Offer to the future generations: warnings, advice, hope, faith, visions, stories, energy, space, time, recipes, power, analysis, dreams, enough.
Trust your intuition, start running with ideas.
Try to be here for 9.30am.
Open up discussion. Blog – how your dealing and frame collaboration – your experiences.
Do we lead or do we follow? Learn that it’s complicated and difficult – a challenge.
It’s all relevant.
Develop mental creative processes.
Identify your individual offer to the group (interests/skills/knowledge/qualities). Show people what you’ve done – get involved in shared activities like a meal together – cook together – relaxed social cohesion – go for a walk, record convo.
Common interests risen from the conferences – challenge – find a like-minded group. Stability with 4 (2 pairs). Dynamic fab four.
Research through reading, drawing, filming, making and other shared activities.
Conversational blog not to journalistic “I”.
Get ready to make an offer to the next group. We can take illustration uniform off and try new things.
Between now and next week – group research. Present on Monday/Tuesday on the next week.
Make contact with your cross-school interdisciplinary group, and where possible meet up by Friday 5th Feb.
Navigate the challenges of team work: ensuring balanced contribution from the team and working to the group’s strengths.
My 2-week collaborative project group:
Rebecca Oliver.
Lleucu Williams.
Heather Welsh.
Tabitha Davies.
Group Interests:
Into the Woods: Away from screens.
Failure and wellbeing.
Desires:
A use of colour.
Strong nature promotion interests within the group – passion.
On Tuesday the 19th of January I took part in two self-selected collaborative workshops exploring the Future Generations themes issued on the previous day of inspiring and informative seminars and lectures led by guest speakers and CSAD tutors. These workshops functions as an experience of the challenges and delights of collaboration.
The workshops I took part in:
Illustrating the future.
Stone, Stick and Box.
Illustrating the future workshop experience:
Illustrating the future workshop – group work by Me, Zack and Lizzie.
The leader of this workshop Chris Glynn provided my group of three with materials to initiate a collaborative illustration piece through the encouraged discussions of stimulated ideas we had independently generated from the previous day of resourceful seminars and lectures.
I took this opportunity to work with my friends Zack Rees and Lizzie Tree who I haven’t worked with before and who I will be moving in with at the end of the year. Talking to these also illustration students was easy going being a happy and chirpy bunch and our ideas all bounced of each other’s which made the project fun and run smoothly.
Chris’s plan was for us to make a piece either finished or uncompleted for the next group after us to interpret and work with.
As a group we promoted creativity and the arts as a wonderful, magical and exciting feature of our world that has an incredibly important role and advertised an encouraged awareness of arts presence in everything around us.
We believe the creative potential within our future generations to further innovate and invent should never be neglected or seen as something less important to the world than subjects like Math, Science and English. What we invent and how we innovate creatively helps us to be more sustainable and develop an ever changing spontaneous and exciting world linked most importantly to our overall happiness and well-being living on Earth.
As a result of discussion we each enjoyed using a part of the A1 page to express and remind our non-artists viewers of the deep value we have today for the arts and creativity present in the world today and to help them realise the potential that the arts offers within the capabilities of our future generations. Art has an all mighty power of the potential to change the world and art is way of people expressing themselves when just speaking out in a street just doesn’t get heard. Great inventions is what gets makers and a country heard of and countries care about what represents it and tourism is always an important and the delight to a country which gives it strength and confidence.
For this workshop I took part in three collaborative based activities.
First task: I was involved in a group of five with people who I didn’t know who are also from the first year of CSAD studying a range of disciplines. We had to balance a stick of bamboo on our index fingers and close our eyes in a race with the first group to get there bamboo stick safely to the ground without dropping it winning the challenge. This was a difficult task which I sensed before its initiation. The problems that we faced were that because of the awkward un-straight shape of the bamboo stick it was difficult for some of us on one end of the stick to sense how fast the other side of the stick were lowering the stick. We certainly had issues with one side getting lowered faster than the other side but we did manage to complete the task successfully after a few attempts, I’m not sure if we won but I think we came close. Experiential learning and making mistakes is what led us to the successfully completion of the challenge.
Second task: The second task involved me partnering up with someone who I didn’t know and who I’ve forgotten the name of from a different disciplinary from first year CSAD. We had to each use a gutter tube in a race to roll a ball to a bucket that was placed at the end of the room. The rule was that we couldn’t walk with the ball in our tube it was a case of repeatedly passing it on to each other for it to travel the distance from the starting point to the finish. We lost the race and I admit that I was so bad at this task and I felt quite bad for the person who I was working with having to deal with my appalling effort. I did feel under pressure as we were the first race competing with another team with an audience watching us. I’m sure though if I had more practice I would have been more useful.
Third task: For the third and final task I was put into a group of four, again with strangers from other disciplines also studying their first year in CSAD. The task that we were given was a competition between us and the other groups to create an invention using the supplied masking tape, papers and scissors to prevent an egg from cracking when dropped from the upper floor to the floor below. With the amount of supplies that we had available to us it was a very easy task and each individual in the group was confident in sharing their ideas of approach to the task which we all took on board with our successful joint winning collaborative project.
Video of our egg protection collaborative project. Out of all the team projects ours hit the floor with the most impact however our packaging design worked successfully as the egg survived unharmed.
How did I find the conference day 2:
I found the day enjoyable, informative and a very useful experience. I was provided a lot of tips and advice about working collaboratively throughout the projects by the workshop leaders which I have taken on board and put into practice which will be used and relevant in my upcoming collaborative projects. I really like taking part in creative projects, socialisation and meeting new people was a nice warming confidence building experience.
To become an illustration student ignited with understanding, excitement and inspiration the Future Generations conferences scheme is an educational event split into two days. On day one I attended a series of lectures and seminars and on day two I took part in two chosen practical workshops.
On day one Monday the 18th of January I attended a series of conferences based on my Field module ‘Future Generations’ including:
Utopias
Panel Discussion on the future of Art and Design in Wales
Into the Woods: away from screens
Keynote Lecture by David Hieatt
Plenary Session with Richard Parry and Chris Glynn
Notes from Utopias Seminar:
Definition of communism:
A theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs. Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?espv=2&q=define+communism+&oq=define+communism+&gs_l=serp.3..0l10.31404.32784.0.33149.10.10.0.0.0.0.145.878.0j7.7.0….0…1c.1.64.serp..3.7.876.b12tWjjn6-I
Definition of capitalism:
An economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?espv=2&q=define+capitalism&oq=define+capit&gs_l=serp.1.0.35i39j0l3j0i20j0l5.10548.11167.0.12849.4.4.0.0.0.0.127.252.0j2.2.0….0…1c.1.64.serp..2.2.251.Z_7OYQDAk2g
Definition of socialism (utopian, welfarism):
A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Policy or practice based on the political and economic theory of socialism.
In Marxist theory a transitional social state between the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of Communism.
Sir Thomas More’s – ideal world and principles. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary ideal island nation. A work of fiction and political philosophy. The book is a framework narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs.
