The Creative Ecology

The creative industries are always growing for jobs.

 

Issue	Old Economy	New Economy
Markets	Stable	Dynamic
Scope of Competition	National	Global
Organisational Form	Hierarchical	Networked
Structure	Manufacturing core	Services/ information core
Source of Value	Raw materials, physical capital	Flexible production

 

The fundamental challenges that we face are:

Underestimation of technological embedding, application of superseded economic models and application of superseded copyright models.

Over this 12 week module I have learnt more about my involvement in the industry at this moment in time.  Information is key; I have to start looking at what I’m best at.  I have to be networking; pulling all my information and other talents together. As well as analysing I need to now be able to know the good stuff from the bad, what I should and shouldn’t be reading and what will drive me forward.  I have to be able to write and represent myself and my work in different places.  I’ve got to start and continue to produce stuff.  I have to think about other people’s work and how I can change it because nothings original anymore.  It’s not enough for me to communicate I have to collaborate as well with other people who have different skills and talents and it will make my work greater.  I also need to understand how to do proper searching for the information I need.

Overall I have to go through the processes and development stages of my work and then reflect on it and have people I know and trust look at my work for an honest opinion.

Net-Art: Designing Virtual Space.

I recently learnt that Net-Art is a new art form that’s part of the network space.  It’s accessible and relatively easily to step into the network space which makes the variation of art much wider.  Net-art is the only art form that curates itself and it is also an open source.  The following two videos are from Eva and Franco Mattes website, they are perfect examples of how art in the network space is conceptual. http://0100101110101101.org/home/mygeneration/ http://vimeo.com/16864989 .  I found these two videos very amusing and interesting.  The “my generation” video shows just how much of a hook technology has on this generation and even though the people in the video are ridiculously hooked in an unhealthy level on gaming, this video has made the situation hilarious and makes everybody realise just how much of a joke the addictiveness is.  In the 2^nd video “Freedom” I also found it very amusing how serious people take their games and are ruthless when they are in front of a controller. These examples show how net-art folds art into life and is also a non-expensive material to use to create art.

Info graphics is considered a part of Net-art also although the data has to be used in an artistic context for it to work.

Overall this topic has made me realise that this generation, including myself, are “free floating signifiers” and take things from where we are and what we know to create a form of art that we could teach to people more experienced.

The Mobile Visual Environment

Mobiles are so important in our lives.  Probably more important than most people realise.  The pressures of people’s lives give a drive for a need for mobile technology.  One contribution to this need for a mobile is caused by killer apps.  Killer apps are not actual apps but and application that the whole world completely wants and needs overnight and they change the way in which the world works.  At this minute in time the two major killer apps are texting and email.  Email changed the way education worked.  People don’t have to attend class anymore if their tutors do online lectures and this works for businesses also with lectures and meetings.  Texting changed the how language was used and created some of its own.  The need for mobile phones created a paranoid society.  Parents now have this desperate need to stay in constant contact with their children when they are out playing.  This has partly to do with the crime rate rising but most of it is to do with the mobile phone acting as an essential piece of people’s lives.

                Mobile phones have positive and negative sides.  A positive is that mobiles can mean you can be in a physical location but intellectually in multiple places.  It can sustain relationships like face timing etc. and has opened people’s lives with sexting.  This then can lead into the negatives of mobiles where sexting can blur the meanings of particular messages and they can be misread.  We have also become medically obsessed that phones can cause problems with our health.

                From the visual side of mobile phones they are seen as a fashion accessory and with some people they are a statement of wealth and status.  Phone covers are also a statement and an expression of us to the world.

                On a global scale mobile phones can be used as a legally binding contract in Africa and they only use it for texts, they can’t afford to use it for calls.  I found that really interesting and was an insight to how different cultures see and use the mobile.

                The future of the mobile means we will have:

• constant connectedness
• more interaction because of the development of apps
• no interface interfaces : touchscreen will die and voice interaction will develop
• immersion : it will become part of us, holographic images and 3D
• similar to the previous point human and machines will converge.

 

Overall I learnt some interesting things about mobiles and didn’t realise how essential they were to some people.  I love imagining what sort of devices and developments will be thought of next because the technology is so advanced already.

