion of unity
• Shared fashion, belief system,values

SUBTERRANEAN VALUES, MATZA 1961

OUGD501 Design Context: Consumerism Task

Task

Using the text Berger, J. (1972) 'Ways of Seeing', write one critical analysis of an advert which, in your opinion, reflects the logic of consumerism, or the social conditions of consumerism, discussed in the lecture 'Consumerism' (17/10/13). Use at least five quotes, referenced according to the Harvard system, in support of your argument. The lecture powerpoint is available on eStudio for reference. Post this discussion to your blogs labelled OUGD501

Research Sources/Further Information

Ways of Seeing is available as a .pdf under the 'Module Resources' section of eStudio Century of the Self documentary http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prTarrgvkjo

OUGD501 Lecture Notes: Identity

OUGD501
LECTURE NOTES
IDENTITY

LECTURE SUMMARY

• To introduce historical conceptions of identity
• To introduce Foucault’s ‘discourse’ methodology
• To place and critique contemporary practice within these frameworks, and to consider their validity
• To consider ‘postmodern’ theories of identity as ‘fluid’ and ‘constructed’ (in particular Zygmunt Bauman)
• To consider identity today, especially in the digital domain

THEORIES OF IDENTITY 


•ESSENTIALISM (traditional approach)
•Our biological make up makes us who we are.
•We all have an inner essence that makes us who we are.
•POST MODERN THEORISTS DISAGREE Post-Modern theorists are ANTI-ESSENTIALIST 

The more vertical the line the more intelligent you are. Shows racial discrimination and the idea of Nazi perfect race.

PHYSIOGNOMY LEGITIMISING RACISM

Hieronymous Bosch (1450 - 1516)

Christ carrying the Cross, Oil on panel, c. 1515

Hieronymous bosch paintings of religion shows Jesus and Mary as blonde hair blue eyed beautiful people, which we know is not true.

Chris Ofili, Holy Virgin Mary, 1996

Historical phases of Identity

Douglas Kellner – Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern, 1992
•pre modern identity – personal identity is stable – defined by long standing roles
•Modern identity – modern societies begin to offer a wider range of social roles. Possibility to start ‘choosing’ your identity, rather than simply being born into it. People start to ‘worry’ about who they are
•Post-modern identity – accepts a ‘fragmented ‘self’. Identity is constructed

 

 

Modern identity 19th and early 20th centuries

  Gustave Caillebotte (1848 - 94),

Le Pont de l’Europe, 1876

Baudelaire – introduces concept of the ‘flaneur’ (gentleman-stroller)

Veblen – ‘Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure’

MODERNE IDENTITY 19th AND EARLY 20th CENTURIES

SIMMEL

• trickle down theory
• emulation
• distinction
• The mask of fashion

GEORG SIMMEL:

‘The feeling of isolation is rarely as decisive and intense when one actually finds oneself physically alone, as when one is a stranger without relations, among many physically close persons, at a party, on the train, or in the traffic of a large city’ 
 
Simmel suggests that:
Because of the speed and mutability of modernity, individuals withdraw into themselves to find peace. He describes this as ‘the separation of the subjective from the objective life’

 POST MODERN IDENTITY: 
 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Identity is constructed out of the discourses culturally available to us.

What is a discourse ?… a set of recurring statements that define a particular cultural ‘object’ (e.g., madness, criminality, sexuality) and provide concepts and terms through which such an object can be studied and discussed.’ Cavallaro, (2001)

POSSIBLE DISCOURSE:

• Age 
• Class 
• Gender 
• Nationality 
• Race/ethnicity 
• Sexual orientation 
• Education 
• Income Etc

DISCOURSE TO BE CONSIDERED:

•  Class
• Nationality
• Race/ethnicity
• Gender and sexuality 

 

OUGD501 Design Context: Consumerism

OUGD501
DESIGN CONTEXT
CONSUMERISM

SUMMARY OF LECTURE:

• Manufactoring desire
• Desire=false need
• Social control vs freedom
• Stratification inequality
• Palliative
• Mass production- Advertising and branding
• Freud- Irrational desires and animal instincts
• Bernays- Public relations 
• Pleasure principle- made to think that our desires have been met and makes us temporarily docile.

Illusionary belief that people at the bottom of the social glass are not in that class e.g because they can own a big television.

P148-P151

• we all feel as though we have the right for the individual pursuit of happiness. But the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.

OUGD501 Design Context: Communictaion Theory Task

OUGD501
DESIGN CONTEXT
COMMUNICATION THEORY TASK

Task

Find a piece of design and write a contextual and social analysis on it, based on the Shannon and Weaver model.

ALZHEIMERS RESEARCH:

 

Art director Domenico Liberti develops a moving and powerful advertising campaign for Alzheimer's Research.