Karl Marx in 1875 – an even spread of wealth around the world, wrote a good book called Capital. (Marx’s theories about society, economics and politics—the collective understanding of which is known as Marxism—hold that human societies progress through class struggle: a conflict between an ownership class that controls production and a dispossessed labouring class that provides the labour for production. States, Marx believed, were run on behalf of the ruling class and in their interest while representing it as the common interest of all; and he predicted that, like previous socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism. He argued that class antagonisms under capitalism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat would eventuate in the working class’ conquest of political power and eventually establish a classless society, communism, a society governed by a free association of producers.Marx actively fought for its implementation, arguing that the working class should carry out organised revolutionary action to topple capitalism and bring about socio-economic change. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx)
Vladimir Lenin – communist country ruler raised questions about communism – dictatorship – enforced middle class and below workers so hard it created an opposite effect, a dystopia. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his political theories are known as Leninism. Recognised as one of the most significant and influential historical figures of the 20th century, Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Admirers view him as a champion of working people’s rights and welfare whilst critics see him as the founder of a totalitarian dictatorship responsible for civil war and mass human rights abuses. The subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, he remains an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin
Joseph Staline – communism dictatorship – dystopia results. Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. In the years following his death, Stalin and his regime have been condemned on numerous occasions, most notably in 1956 when his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced his legacy and initiated a process of de-Stalinization. Stalin remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant. However, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed. The exact number of deaths caused by Stalin’s regime is still a subject of debate, but it is widely agreed to be in the order of millions.
Definition of Utopia: an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?espv=2&q=define+utopia&oq=define+utopia&gs_l=serp.3..35i39j0l9.161247.163809.0.163957.13.12.0.0.0.0.226.1290.0j8j1.9.0….0…1c.1.64.serp..4.9.1285.XbSoSg2y-Qc
Definition of Dystopia: an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?espv=2&q=Definition+of+Dystopia&spell=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiW0MvvgMPKAhVERCYKHWm5DHEQBQgaKAA&biw=1517&bih=741&dpr=0.9
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, novelist, philosopher and prominent member of the Huxley family. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular Universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley
Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World, 1932 – Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that combine profoundly to change society. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), who used the pen name George Orwell, was a British novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism. Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. Orwell’s work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including, but not limited to, cold war, Big Brother,Thought Police, Room 101, memory hole,doublethink, and thoughtcrime. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell
Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four – rebel in society, brainwashes, big brother always watching us. Often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government’s invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged elite of the Inner Party, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as “thoughtcrime”. The tyranny is epitomised by Big Brother, the Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality but who may not even exist. The Party “seeks power entirely for its own sake. It is not interested in the good of others; it is interested solely in power.”Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Bauhaus – revolutionary 1919-1933, identity producing questioning – avant-garde – we can change the world through art and design – all-encompassing vision. Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was an art school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicised and taught. At that time the German term Bauhaus—literally “construction house”—was understood as meaning “School of Building”. Nonetheless, it was founded with the idea of creating a “total” work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art, design and architectural education. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The school existed in three German cities: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohefrom 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime. The Nazi government claimed that it was a centre of communist intellectualism. Though the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world. The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. For instance: the pottery shop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, even though it had been an important revenue source; when Mies van der Rohe took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus
Buckminster Fuller – had a brain that fired in all directions. Used the word world around to relate to the spherical shape of the planet instead of the term he criticised worldwide that he found too flat.
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer and inventor.
Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth”, ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres.
Fuller was the second World President of Mensa from 1974 to 1983. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
Dymaxion House: The Dymaxion House was developed by inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller to address several perceived shortcomings with existing homebuilding techniques. Fuller designed several versions of the house at different times — all of them factory manufactured kits, assembled on site, intended to be suitable for any site or environment and to use resources efficiently. A key design consideration of the design was ease of shipment and assembly.
As he did when naming many of his inventions, Fuller used a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension to arrive at the term Dymaxion. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house
Dymaxion Car: The Dymaxion car was designed by American inventor Buckminster Fuller during the Great Depression and featured prominently at Chicago’s 1933-1934 World’s Fair.Fuller built three experimental prototypes with naval architect Starling Burgess — using gifted money as well as a family inheritance to explore not an automobile per se, but the ‘ground-taxiing phase’ of a vehicle that might one day be designed to fly, land and drive — an “Omni-Medium Transport”.Fuller associated the word Dymaxion with much of his work, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension, to summarize his goal to do more with less.
The Dymaxion’s aerodynamic bodywork was designed for increased fuel efficiency and top speed, and its platform featured a lightweight hinged chassis, rear-mounted V8 engine, front-wheel drive and three-wheels. With steering via its third wheel at the rear (capable of 90° steering lock), the vehicle could steer itself in a tight circle, often causing a sensation. Fuller noted severe limitations in its handling, especially at high speed or in high wind — allowing only trained staff to drive the car and saying it “was an invention that could not be made available to the general public without considerable improvements.” Shortly after its launch, a prototype crashed after being hit by another car, killing the Dymaxion’s driver. Subsequent investigations exonerated the prototype.
Despite courting publicity and the interest of auto manufacturers, Fuller used his inheritance to finish the second and third prototypes, selling all three, dissolving Dymaxion Corporation and reiterating that the Dymaxion was never intended as a commercial venture. One of the three original prototypes survives, and two semi-faithful replicas have recently been constructed. The Dymaxion was included in the 2009 book Fifty Cars That Changed The World and was the subject of the 2012 documentary The Last Dymaxion.
In 2008, the New York Times said Fuller “saw the Dymaxion, as he saw much of the world, as a kind of provisional prototype, a mere sketch, of the glorious, eventual future.” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_car
The Eden Project: The Eden Project (Cornish: Edenva) is a visitor attraction in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. Inside the two biomes are plants that are collected from many diverse climates and environments. The project is located in a reclaimed Kaolinite pit, located 2 km (1.2 mi) from the town of St Blazey and 5 kilometres (3 mi) from the larger town of St Austell, Cornwall. The complex is dominated by two huge enclosures consisting of adjoining domes that house thousands of plant species, and each enclosure emulates a natural biome. The domes consist of hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal, inflated, plastic cells supported by steel frames. The first set of domes simulate a tropical environment and the second, a Mediterranean environment. The attraction also has an outside botanical garden which is home to many plants and wildlife native to Cornwall and the UK in general; it also has many plants that provide an important and interesting backstory, for example, those with a prehistoric heritage. The name Eden Project stems from the 1994 TV series Earth 2. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eden_Project
Walt Disney in 1935 – Disneyland Utopia in tune with the American dream. Happy place – a place where adults can relive memories of the past, a source of joy and inspiration to all of the world. A worry free place – highly recommended – friendly American voices – smooth – entertainment.
Disneyland Park, originally Disneyland, is the first of two theme parks built at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California, opened on July 17, 1955. It is the only theme park designed and built under the direct supervision of Walt Disney. It was originally the only attraction on the property; its name was changed to Disneyland Park to distinguish it from the expanding complex in the 1990s.