Internet of Things

The internet of things is how we have evolved with use of the internet and its devices. The internet and the interweb are two different things. The internet is an object that does a particular thing. The interweb is the interconnections of how that is used and connected. The connections between these things have changed over the years. It began with the Sarnoff Loop which is a broadcast of 1 source to a number of people and there is no connection within the people. This then developed into the Metcalf Loop, a one to one connection and a prime example of this is the mobile. Now we have advanced to the Reed Loop which is lines of communication multiplied such as the computer.
If we have an internet of things connected all the time we will have too much data and we won’t know what to do with it all. The negative sides of having too much data are that we will be judged on it like how doctors are judged on their fail rates etc. although it’s not fair that their patients could have been seriously ill. A major positive side is a video we watched of a TED talk by Deb Roy “The Birth of a Word”. It’s amazing what he has done with the use of data. It’s obvious that he and his team put so much work into it but because it was so personal it would have been well worth it. The fact that he invites you into his life and his family makes you feel like part of the experiment. This talk benefits us because it would give us inspiration and make us think of new ways to start presenting data. We would also start thinking about our own data and if you are a parent you may start to think about how you’d teach your child to talk.
Overall the internet of things is where you gather together your data to make your infographic. Sometimes the data doesn’t matter it’s the art of how it’s presented.

Modernism and Postmodernism- who cares?

Modernism       

When I heard any word even remotely like modernism, renaissance, fauvism, post modernism, and basically any word with “ism” at the end  I automatically dread having to listen to information about it because it goes in one ear and out the other.  But in this class I actually learnt some stuff about modernism and postmodernism which I normally would have blanked out.  We started off talking about modernism and how it began at the time of the industrial revolution when everything was industrialised and a microcosm of modern life.  I never quite knew the definition before but that lecture taught me that modernism completely dismisses anything that came before it and people were making things from modern materials and making them very minimalistic.  I would say modernism is very independent because it has the attitude of being original and different from everybody else and the competition of trying to be the next one to come up with a new outstanding idea that was never heard of before.  Even though modernism is independent I would also say its dependant in other aspects for example, modernism is obsessed with knowing about itself, where we come from and where we’re going.  Psychology and sociology was formed in the modernism period because of his sort of thinking.  These practises’ also started challenging religion and questioning old values and ideas.  Modernism developed a strong interest in the future; in moving forward and believing we were going somewhere.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism doesn’t really follow any guidelines like modernism does.  It doesn’t say new is wrong, old is better or religion is the way forward.  With postmodernism anything goes!  Some traits of postmodernism is the principal that it’s always about you and how you see things, it’s not about the thing itself it’s about how you see it and in some case’s how you interpret it.   Here are the characteristics of postmodernism:

Shallowness-   An example of this is the Blair Witch Project, we know nothing about the characters or why their camping out and have no intentions of wanting to find it out; we are more interested in what’s going to happen to them next.  No depth to our interest in the story.  Another example of this characteristic was 9/11.  The thing we remember most about that tragedy wasn’t the people being killed or how it was making America paranoid and therefore destroying itself from within.  The thing we remember most is the scene of the airplanes going into the buildings and how immoral it is that some people would say it’s the best postmodernism piece of art yet.

Intertextuality- This is the blurring of distinctions between genres.  A great example of this is Pulp Fiction; it combines a range of films.

Non-linear Narrative- Emphasis on fragmented forms and random seeming collages of different material.  Example of this is the Twitter Novel where you can jump about from different pages and the information is still readable.

Knowing-ness- You always know you’re doing something.  Tendency towards reflexivity, self-consciousness.  We can get away with things because people know were intentionally doing it.

Minimalism- Letting a simple idea stand on its own.

Anything goes- A rejection of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.  Both depends on choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying and consuming art.

Art is good in their own right depending on their field.­­

Presenting the New- Exhibition and Publication.