This ad campaign's primary purpose is to raise awareness for Alzheimers, It is aimed at elderly people and their families as these are the people that the disease affects the most. For this campaign to raise awareness of the disease, Liberti avoided long winded explanantions of symptoms and what it leads to, opting for a hard-hitting visual approach instead. Through the use of generic family photos, Liberti's message about the effects of this disease hit home in a much more personal way. He employs a redundant form of communication by removing the faces of family members, no words are needed to explain the message he's conveying. There's something incredibly disturbing about the faceless images, which is kind of the point and why the concept is so effective.

SHANNON AND WEAVER MODEL

 

The Shannon and Weaver communication model can be applied to this campaign. The information source is Alzheimer's awareness as they are the client and set the brief, the transmitter is the art director who took the information and created a concept to help portray the message, The channel is the final design, in this case the print based images in the format of posters, billboards and magazine advertisements. The receiver is the audience, in this case the general public viewing the the ad in one of its channel forms. The destination is the audience receiving the message and the raised awareness on Alzheimer's disease. This ad is very effective as it plays with peoples emotion and pulls on their heart strings, the personal approach of the ad helps people emphasize and hits out to a wide target audience.The noise of this campaign is reduced by the use of the word 'Alzheimer' it helps create the optimum redundancy and avoids an emphatic tone by not over complicating the design. Instead, playing with peoples own emotions rather than filling them with information that they can find out for themselves by researching.

OUGD501 Lecture Notes: Consumerism- Persuasian, Society, Brand, Culture

OUGD501
COP LECTURE NOTES 
CONSUMERISM

AIMS OF LECTURE:

• Analyse the rise of US consumerism
• Discuss the links between consumerism and our unconscious desires
• Sigmund Freud
• Edmund Bernays
• Consumerism as social control

Content of lecture mainly sourced from the above. 

SIGMUND FREUD (1854-1939)
 

• New theory of human nature
• Psychoanalysis
• Hidden primitive sexual forces and animal instincts which need controlling
• The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)
• The Unconscious (1915)
• The Ego and the Id (1923)
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
• Civilization & its Discontents (1930 
• The unconcious is a strange and irrational place.

 

  1930

• Fundamental tension between civilization and the individual
• Human instincts incompatible with the well being of community.
• The Pleasure Principle- If we can satiate our primitive desires, momentarily we are docile and happy
• civilisation will make us discontented as we cant live out our desires with in society.

WW1 1914-1918


EDWARD BERNAYS (1891-1995)

• Press Agent
• Employed by public information during WW1
• Post war- set up ‘The Council on Public Relations’
• Birth of PR
• Based on the ideas of Freud (his uncle).
• Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923)
•  Propaganda (1928)

EASTER DAY PARADE

Employed by tobacco company to get woman to smoke, he paid lots of beautiful debutante to walk in the middle of New York parade. At an organized moment under the watchful eye of cameras the woman sparked up. He fed a story to the papers that these women were sufrigets the cigarettes became a symbol of sex appeal independance and freedom, breaking free of the oppression of men.

1924

• product placement
• Celebrity endorsements
• The use of pseudo-scientific reports
• Even presidents were involved 

FORDISM:

• Henry ford 1863-1947
• Transposes taylorism to car factories of Detroit 
• Moving assembly line
• Standard production models built as they move through the factory
• Requires large investment, but increases productivity so much that relatively high wages can be paid, allowing the workers to buy the product they produce

THE MODEL T FORD 1908-1927 

• 1910 – 20,000 produced, $850
• 1916 – 600,000, $360
• By 1927 – 15 million manufactured, $290
• Assembly time reduced from 12.5 to 1.5 hours

Aimed at men and sells the idea of male sexual virility linked to owning a car. It sells power, over women, over the car, over the road.




MARKETING HIDDEN NEEDS
VANCE PACKARD

• Selling emotional security
• Selling reassurance of worth
• Selling ego-gratification
• Selling Creative Outlets
• Selling Love Objects
• Selling sense of power
• Selling a sense of roots
• Selling immortality

1920

A new elite is needed to manage the bewildered herd
Manufacturing consent
Governmental propaganda in order to control its own people.

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1917

Over threw the wealthy rich and created a communist nation ran by the people and distributing wealth fairly amongst the people.

OUGD504 Design for web: Web lecture

OUGD504
DESIGN FOR WEB
WEB LECTURE

Cern is the European Organization for Nuclear Research and was were the internet was born. 
The internet was created 1991 - Switzerland 
Started 1991
Tim Burnerslee





'' To link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will''



The first ever internet page looked like this, very minimal, monochrome and text based.

 Web Servers:





The worlds first web server, was introduced by a next computer that was designed and built by Steve Jobs.



First Web Image: 1992 'Les Horribles Cernettes'  



In 1992, the first image was uploaded to the internet and was in the form of a PNG file. A universal file format.