Walt Disney came up with the concept of Disneyland after visiting various amusement parks with his daughters in the 1930s and 1940s. He initially envisioned building a tourist attraction adjacent to his studios in Burbank to entertain fans who wished to visit; however, he soon realized that the proposed site was too small. After hiring a consultant to help him determine an appropriate site for his project, Walt bought a 160-acre (65 ha) site near Anaheim in 1953. Construction began in 1954 and the park was unveiled during a special televised press event on the ABC Television Network on July 17, 1955.
Since its opening, Disneyland has undergone a number of expansions and major renovations, including the addition of New Orleans Square in 1966, Bear Country (now Critter Country) in 1972, and Mickey’s Toontown in 1993. Opened in 2001, Disney California Adventure Park was built on the site of Disneyland’s original parking lot.
Disneyland has a larger cumulative attendance than any other theme park in the world, with over 650 million guests since it opened. In 2013, the park hosted approximately 16.2 million guests, making it the third most visited park in the world that calendar year.According to a March 2005 Disney Company report, 65,700 jobs are supported by the Disneyland Resort, including about 20,000 direct Disney employees and 3,800 third-party employees (independent contractors or their employees).
Walter Elias “Walt” Disney (December 5, 1901 – December 15, 1966) was an American entrepreneur, cartoonist, animator, voice actor, and film producer. He was a prominent figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, and is regarded as a cultural icon,known for his influence and contributions to entertainment during the 20th century. As a Hollywood business mogul, he and his brother Roy O. Disney co-founded The Walt Disney Company.
As an animator and entrepreneur, Disney was particularly noted as a filmmaker and a popular showman, as well as an innovator in animation and theme park design. He and his staff created numerous famous fictional characters including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Disney himself was the original voice for Mickey. During his lifetime, he won 22 Academy Awards and received four honorary Academy Awards from a total of 59 nominations, including a record of four in one year, giving him more Oscar awards and nominations than any other individual in history. Disney also won seven Emmy Awards and gave his name to the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resort theme parks in the U.S., as well as the international resorts Tokyo Disney Resort, Disneyland Paris, Hong Kong Disneyland, and Shanghai Disney Resort.
Disney died from lung cancer on December 15, 1966 in Burbank, California. He left behind a vast legacy, including numerous animated shorts and feature films produced during his lifetime; the company, parks, and animation studio that bear his name; and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney
American dream hand in hand with capitalism – happiness through buying lots of stuff – props – objects. Middle class surburban.
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite. The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennae to broadcast radio pulses. It was visible all around the Earth and its radio pulses were detectable. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the larger Cold War. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments.
Sputnik itself provided scientists with valuable information, even though it was not equipped with scientific instruments. The density of the upper atmosphere could be deduced from its drag on the orbit, and the propagation of its radio signals gave information about the ionosphere.
Sputnik 1 was launched during the International Geophysical Year from Site No.1/5, at the 5th Tyuratam range, in Kazakh SSR (now at the Baikonur Cosmodrome). The satellite travelled at about 29,000 kilometres per hour (18,000 mph; 8,100 m/s), taking 96.2 minutes to complete each orbit. It transmitted on 20.005 and 40.002 MHzwhich were monitored by amateur radio operators throughout the world. The signals continued for 21 days until the transmitter batteries ran out on 26 October 1957. Sputnik 1 burned up on 4 January 1958, as it fell from orbit upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, after travelling about 70 million km (43.5 million miles) and spending three months in orbit. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1
Guy Debord – wrote The Society of the Spectacle – a fair system with no exploitation – criticism of the capital. Guy Louis Debord (December 28, 1931 – November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Debord
The Merry Pranksters were a group of people who formed around American author Ken Kesey in 1964. The group promoted the use of psychedelic drugs, then still legal.
Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters lived communally at Kesey’s homes in California and Oregon, and are noted for the sociological significance of a lengthy road trip they took in the summer of 1964, traveling across the United States in a psychedelic painted school bus called Furthur or Further. During this time they met many of the guiding lights of the mid-1960s cultural movement and presaged what is commonly thought of as hippies with odd behaviour, long hair on men, bizarre clothing, and a renunciation of the normal society, which they dubbed The Establishment. Tom Wolfe chronicled their early escapades in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Wolfe also documents a notorious 1966 trip on Further from Mexico through Houston, stopping to visit Kesey’s friend, novelist Larry McMurtry. Kesey was in flight from a drug charge at the time. Notable members of the group include Kesey’s best friend Ken Babbs, Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, Lee Quarnstrom, and Neal Cassady. Stewart Brand, Paul Foster, the Warlocks (now known as the Grateful Dead), Del Close (then a lighting designer for the Grateful Dead), Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, and Kentucky Fab Five writers Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman (who overlapped with Kesey and Babbs as creative writing graduate students at Stanford University) were associated with the group to varying degrees.
These events are also documented by one of the original pranksters, Lee Quarnstrom, in his memoir titled When I Was a Dynamiter. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_Pranksters
Media Burn, Ant Farm, 1971 – we are watching too much TV. Ant Farm was an avant-garde architecture, graphic arts, and environmental design practice, founded in San Francisco in 1968 by Chip Lord and Doug Michels (1943-2003). Ant Farm’s work often made use of popular icons in the United States, as a strategy to redefine the way those were conceived within the country’s imaginary.
“Media Burn” employs performance and spectacle in service of media critique, featuring the explosive collision of two of America’s most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented what they termed the “ultimate media event.” In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a “Phantom Dream Car”—a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible—was driven through a wall of burning TV sets.
The spectacle of the Cadillac crashing through the burning TV sets became a visual manifesto of the early alternative video movement, an emblem of an oppositional and irreverent stance against the political and cultural imperatives promoted by television and the passivity of TV viewing.
Joseph Beuys, 1972 – social sculpture – using society as your material – a valid way of making art – through politics – lectures – 7000 oaks planted commission in 1982 which got in the way of property development created areas of green open land. Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art. His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his “extended definition of art” and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate. He is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys
7000 Oaks – City Forestation Instead of City Administration is a work of land art by the German artist Joseph Beuys. It was first publicly presented in 1982 at the documenta 7.
With the help of volunteers, Beuys planted 7,000 oak trees over several years in Kassel, Germany, each with an accompanying basalt stone. In regard to the extensive urbanization of the setting the work was an extensive artistic and ecological intervention with the goal of enduringly altering the living space of the city. The project, though at first controversial, has become an important part of Kassel’s cityscape.
“The planting of seven thousand oak trees is only a symbolic beginning. Contrary to its initiative, progressive features such a symbolic beginning requires a marker, in this instance a basalt column. Future goals for the project included: a) an ongoing scheme of tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect environmental & social change “the purpose of educational activities”; b) a growth of awareness within the urban environment of the human dependence on the larger ecosystem educational outreach; and c) an ongoing process whereby the society would be activated by means of human creative will social sculpture.”
Beuys’ art works and performances are not about entertaining and amusing the audience. It is an awakening message from the tradition, a recognition of the whole based upon a new concept of beauty that extends beyond the instant gratification.