                In this lecture we started off by looking at David Shrigley.  I love his work because it makes people talk and takes the hand at particular things in society today and he makes illustrations to do with topics that society try to avoid.  This then carried on to a piece for the City of Culture that was recently placed in the guildhall (http://www.flickr.com/photos/jameswhorriskey/8136902655/).  These two topics were a representation of how the artists themselves see the industry as being ridiculous and they exploit it to their advantage.   It was also a lesson for us to be sure of what we’re exhibiting of our own work because they will be the pieces that we will be known for and have attached to our names for our career.

                We also talked about digital space and how we can use the publication of Facebook and apps to make exhibitions for ourselves and change that sort of application so that we can benefit from it.  Although we are told to use these applications and websites to our advantage there is also a very blurred line between public and private information and it is mostly because of apps like Four Square, Facebook, Twitter etc. that we have to be very careful about.  These apps make it very easy for everybody to know your business and everything that you doing so it is vital that we think about what we are publishing on these social networking sites and websites like blogs etc.

One main topic of this lecture was our Simulacra.  It’s a representation of what people think about us, for example the impressions we give people, the information that we give about ourselves over the internet that give people particular impressions about us and our personalities.  It’s been said that nobody could know the real you, not even people that are with you 24/7 so it is crucial what stories we tell about ourselves because these will be the imprints that we leave in people’s minds.  Two main artists that control their own simulacra are Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst.  For them it’s not about the Art it’s about the concept behind it.  They know how to work the art industry to their advantage.  Their art pieces may not be gorgeous paintings or amazing works of art but because they get people talking and cause controversy they become desirable and this all adds to their Simulacra.  Art should always be a provocation and it should always ask questions about the future and I believe these two artist come under these two rules.

Even though there is a blurry line between publication and privacy with the internet there are a lot of pro’s to using digital space.  It makes getting your own work seen and out there very easy, it gives you the control to get yourself noticed.  The 3D printer would tie in with this as you could make your own product from the comfort of your home or if you get a chance to use an industrial 3D printer and you can use social networking sites and websites to advertise and distribute your item.  All of this means you can create yourself a business overnight.  Some websites that you can upload your work to for free may have over thousands or millions of members and all it takes is 2 seconds for you to create yourself an online gallery and have the potential to be seen by all those people.   These websites also give you the chance to get feedback on your work and improve it.  One major thing that has recently been advertised is the Google glasses and I would advise everybody to watch the promotional video for them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4 ), it is a great example of the positive things that can come of the digital space.

                Overall I learnt that our own Simulacra is VERY important especially if we want to be in the art industry as what we put out there will be tied with our name.  We have to control our own Simulacra and put out there what we want to be seen.

Sound

At the start of our lecture we had about sound I wasn’t sure what it really had to do with my course and design. But I listened anyways and near the end I realised how it was related to design when our lecturer showed us one of her projects where she made a product where sound was an essential component in it. Our lecturer introduced some of us to a musician called John Cage. He was a musician that looked deeply into the meaning of silence and done various experiments on it. He’s final results and conclusion was that he believed there’s no such thing as silence because even if you’re in a sound proof booth, if you listen long enough you will start to hear your heart beating and the blood flow through your veins. So with this fascinating conclusion he conducted a piece that coincided with this theory. The performance is in the link provided with this blog entry and I would advise everybody to watch it and see what you think so yourself. Personally I don’t find it as amazing as most people do. I agree that it is a very well planned out statement and gets a lot of people talking and provokes emotions wither its positive or negative, so it serves it purpose. But I think it was a very weird way of showing it and when we listened to him in an interview to he was an odd character but he must have had a very interesting outlook on aspects of life if he picked up on some things people didn’t, which I’d give him credit for.

Fusing the Visual and the Aural- The Art of the Record/CD Sleeve.

One of the earliest examples of turning 2D into 3D was the record sleeve.  When record sleeves first came out it was the beginning of a great creation.  They took 2D art and presented it in a 3D way.  They started off as a vinyl record with a plain brown paper sleeve that had a hole cut out in the middle so as the image on the centre of the vinyl record could be seen.  This was also the start of blending the visual with the aural.  The 60’s was one of the major turning points for this craft.  The world was quite grey in a general sense but was introduced to colour when the 60’s era began.  This helped the visual industries as people started seeing it as being more important than originally thought.  Record sleeves were now developing and having more money and production invested into them.  They were changing from brown paper sleeves with a hole cut in the centre to more colourful pieces of work made from cardboard and properly produced.  They were now being seen as pieces of art.

