Lecture 3: Historical and Artistic Backgrounds: The Visual World

Historical and Artistic Backgrounds: The Visual World

This is a focus on 20th century Avant Garde (after revolution/renaissance period) artists and poets.
Futurists include: Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Letrists and Concrete poetry.
20th Century experimental designers and artists.
21st Century language media art: Artists/Poets and Writers

They were all well known for breaking boundaries, changing designs and experimenting with ideas out of the norm.

Prominent Names to look up:
Marinetti
Speakermann
David Carson
Neville Brody
Glen Ligon
Jasper Jones
Jenny Holzer
Shirnan

Using Photoshop

I have created some 'Andy Warhol' style images within my seminar workshops. These images play around with different hues, saturations, colour styles and effects.

I used a "canvas" on photoshop to create the four different images as one larger image.

Narrative Theory

Narrative theories I could apply to my group project:

Todorov:
His theory consists of three simple rules which make up most narrative structures and have been used for years to define between a narrative and a non narrative.
He said that one must start with an equilibrium, a setting where there are no problems and everyone is going about their everyday lives (that is normal to the context).
What proceeds this is an upset of the equilibrium (a problem) this then becomes a disequilibrium.
Once the problem has been sorted out, the equilibrium is restored back to how it was at the start of the narrative.

Propp:
Propp had a few theories that related to the narrative of the media text. For one, he said that there were different types of 'character' within the story, and these characters relates back to old fairytales. The characters are as follow
The villain
The donor
The helper 
The princess 
The father figure
The dispatcher

These characters are nearly almost present in films and other media texts with a narrative. 

Research into Group Project - Photoshop Effects

Research into Group Project - Vintage Photography

Research into Group Project - General Idea's

To gain some inspiration and motivation for our group project, I researched images online to get the feeling of what I wanted to create:

The makeup used here is similar to the style of makeup we want to use on the Mime charater to portray the moods he is feeling throughout the film.

Another example of mood reflecting makeup.

This is the style of typography that I would like to use, to add interactive text to the film.

Black and white gives mystery to the piece.

Lecture 2:

Signs and Semiotics:

- The term "Semiotics" is a constructionists approach to reading media texts.
- The term was coined by thinker Saussare when he asked "How can we make meaning of arbitary signs such as "dog", "tree" and "cat".
-Structuralists tried to develop a formal or scientific set of rules, these theorists include Pierce, Barthes and Hall.

Saussare:
                  Signifier = the object itself
                  Signified = the assosiations we have with the form
                  Sign = Signifier + Signified

The 18 symbol has a red and white background with a white 18 on the inside.
The assosiations we have with this logo are: movies, sex, rape, adult content, swearing, drug use or gambling. 

Roland Bartes
Bartes came up with an extension of Saussares theory and he managed to broaden the application of the theory to image, music and text, across all forms of media.

Bartes made some rules to apply to his theory and these included:
Denotation - Literal description of the form
Connotation - Second level cultural convention assosiated with the form.

The creation of the 'myth' comes when the sign itself becomes the signifier.

Stuart Hall
Hall came up with yet another extensive and broader framework for decoding signs.
He used encoding and decoding to do this.