“I not only want to stimulate people, I want to provoke them.” (Bastian, Heines and Jeannot Simmen, “Interview with Joseph Beuys,” in the catalog exhibition, Joseph Beuys, Drawings, Victoria and Albert Museum, Westerham Press, 1983, no folio)
It is a movement from the tradition, the expected, and the established for an inclusive openness. Completed in 1987 by his son, Wenzel, on the first anniversary of his father’s death (and included in documenta 8), the project is still maintained by the city. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7000_Oaks
Wheatfield – a confrontation – Agnes Denes, 1982 – Bread. Agnes Denes (Dénes Ágnes; Budapest, 1931) is a Hungarian-born American conceptual artist based in New York. She is known for works in a wide range of media – from poetry and philosophy writings, to complex hand and computer rendered diagrams (which she terms Visual Philosophy), sculpture, and international environmental installations, such as Wheatfield — A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre wheatfield in downtown Manhattan.
Arguably her best known work. It was created during a six-month period in the spring, summer, and fall of 1982 when Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat on two acres of rubble-strewn landfill near Wall Street and the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan (now the site of Battery Park City and the World Financial Center).
A disused stadium turned into community garden – Owen Griffith – generated community links.
Artist Owen Griffiths will give a talk this Friday lunchtime about his involvement in turning the disused Vetch Field into a socially engaged artwork, which forms part of the Cultural Olympiad in Wales.
Once the home ground of Swansea City Football Club, the Vetch in the Sandfields area of the city became redundant as the Swans moved on to their newer, shinier abode, the Liberty Stadium, in 2005. Over the last six months Griffiths has been working with the local community to create an ‘urban utopia’ on this site following the demolition of the old stadium.
The result is the Vetch Veg project. A portion of the old Vetch site has been turned into temporary vegetable patches and the local community has worked together over the last few months to develop the plots, tend winter crops and generally maintain the space.
The Vetch Veg Project is a participatory and interdisciplinary social artwork in association with ADAIN AVION *
Vetch Veg will be transforming the pitch into edible land, providing the residents and the surrounding community free space in which to grow Vegetables. Temporary vegetable gardens will be created with raised beds, were local residents will have the opportunity to work together, growing produce, keeping bees and chickens etc. All plots will be free to individuals, families or organizations living or based in the Sandfields. Vetch Veg has secured a proportion of the Vetch’s larger development specifically to grow food and provide the community an opportunity to transform the way we eat. Reconnecting with the process of growing food and self-sufficiency is becoming increasingly significant as food prices rocket and financial cuts increase. It is also is in some way a shift to a more entrepreneurial and creative society. Reusing, reshaping and rethinking resources such as the Vetch to have a temporary use as an edible land. Increasing air miles via global food transportation is having a crippling effect on the environment, what better way to draw attention to this issue than by using a recycled plane without wings as a catalyst for growing your own. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/entries/8842c018-dfa1-3878-8cd7-cfab0930296c & http://vetchveg.tumblr.com/about
10 houses on Cairns Street – Assemble, 2015 – group of Architects, recycled materials- transforming derelict to revive – a strong link to residents – alternative hand making process.
The rebirth of a troubled Toxteth community might be art. The story of the street and the young architects succeeding where every official plan has failed has caught the art world’s attention.
Assemble are working with the Granby Four Streets CLT to refurbish 10 derelict terraced houses on Cairns St in Toxteth. The project is the result of a hard-won, 20 year battle by local residents to save the houses from demolition.
Residents reclaimed and planted their streets, painted the empty houses, organized a thriving monthly market and founded a Community Land Trust. Assemble have worked with them to translate their resourceful and DIY attitude into the refurbishment of housing, helping the CLT provide affordable housing for local residents that remains in community ownership. The houses use simple & low cost materials and include a number of playful, handmade architectural elements that help re-establish the character of the homes following their long neglect. Source: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/may/12/assemble-turner-prize-2015-wildcard-how-the-young-architecture-crew-assemble-rocked-the-art-world & http://assemblestudio.co.uk/?page_id=1030
GFP Bunny, Eduardo Kac, 2000 – glow in the dark rabbit.
Eduardo Kac is a contemporary American artist and professor of Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kac was born in 1962, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Kac has worked in numerous and diverse artistic media since he began practicing in the early 1980s in Rio. “His work encompasses many genres, and he is often a pioneer and a protagonist in many fields: holography applied to the arts, the creation of works to be transmitted by fax, photocopied art, experimental photography, video, fractals, digital art, microchips approached as human prostheses, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, teletransportation, genomes, biotechnology, Morse code, DNA. Kac has coined many names for his work, such as: bioart, biopoetics, biorobotics, biotelematics, holopoem, holopoetry, telempathy, plantimal, telepresence, teleborg, transgenic art, weblography, and webot.”
In what is probably his most famous work, Alba, Kac allegedly commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent rabbit; a rabbit implanted with a Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) gene from a type of jellyfish. Under a specific blue light, the rabbit fluoresces green. In 2000, Alba was presented in Avignon, France. Kac’s aim was for Alba to live with his family, but prior to the scheduled release of Alba to Kac, the lab retracted their agreement and decided that Alba should remain in the lab.
GFP plants, fish, and mammals have been long-term residents of science laboratories. The GFP gene is typically used as a type of marker, that, when attached to a separate genetic modification or gene, illustrates where that symbiotic gene manifests in the organism. However, Kac used GFP as a social marker, in a symbolic (not scientific) manner, to raise questions about how society constructs the idea of difference. Notably, since Alba’s conception, GFP zebrafish have hit the commercial market under the trademarked name, GloFish.
Kac, in response to the laboratory’s retraction of Alba’s liberty, flies a flag outside of his home, sporting a silhouette of a green rabbit. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduardo_Kac#GFP_Bunny
Liberator 3D printed gun. The Liberator is a physible, 3D-printable single shot handgun, the first such printable firearm design made widely available online. The open source firm Defense Distributed designed the gun and released the plans on the Internet on May 6, 2013. The plans were downloaded over 100,000 times in the two days before the US Department of State demanded that Defense Distributed retract the plans. The plans for the gun remain hosted across the Internet and are available at file sharing websites like The Pirate Bay. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberator_(gun)
The United Micro Kingdoms (UmK) is divided into four super-shires inhabited by Digitarians, Bioliberals, Anarcho-evolutionists and Communo-nuclearists. Each county is an experimental zone, free to develop its own form of governance, economy and lifestyle. These include neoliberalism and digital technology, social democracy and biotechnology, anarchy and self-experimentation and communism and nuclear energy. The UmK is a deregulated laboratory for competing social, ideological, technological and economic models. Source: http://www.unitedmicrokingdoms.org/
Foam organisation – alternative futures: FoAM describes itself as “a network of transdisciplinary labs for speculative culture”.The networked, Brussels-based collective constitutes a group of designers, scientists, cooks, artists, engineers and gardeners who share an interest in taking knowledge from their respective areas of expertise and applying it in new public contexts. Guided by the motto “Grow your own worlds,” the practice of this multidisciplinary research group aims at integrating principles of ethical living, sustainable design and eco-technology. FoAM’s overall mission is shaped by its various participating artists and technologists, who have sensed a need for mediation between the artistic and the scientific worlds.FoAM was founded by Maja Kuzmanovic in 2000 as a cultural research department in Starlab. In 2001, FoAM became an independent, distributed entity with cells in Brussels and Amsterdam. Since that time, the core group of this de facto new-media think tank has included members from Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, Croatia, Lithuania, the UK, and Sweden; its larger network has attracted people from around the world.Since 2004 FoAM has positioned itself as the only Flemish “Hybrid Reality Lab,” with a primary focus on the field of hybrid reality (technologies, media and materials entangling the physical and the digital). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_(organization)
FoAM speculates about the future by modelling it in artistic experiments that allow alternative perspectives to emerge. By conducting these experiments in the public sphere, we invite conversations and participation of people from diverse walks of life.