Record sleeves continued to flourish as they began to introduce posters, books and leaflets into these sleeves and the art on the album covers became more creative as the years went on.  Everybody then wanted to get in on the act because of how popular they were so artists such as James Dean made a record.  James Dean is famously known for being an actor but released a record of him reciting poetry.  Record sleeves then advanced into CD covers in the late 1970’s which had all the similar principals and ideas as the record sleeve but was smaller and more compact.  The audio section of the music industry is now believed to be dead by most people because anybody could make music with the right software and once you can digitize something it becomes worthless such as illegal downloads etc.  The importance of the music section of the music industry has also been taken over by the visual aspects (some exceptions).  But one thing that the music industry still has and is still as strong as it ever was is the loyalty to the bands and artists.  A great example of this was when Radiohead gave one of their albums away for free.  I previously didn’t know this and when I was told this story I thought it was brilliant.  Radiohead recorded and album and decided that they may as well give it away for free if people are going to go ahead and download it illegal anyways.  So the advertising and did the publicity and all themselves and gave the people who bought it the option to donate something if they wanted but it wasn’t compulsory.  If Radiohead stuck with having a team help them to get the album out there and charged a fee for the cd as normal they would have made on average £1.91 for each album after paying all there team and resources.  Because of the loyalty of their fans and the respect people had for their talent and skill the made on average £1.92 for each album.  It’s great to see the support bands have from their fans and how loyal they are.

Marks on a flat surface- Visualising 2D.

Think Quarterly.

Code-

When Semiotics was first mentioned in class I automatically thought “this sounds hard”, but when it was explained I was surprised how much I understood about a certain part it plays in the media.  It’s basically symbols used for information so as people from different cultures, languages etc. can all understand them.  It also falls under one of the 4 C’s, Code.  Another example of Semiotics within media would be soaps ads.  The adverts commonly have woman staring in them and has them doing the washing.  The code of an advert like this is to make us think that most people think the woman’s place is in the kitchen.

During class our tutor played a YouTube video called “Selective attention test”.  I thought it was a really interesting experiment.  It made me realise how much we look at things and how many images our eyes see every day but only how much of that information we actually notice.  It’s also an example of were only looking at what were told to look at.

Collaboration-

Another one of the 4 C’s is Collaboration.  In this case we were talking about the collaboration between art and technology.  The most common question and discussion about this collaboration is if you use printing, graphics tablets etc. does it mean the machine did the work or the artist?  When I was asked that question my first thought in my head was that it’s how the artist uses the technology that makes it worthy in its own right.  Benjamin W once made an opinionated point that once technology is involved a piece of art loses it’s aura.  When I first heard this statement I thought that it is a valid point but then I was told about Bill Viola’s piece “The Passing” and once I watched only a section of it I can safely say it is a great example of how using technology to create art can have an aura also.  This video was completely construction but still makes an impact.  In my own opinion, I believe that media such as film can have just as much or more of an effect than for example a fine art painting can have.

Culture-

Cultural art doesn’t always have to be fine art pieces.  As we looked at in class it can also be album covers.  One cover we looked at was the Sex Pistols “Anarchy in The UK” and just by looking at this imagery you are able to tell what era and time span it was from, the “70’s”.  The features that give this away are the typography and style of the graphics.  This is a good example of how when limited to 2 dimensions you can still get a very visually effective piece of art.

The “Think Quarterly” journal from Google took the idea of 2D imagery on the internet to applying it to what some people would probably call an ‘old school’ way of finding out information.  They made a book out of the information on the online magazine and made it very visual and appealing.  This goes against the idea that books are no longer as popular and that the internet is the way forward, it simply encourages people to use books more often and makes them more inviting to the people who normally wouldn’t have interest in opening one.  The “Think Quarterly” book was that well thought out and orchestrated that it could be called a piece of art on its own.

Overall view-

After looking at different aspects of 2D imagery and media all the information supported the initial thought that I had about technology in art.  The technology you use is irrelevant; it’s what you do with it that matters!

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com! This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

Happy blogging!