Part 2

Terminology

Code: What the websites are made from
HTTP: Hyper Text Transer Protocol
HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets (What makes websites look appealing / thought and context.)
FTP: File Transfer Protocol (Sends a large body of information to another computer, e.g Google create a websites design when the link is clicked on)
CMS: Content Management System (content change and updates)

- Static websites dont change
- For good website it needs to be dynamic.
Skeuomorphism: A derivative object that retains ornamental design cues from structures that were necessary in the original.



This is an example of skeuomorphism because there are magazines on a news stand shelf but when its featured on screen its ment to be digital and we should be able to just slide through images of the next pages rather than it be a book with turning pages.

Responsive design: ' Could be reactive design' It is ' Responsive' because the design 'responses' i.e can be adapted to a variety of media using screens of various sizes. 

• The concept was introduced by Ethan Marcotte

This is an example of responsive design. This a website that works across a variety of platfroms, from the laptop, iphone and tablet.

Part 3 
Design
You can use a grid on any website
The grid is the most important tool.



A website is designed by a grid system. The grid is the most important tool used by a designer to keep consistency.



When creating a website you should always think about the considerations, and weather it will enrich your audience.
What is the purpose of the website?
Who are the target audience?
What do the target audience need?
We then though about how we could create a website that was relevant to us as graphic designers
Purpose: showcase work, promote, jobs
Audience: potential clients, local companies, variety of work
Needs: Images, easy to navigate, engaging, stand out, contact.

Websites + Books 
www.awwwards.com
www.webdesignledger.com
www.fivesimplesteps.com
www.piccsy.com/everything-design
www.aisleone.net
Books 
HTML + CSS 
Practical guide designing for web
Scratching the surface - Adrian s.
For the next part of the seminar we looked at some websites as a class and said the first word we thought.
BBC
Cluttered 
White
Busy
Blocks
Monochrome

Bicycle website
Clean
Bike
Grey
Minimal
Ling cars
Pop up
Magazine
Cheap
Cluterd
Crazy
Disgusting
Flashy
Cathedral
Medieval
Game
Tacky
Inappropriate
Pop up
Legwork studio
Bad Navigation
Unorthodox
Un-engaging
Bad use of type
Inexibit is a good website to go on - another behance, designers & illustrators exhibit there work.

OUGD501 Design for Web: Research

OUGD501
DESIGN PRODUCTION
DESIGN FOR WEB

• Cern - The internet was created 1991 - Switzerland 
• Started 1991
• Tim Burnerslee

'' To link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will''

• Web serves - steve jobs NeXT

• 1992 worlds First image  - ' Les horribles cernettes'  

• universal file format

Part 2

Terminology

• All websites use codes
• Encoding - They all mean something
• HTTP - hyper text transfer protocol
• URL - uniform resource locator
• HTML - hyper text markup language
• CSS- cascading style sheets
• FTP - File Transfer protocol
• CMS- content management system

- Static websites dont change

- For good website it needs to be dynamic.

• skeuomorphism - Imitate other websites - like ebooks with turning pages.

This is an example of skeuomorphism because they still have magazines on a news stand shelf but when its featured on screen its ment to be digital and we should be able to just slide through images of the next pages rather than it be a book with turning pages.

Definition - Its a derivative object that remains oriental design from structures that were necessary in the original 

- A software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.

Responsive design ' Could be reactive design' It is ' Responsive' because the design 'responses' i.e can be adapted to a variety of media using screens of various sizes. 

The concept was introduced by Ethan Marcotte

Part 3 

Design

• You can use a grid on any website
• The grid is the most important tool.

WHAT IS THE POINT?

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE WEBSITE?

WHO ARE THE TARGET AUDIENCE?

• potential clients
• local companies 
• promote yourself

Websites and books we should look at - 

• Awwwards www.awwwards.com
• Web design ledger www.webdesignledger.com
• Five simple steps www.fivesimplesteps.com
• Piccsy - everything design www.piccsy.com/everything-design
• Aisleone www.aisleone.net

Books 

• Html & css 
• Practical guide designing for web
• Scratching the surface - Adrian s.

We looked at some websites as a class and said the first word we thought.
Apple website -

• fluorescent 
• simple
• bright 
• unique
• high end
• typography

LCA-

• Thin
• Colour
• Bland

BBC-

• Cluttered 
• White
• Busy
• Blocks
• Monochrome

Bicycle website- 

• Clean
• Bike
• Grey
• Minimal

Arcade- 

• Cheap 
• cluttered
• bad use of colours
• & Images

Ling cars-

• Pop up
• Magazine
• Cheap
• Cluterd
• Crazy
• Disgusting
• Flashy

Cathedral-

• Medieval
• Game
• Tacky
• Inappropriate
• Pop up

Legwork studio-

• Bad Navigation
• Unorthodox
• Un-engaging
• Bad use of type

Inexibit is a good website to go on - another behance, designers & illustrators exhibit there work.

Task - Go on more websites answer the three questions.

WHAT IS THE POINT?

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE WEBSITE?

WHO ARE THE TARGET AUDIENCE?