Amidst rampant consumerism, xenophobia and climate chaos, FoAM is a haven for people who are unafraid to ask the question: “What If?” and “How could it be otherwise?” Instead of dismissing possible futures because of their improbability, we speculate: What if we see plants as organisational principles for human society? What if lack of fossil fuels turns jet-setting artists into slow cultural pilgrims? What if market capitalism collapsed? By rehearsing for a range of different scenarios, we can cultivate behaviours that make us more resilient to whatever the future holds. This is why we encourage FoAM‘s activities to explore the breadth of themes and methods – from robotics to permaculture, tinkering to meditation. Layered as long-term initiatives and short term projects, FoAM‘s activities uphold the values of complexity and whole systems thinking, pollinated by the transdisciplinarity of our teams.
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 British Dystopian science fiction drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Oskar Werner, Julie Christie, and Cyril Cusack. Based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Ray Bradbury, the film takes place in a controlled society in an oppressive future in which a fireman, whose duty it is to burn all literature, becomes a fugitive for reading. This was Truffaut’s first colour film as well as his only English-language film. At the 1966 Venice Film Festival, Fahrenheit 451 was nominated for the Golden Lion. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451_(film)
Logan’s Run –Logan’s Run is a 1976 American science fiction film directed by Michael Anderson and starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Roscoe Lee Browne, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Ustinov. The screenplay by David Zelag Goodman is based on Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. It depicts a dystopian future society in which population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by killing everyone who reaches the age of thirty, preventing overpopulation. The story follows the actions of Logan 5, a “Sandman”, as he runs from society’s lethal demand. The film was shot primarily in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex—including locations such as the Fort Worth Water Gardens and the Dallas Market Center—between June and September 1975. The film uses only the basic premise from the novel, that everyone must die at a set age and Logan runs off with Jessica as his companion, while being chased by Francis. The motivations of the characters are quite different in the film. It was the first film to use Dolby Stereo on 70 mm prints. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, won a Special Academy Award for its visual effects (shared by L. B. Abbott, Glen Robinson and Matthew Yuricich), effects which included the use of laser holography for the first time in a feature film, and won six Saturn Awards including Best Science Fiction Film.In 1977, a short-lived TV series aired, though only 14 episodes were produced. Since 1994, there have been several unsuccessful efforts to remake Logan’s Run. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)
My notes from the panel discussion based on the future of art and design in wales:
Does art have to be useful?
Does art have to solve problems?
Art is about trying to make something interesting.
Engagement values – its importance to people – community – public engagement.
Art role in Wales is different to role elsewhere. Tangible difference – a common language – can be fragmented – constant debate of language – express what we are doing for ourselves and for the rest of the world who are not artists.
Creative capacities of humans and destructive capacities of humans.
How does art contribute?
City and non-city – what do they owe each other?
What is your own community?
Making connections to and from the city.
It matters to a country what represents it.
Recommended arts festival in Roath (Cardiff) – MADE.
Imaginative world of the city – alternate universe/world of Cardiff.
How can you celebrate your community?
Ecology definition: The branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. The political movement concerned with protection of the environment. Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?espv=2&biw=1517&bih=741&q=define+ecology&oq=define+eco&gs_l=serp.1.0.35i39j0l6j0i10j0l2.220061.221701.0.223100.10.10.0.0.0.0.145.875.9j1.10.0….0…1c.1.64.serp..0.10.870._PtFK1brK1U
Why do you value arts in society?
We need to show the world why art is important to the world.
Notes from Into the Woods: Away from screens seminar:
Early childhood studies.
Outdoor Learning Centre.
Eco modernist manifesto 2015.
Environmentalists to embrace technology in order to save nature.
Biodiversity: the variety of plant and animal life in the world or in a particular habitat, a high level of which is usually considered to be important and desirable. Source: https://www.google.co.uk/search?espv=2&biw=1517&bih=692&q=define+Biodiversity&oq=define+Biodiversity&gs_l=serp.3..35i39j0l9.2362207.2362207.0.2362539.1.1.0.0.0.0.75.75.1.1.0….0…1c.1.64.serp..0.1.74.lJeHs0NQHdA
Hiut – a story about jeans – Cardigans last factory standing – best at what it did – maker town which got closed down – workers out of job who are world class jean makers.
Fight battles that you can win.
40 years of knowledge shouldn’t just be thrown away.
Internet – one to one relationship with your customer.
Interesting things happen, when you do interesting things.
Market it – social Medias is binary.
Define your fears, not your goals – understand them and be happy with them. Don’t give a shit about what others think.
Courage – great art concepts takes courage – have crazy ideas – what they’re not going to say is “it’s like something” bring something new to the world.
When you’re ahead of the curb people laugh. Ideas/concepts that may have seemed ludicrous at the time influenced the inventions we take for granted today.
Be brave.
Don’t work for anybody else – you are stars – you are amazing – back your ideas – invest in yourself.
Your dreams should scare you – aim super high – listen to your dreams much more than you should listen to logic.
On the 11th of January (2016) I issued my term two FIELD module brief entitled ‘Future Generations’ that will be initiating on Monday the 18th of January (2016).
This year’s theme connects directly to the Wales Government’s Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015, which establishes a framework for initiatives in Wales relating to economy, environment, social justice and culture.
Re-read the briefs from last term – they are full of ideas and guidance that will prove helpful to me in term two and I will have a different perspective of them now.
The Wales government’s well-being of future generations act 2015.
This reading will help me to understand what next week will be all about and how to approach the upcoming collaborative projects.
Notes:
Your work is serving other people – serving others is a great reward.
Experiential processes and ideas.
Finding out what collaborator I am.
Meeting a balance of the criteria.
Learning outcomes.
Illustration – a huge discipline that can travel.
Take your intention into Field, you set your own agenda. Carry on utilising the guidance from the term one briefs. Re-read the intentions, you make your rules.
Feedback = advice on how to move forward.
Art and design shaping the future of humanity.
Sustainability.
Well-being, sustainability, economy, justice, Culture = Bedrock – fundamental to art and design.
Conferences – the idea of it is IGNITION! INSPIRATION. FIRE IN THE HEART.
I’ve been allocated to Field Group A and collaborative field group 3.
I’m going to be involved in a 2 day conference starting tomorrow on January 18th where staff and guest speakers will explore art and design’s changing roles in relation to culture, environment, economy and social justice. I will also be attending a panel discussion on the future of art and design in Wales, and a keynote lecture by David Hieatt, brand developer, co-founder of The Do Lectures.
Day 2 features practical workshops exploring these themes and the challenges and delights of collaboration.
This unique event invites artists and designers of the future to engage with the themes and intentions of Wales Government’s Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015. It raises questions about interdisciplinary creative education and creates opportunities for students from Fine Art, Graphic Communication, Illustration, Artist Designer Maker, Ceramics, Product Design, Textiles and Architectural Design & Technology to lay the basis for collaborative work later in the term and potential future partnerships.
CSAD are planning a public showcase in Cardiff in May of the most interesting work that arises from this module.
My chosen conferences that I will be attending on Monday January the 18th:
On the 12th of January (2016) I had a Formative Feedback Tutorial with Georgina who is one of the Illustration staff at CSAD.
In the meeting I expressed how I thought the Subject module term went and what I feel I need to improve on for next term as my role as an illustrator.
Georgina’s impressed response to my work was fantastic. She used words like exceptional, well thought out and blown away. She particularly commended my blog work expressing how she could see clearly a vast amount of evidence of how I utilised all the provided skills, context and ideas from term one consistently throughout the projects. Georgina also could see that I responded to my crits very well as I utilised the advice and feedback provided to develop my work to stronger outcomes.
She described me as a very organised and hardworking student and concerned if I think I am over working. I explained to Georgina how I always feel I have plenty of time to complete the tasks with this liberating and relaxed full time course. With my management of a good and healthy balance, I love and enjoy work activities and I love the time to myself to do other things. She asked if I had a job and I explained that my part time job working as a sales assistant at Sports Direct on the weekends creates no stress related problems rather quite the opposite.
Georgina’s advice for improving my role as an illustrator for next term and beyond:
Make the images on my blog bigger.
Carry on with the great work.
Create a separate blog that showcases images of my work in the form an online timeline folio which will be great promotionally and a lovely collective (online gallery) way to store, share and reflect on my achievements. Most importantly it will be used for efficient analysis reviewing of my practical developments.
My Streetcar pictures that I took of my 3D piece could be better presented.
Finally Georgina told me that I should be proud of myself and handed me my formative assessment form. The form indicates how well I am doing against the assessment criteria of CSAD that will be used in the final, summative assessment. At this stage no marks will be rewarded.
I am currently working at an exceptional standard in the 1st division of the assessment criteria.
Being on this level is very rewarding and I have vowed that despite any highest achievements I’m not going stop working on developing and improving myself as an illustrator.
Illustration is truly all fun to me as I enjoy very much the inner reward of serving my work to the world. The reward of servicing the world is and will always be more special than the assessment and judgment of my work.
Today I was briefed on the Field module by Illustration senior lecturer Chris Glynn, in preparation for its initiation beginning next week on Monday the 18th of January 2016. (I will complete a separate blog post about this tomorrow on the 12th of January)
Importantly, I was also reminded of the 20 minute formative feedback tutorial based on my term one SUBJECT module work with a staff member of the Illustration team Georgina that I must attend tomorrow on the 12th of January.
Being a formative assessment, my work is reviewed and given feedback. It will not be marked, but instead I will be given advice on how to improve my work or how to develop interesting ideas or techniques. If I desire I can then carry on with work after the formative assessment and make that work ready for a summative assessment.
My intentions for tomorrows Formative Feedback Tutorial:
Talk about how you think the term went:
The term went really well, I really enjoyed it, I wasn’t stressed as I didn’t feel any pressure, and the term was very liberating. I also found it very enlightening, enthusiastic, interesting and enjoyably challenging. I particularly love the schools highly enforced principles of positioning ourselves in a global context. Empowering me as a person with a great and important role to service the world and its future.
I have gained and equipped myself with the knowledge of the basic yet powerful tools to create effective illustrations. I have obtained a new perspective of the role of illustration being far more important than I initially preconceived before entering this course. I didn’t realise the power of illustration and I have so much respect and admiration for emotive work. With the infinite possibilities, versatility and scope of topics I can work with in illustration being absolutely anything. I realised how much I can learn from all the interesting unexplored themes I have yet to explore. I can really extend my knowledge about the world through the liberating opportunities that illustration will always have to offer. I am really excited and willing to engage with any kind of challenging and problemamtic based topic in need of solving or aid.
What I need to develop on (comparing my work to the assessment criteria):
I experienced no issues of time management as I achieved the deadlines perfectly fine but I need to improve on my punctuality. I should have read the handbook at the very start of the course as they recommended to me. To be more informed about the school and to be more informed on the module aims and criteria modulators for which they use to assess my work – I am currently progressing through this book daily.
I definitely felt like I rushed into the projects and I really lacked experimentation as I had a lot of ideas that I never put into practice. I believe this is because I didn’t structure my approach to the projects appropriately lacking a compliance to the fundamental strategy of following the ideal stages of approach to tackling a project most beneficial to me as a learner. Intentionally, I need to showcase more of my unique creative ideas through as much practice as I can manage to improve my skills, confidence and conviction of my position as an illustrator. I feel I have so much potential in me to discover and I realise after reviewing my folio that I am currently not going about discovering my potential in the best way with a lack of experimental work per project. To improve, I need to follow the project approach strategy below consistently to achieve my aspired role of a professional practitioner.
The project strategy that I need to adopt (from the CSAD Illustration Handbook):
PLANNING – (your goals and intentions for learning or achievement) Research. Start with idea one – then progress to the next step. Witness how one idea can multiply. (Do not use a complex mashup of an initial idea developed and multiplied theoretically and compressed into one practical outcome. I regret this approach I used in the term one projects)
DOING – (aligning actions and intentions) Experimentation – work on small scale to save time, employ a range of methodologies – document nicely in your sketchbook – annotate.
RECORDING – (thoughts, ideas, experiences, in order to understand and evidence the process and results of learning) sketchbook annotation and BLOG
REFLECTION – (reviewing and evaluating experiences and the results of learning) sketchbook annotation and BLOG – self reflect as I go along!
REPEAT until you have arrived to your desired outcome.
BLOG IMPROVEMENTS: I need to blog every day and at least be up-to-date weekly. Do not let one weeks’ worth of blogging drift into next week’s chores. I don’t want to spend a lot of time catching up on blogging when the work isn’t fresh in my mind, it isn’t as enjoyable and becomes a big chore over the holidays. More importantly to me, I need to develop on my practical skills over the holidays. I also need to professionalise my photographs for my blog – the audio visual facilities mentioned in the handbook offers a small lighting studio that provides an infinity background with balanced fluorescent lights for the documentation of small 3D pieces and flat artworks.
I will always work on developing and improving on myself as an Illustrator even if I get the highest class division – “Don’t rest and feel self-satisfied, keep challenging yourself. Artists and Designers continue to learn and improve throughout their careers!” – quote from the super informative CSAD Handbook.
I will respond to my feedback by applying, equipping and utilising these helpful tips and advice provided to me by Georgina.
On Thursday the 3rd of December I attended a keynote lecture led by Dr Alexandros Kontogeorgakopoulos titled ‘The Future of Sonic Arts: Credo?’
My notes from this lecture:
Alexandros will be speaking of a beautiful story.
Alexandros’s aim is to expose, inspire and stimulate me by giving me some ideas about the world of sound and music.
Alexandros is a musician who started in science and is working in an art school – ventured into a variety of disciplines.
Hints about music in the last 120 years, a quick overview of some of the pioneers and dinosaurs that changed the way we think and do music/sonic art.
Sound art/sonic art/organised sound.
Big pioneers, important people that inspired and changed sonic arts.
Alexandros teaches us how sound can be reflected and be used in my discipline – sonic art offers a lot of interest and potential.
Soundscape, Canadians, importance of sound, was not until the renaissance that god became a portrait before that he was a sound, in the west the ear gave way to the eye as the most important gatherer in about the time of the renaissance.
In ancient times storytelling was the main medium to pass information from generation to generation, it was an oral culture, audio sound was very important but in the renaissance the paradigm changed but now were coming to an era with technology and electricity that maybe sound with regain a place.
A great media theorist also claimed that now with the electricity the sense of listening is going to become prominent and important again so Dr Alexandros wants to just emphasise the importance of sound which is highly neglected in our society and in an art school he thinks it has a very important role in every discipline.
Sound is more than an extra medium to play with it offers different ways to think about your work, it can be reflected in architecture, textiles, every discipline.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (25 April/7 May 1840 – 25 October/6 November 1893), often anglicized as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was a Russian composer of the late-Romantic period, some of whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. Tchaikovsky was honoured in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ilyich_Tchaikovsky
Drama, power, steam engine playing very loud – Pyotr Tchaikovskya Russian composer, a powerful orchestra, the music is huge and big, the music is like a factory, it actually is a factory and works like a factory, 100 musicians all directed by one maestro.
Technology of the orchestra, technology in music and culture in music is always related, they go hand in hand, and important aspect of the music factory (the metaphor).
Dr Alexandro’s recommends we go see an orchestra play in the St David’s Hall – a classical music concert, it’s very cheap and there is nice ice-cream in the breaks.
Cage was an American composer, music theorist, writer, and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of music instruments. Critics have launded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
John Cage – a key figure, composer of the last century, weird personality, 30’s, music inventor, influential, changed what could be considered as music, played an important role in the Fine Art and was inspired by Fine Art. Different composition, no orchestra, uses ordinary objects, well calculated, interesting and very fresh approach of music making.
John Cage introduced the concept that every sound is music, he embraced randomness, he said “I want the sounds to be themselves, I don’t want to control them anymore, I want the escape of my memories and my learning, I want sound to flourish without me, and how can I do that? – with randomness” – Cage was predicting the future of electrical in music, he was trying to figure out a machine that would liberate us and other composers so that it will be possible to do almost everything that you can imagine. He found the instruments poor, we need to refresh the way we approach music and everything related to music. Manifesto by John Cage ‘The Future of Music: Credo’. Like a prophet he sees the future.
Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist and acoustician. His innovative work in both the sciences particularly communications and acoustics and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him widespread recognition in his lifetime. Most widely and currently recognized for his accomplishments in electronic and experimental music, at the core of which stands his role as the chief developer of a unique and early form of avant-garde music known as musique concrѐte. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer
Pierre Schaeffer – collage sounds – recorded train stations, places, activities etc. Musicology of how we do things with music and discovered collage with sounds, used the technology of the tape recorder not as a medium to record existing compositions but as a medium to create new music, the first man to discover the loop (replaying the tape over and over) to create a repetitive pulse like it is used in house music today.
Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his ground-breaking work in electronic music, aleatory (controlled chance) in serial composition, and music spatialization. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Stockhausen
Karlheinz Stockhausen – the term electronic music came from Mr Stockhausen, more pure, starts with the vary basic material, the devices that only create tone, used apparatus that you will find in a lab, experimenting with the help of the tape recorder, the fathers of electronic music, there work is a foreign language to us, Stockhausen did research, his work sounding more like a sci-fi cheap movie of the 50’s, sonic universe, molecules of sound.
Max Mathews was a pioneer of computer music. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mathews
Max Mathews – the father of computer music, first person to make computers sing or make a single bleep back in 1957, synthesized the first music with the computer, every possible sound could be implemented, explored how the ear listens to sound, engineered the system on the computer.
Risset is a French composer, best known for his pioneering contributions to computer music. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Risset
Jean-Claude Risset – started exploring the computer in a musical way, discovered sound synthesis, difficult music to digest, melody+chord+gong, same ingredients can manifest itself into sound compositions, machine to make sounds.
These people used taped – found objects, primitive devices.
Lejaren Hiller was an American composer. In 1957 he collaborated with Leonard Issacson on his String Quartet No. 4. Illiac Suite, the first significant use of a computer to compose music. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lejaren_Hiller
Lejaren Hiller – “Can I use a computer to compose a score”, to make music.
Great ideas are coming from connecting the dots, people coming together from different disciplines – that’s where innovation starts. So if you stay safe in your area maybe you will not innovate, this doesn’t mean you will not do excellent stuff. Most of the people in the school believe this that’s why we force you to do a project together with a field and force you to see it as a constellation together because we want to create this type of synergies. That’s the composition that the computer did. Music is a very codified system something like mathematics. Hiller put rules into the computer. We do not want the computers to take over we just need tools, tools that will take us to new territories and places.
Waisvisz was a Dutch composer, performer and inventor of experimental electronic musical instruments. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Waisvisz
Michel Waisvisz – weird instrument, jumping 30 years ahead, gloves – data gloves, trying to invent the performance aesthetic by designing new interactions with the computer, a new area: how we interact with instruments, how do we make the instrument (computer) to help us to make the composition and how do we make the computer do the sounds. Waisvisv innovated and makes new instruments and new sounds, performs in concerts.
Notating music was amazing technology, invented in the early 1000 by an Italian monk, figured out how to put time and pitch onto paper.
Sometimes musicians seek for the science before science seeks for the science.
The people just mentioned wanted to create music and go to unexplored lands.
Early studios – machines left and right, they occupy a lot of space, now it’s all done on a computer.
A Moog modular synthesizer is a monophonic analogue modular synthesizer designed by the electronic instrument pioneer Dr. Robert Moog. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moog_modular_synthesizer
Moog Modular synthesizer – machine, influenced rock music a lot – like Pink Floyd and Brian Eno used one. Bulky old school system – the ultimate trend now.
Yamaha DX7 electric keyboard.John Chowning – a very successful man.
The Yamaha DX7 – in the 80’s commonly seen nowadays, digital set up, synthesizer, the first commercial success, John Chowning became a millionaire because he sold his sonic art and algorithms to Yamaha, a very serious and spiritual composer, sound of the 80’s.
John M. Chowning (born 1934) is an American composer, musician, inventor, and professor best known for his work at Standford University and his invention of FM synthesis while there.
Miller Puckette. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_PucketteAn example of Miller Puckette’s Pure Data (Pd) performing platform. Source – http://www.body-pixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Pd_Pure_Data.jpg
Miller Puckette (born 1959) is the associate director of the Centre of Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_Puckette
Then the emergence of software by connecting bits together, computer language, multi-media works, programming, Miller Puckette invented this language.
Link to an example of Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD36IajCz6A – Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.
Dr Alexandros collected and presented contemporary projects linking to sound art, like this sonic art and new media installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin’s.
Xenakis was a Greek-French composer, music theorist, and architect-engineer. He is commonly known as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iannis_Xenakis
Brian Eno is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno
Ambient music is a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_music
Brian Eno – sonic arts and painting, inventor of ambient music, Fine Artist. Worked on records by Coldplay and many more works created by brilliant composers.
Transforming ordinary stuff into magical situations. Sonic arts and design – Daily tous les jours. Daily tous les jours is an interaction design studio with a focus on participation – empowering people to have a place in the stories that are told around them.
A project by Carsten Nicolai, expensive project that Nicolai was commissioned to create, he enjoyed playing with the facades of buildings – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbwU8LB1NqI
Carsten Nicolai is a German musician. He uses the stage names Alva Noto, Noto and Aleph-1. He is a member of the music groups Diamond Version with Olaf Bender (Byetone), Signal with Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender, Cyclo with Ryoji Ikeda, and Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto with Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom he composed the score for the Hollywood film The Revenant. Nicolai was born in Chemnitz, Saxony, Germany (then Karl-Marx-Stadt, Saxony, East Germany) in 1965. He studied architecture and landscape design before pursuing art. In 1999 he founded Raster-Noton. Nicolai has recently written an opera, Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, in collaboration with Michael Nyman.
Nicolai has performed and created installations in many of the world’s most prestigious spaces including the Guggenheim, New York, the SF MoMA, Modern Art Oxford, NTT Tokyo, Tate Modern and Venice Biennale, Italy. As a member (and co-founder) of the Raster-Noton label he was responsible for the acclaimed CD series ’20 to 2000′ that went on to win the Golden Nica prize at Prix Ars Electronica, 2000. Carsten Nicolai also works as a visual artist. Using the principles of Cymatics he often visualizes sound. In 2013, Nicolai participated as a visual artist in Noise, an official collateral show of the 55th Venice Biennale of Art. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alva_Noto
Nicolas Collins (born March 26, 1954 in New York City) is a composer of mostly electronic music and former student of Alvin Lucier. He received a B.A. and M.A. from Wesleyan University. Subsequently, he was a Watson Fellow. Nicolas Collins was “a pioneer in the use of microcomputers in live performance, and has made extensive use of ‘home-made’ electronic circuitry, radio, found sound material, and transformed musical instruments.” He has presented over 300 concerts and installations in Europe, Japan, and the United States as a solo artist and as a member of various ensembles. He is a member of The Impossible Music Group with David Weinstein, David Shea, Ted Greenwald, and Tim Spelios.
Collins is a prominent curator of performance and installation art, and has been a curator, policy adviser, and board member for numerous cultural organizations. For example, in the early 1990s he was both artistic Co-Director at STEIM (Studio for Electro Instrumental Music), located in Amsterdam and a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) composer-in-residence in Berlin. Collins is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press. He is also the chair of the sound department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2006 Collins’ book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking was published by Routledge. An expanded, updated edition was published in 2009. He was a major influence on the establishment of the Musical Electronics Library in NewZealand. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Collins
Sonic arts and makers/hackers – Nicolas Collins, he developed an aesthetic of Arduino culture.
Benjamin “Ben” Burtt, Jr. (born July 12, 1948) is an American sound designer, film editor, director, screenwriter, and voice actor. He has worked as sound designer on various films, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), WALL-E (2008) and Star Trek (2009). He is most notable for creating many of the iconic sound effects heard in the Star Wars film franchise, including the “voice” of R2-D2, the lightsaber hum, the sound of the blaster guns, and the heavy-breathing sound of Darth Vader. Burtt is also known for “voicing” the title character, Wall-E, in the 2008 Pixar movie WALL-E. He also created the robotic sound of Wall-E’s voice, along with all the other characters in WALL-E, and was the sound editor of the movie. The winner of four Academy Awards (two of which are Special Achievement Academy Awards), he is the director of various documentary films. He is also the editor of the three films of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Burtt
Sonic arts and illustration: Ben Burtt – R2-D2, WALL-E, developed sounds to convey emotions and communications.
Christine Sun Kim is an American sound artist who has been deaf since birth. Based in New York City, she started as a visual artist, but started to be attracted to sound as a medium because of the “rules” society attaches to it and her disconnect from sound as most people experience it. She states her mission as to “unlearn sound etiquette.” Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Hull House Museum in Chicago, and Art Basel in Hong Kong. She was named a TED Fellow twice. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Sun_Kim
Sonic arts and materiality: Christine Sun Kim – physicality of sound, the way they vibrate – paint on speakers.
Björk Guðmundsdóttir (born 21 November 1965), known mononymously as Björk, is an Icelandic singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and occasional actress. She initially became known as the lead singer of the alternative rock band The Sugarcubes, who’s 1987 single “Birthday” was a hit on US and UK indie stations and a favourite among music critics. Björk began her career as a solo artist in 1993. Her album Debut was rooted in electronic, house, jazz and trip hop and is widely credited as one of the first albums to introduce electronic music into mainstream pop. Over her three-decade solo career, Björk has developed an eclectic and avant-garde musical style that incorporates aspects of electronic, alternative dance, trip hop, experimental, glitch, jazz, alternative rock, avant-garde, and classical music. Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rk
Sonic arts and electronic music performances: Björk.
Dr Alexandros’s conclusion of the lecture:
Sonic Art – The term generally designates the art form in which the sound is its basic unit. A liberal view of sonic art would indicate it to be a subset of music. Sonic art is associated both with musicians as well as fine and new media artists.
Sonic art is a wonderful extension of your play (discipline), play with this universe. Dr Alexandros would like to see us playing with sound and taking it to different places.
What did I gain from this lecture?
From this lecture I obtained an enlightening insight and a useful understanding of the life of sonic arts established through creative and influential developments using technological advancements produced over time powered by the constellation of great and inspiring people.
This broad aspect of field work is how I gained a wider perspective of the outstanding beauty of minds structured from an alliance of diverse disciplines inspired and stimulated, coming together to innovate and make fascinating progression and discoveries to further thrive the art industry. I emphasise and understand now how important sonic arts is as an avant-garde of sounds conforming to our technological culture and this form relating to the powerful sense of hearing being such an important tool of communication and learning which we take for granted. I recognise how sonic art is becoming more and more utilised and subjected by designers of technology in this expanding electric world of cyborgs today for example smartphone Apple’s Siri and GPS voice navigations.
From Dr Alexandros’s lecture I grew a stimulating interest in the idea of creating new sounds with my own invented instruments to technologically collage and formulate effective sound designs using a computer to function with my illustration discipline as an additional communicativepowerful tool to further engross my audience and to gain an acquired skill and a first-hand experience of this growing electronic sonic art realm through practice.
What I particularly admired about this lecture was the success of experimentation by using primitive devices with sounds made from ordinary objects enforcing the idea that everything can be a tool to our creations and the exciting idea of taking something with a distinct purpose and then reinventing this career to a new path opening new possibilities and potentials as we excitingly and forever encourage venturing into unexplored lands. As suggested by Dr Alexandros I will go see a classical music performance for the first time and consider in investing in a tape recorder.
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