Thursday 29 October 2015

Summarising and paraphrasing

David Glauntlett
Media, Gender and Identity
In films women and men are equal in abilities and skills, but men are usually the leaders and saviours of women. If a woman is a leader she is normally young and attractive. To be fair, men have also to be attractive, but they can be in their forties, fifties and sixties and there are numerous examples of this (Sean Connery, Bruce Willis, etc).
In advertisement it is widely proved that women usually are announcing domestical products or supporting men. They are usually portrayed as housewives not just in adverts, but also on slogans. An example is the Iceland Supermarket's: 'That is why mum goes to Iceland'. At some point advertisers stopped doing this to avoid offense to customers and keep them, but not because they have changed the way they see the world.
Nowadays the women expected to be seen on films and advertisement are busy, confident, in control of their lives and slave of no one. Men on the other hand are started to being used to support that idea with different roles: the woman that no man tells her what to do or the man that is used as a mock when he tries to do this.
The speech to make contemporary women to consume is based on two words: freedom and liberation. Selling beauty has a different approach from 1970 nowadays. TV shows or films cultivate insecurities in order to sell solutions, something that adverts do.


Laura Mulvey
Visual and other pleasures
Mulvey presents her theory based on two aspects of the human being: the scopophilia, which is the pleasure of looking, and the narcissism as cross roads of feelings that make us forget about the real reality.

Through scopophilia an spectator identifies an alike on the screen as a physical object, affecting that person's erotic identity. And here is where narcissism plays its role. From the childhood when a kid discovers his or her look on a mirror wonders how to improve it based on the standard figures on TV and films, creating both a fascination and stimulation of the ego libido on what he or she could be and a high demand of himself. This dichotomy was very important for Freud and it has no meaning by itself, only if attached to an idealisation. It
is a virtually pleasant process because a person is in tension between following the instinctual drives through the scopophilia but also the self preservation given by the narcissism, but it makes that person ignore the reality and motivate false interpretations of it creating expectations with inevitable disappointments.

Women play an important role in forming the patriarchal unconscious, being what men do not wish to be because of an association to maternal roles and the natural lack of phallus, a part of the body directly related with power. For that, the women unconsciouslly symbolises the castration threat.
In films, ergo in reality by extension, women are just beautiful objects for men to enjoy. On one hand, the man normally controls the plot and the spectator looks through his eyes. On the other, the women are usually sexual reasons to distract the man from the main story-line. The woman is indispensable to ensure spectacle in normal narrative films, but her function slows down the action for erotic contemplation. A good example for this can be strippers, pin-ups, Ziegfield or Busby Berkeley, shows that satiate fantasies through scopophilia.
 
The men usually play active roles, while the women do the passive. Man's fantasies are projected on a woman, who is styled according to that projection. They have strong visual and erotic impact to be identified as the mentioned projection. It is what she provokes or represents what is imoprtant, either if it is love or fear, or even feelings of concern: this makes the male character to act the way he acts. But the woman has no importance by herself.

When analysing film and reality it is important to understand that in the 'film world' there is a control of time - through edition and narrative - and space - distances can be faked-. These are codes that given in a proper order can define desires. Desires that can be reflected from 3 different angles:

- The camera that films what is going on before it.
- The interpretation of the audience watching the final product.
- How characters see each other in the illusion on the screen.

Saturday 24 October 2015

Reading and Understanding a Text

In the last lesson we were assigned to start our research reading the texts on eStudio and extracting five different arguments with their respective quotes.

David Gauntlett is very analytic and objective in his book Media, gender and identity using several examples to back his arguments up. His conclusions can be cataloged as feminist, but they are just a result of an impartial breakdown of different facts and studies. The following text is a conclusion he made after the analysis of the roles of males and females in contemporary films, stating that although both men and women have to meet canons of beauty in order to be in a film, but older men are more likely to be considered for leading characters:
"Women and men tend to have similar skills and abilities in films today, but if you look at any bunch of films on release and identify the one leading character in each, there's likely to be more men than women. Male characters alre also more likely to find themselves able to save a woman in a heroic moment. Leading women have to be attractive, within our recognised conventions of what makes women attractive; but, to be fair, we should note that leading men also have to be attractive, within the recognised conventions for males. Men can get away with being older, however, and there are far more leading men in their forties, fifties and sixties than there are leading women in this group".

In relation with David Glauntlett conclusion shown above, from a psychological point of view with a more technical but deeper articulation of arguments Laura Mulvey analyses in her book Visual and other pleasures the scopophilic instincts of the human being, feeling pleasure when “using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight”. But also the narcissism cultivated from a very young age when a person sees him or herself in the mirror for the first time and how the brain use that image to project a “better” one based on the canons of beauty the cinema industry sell. In the next paragraph she thoroughly explains how this two mental processes have no meaning by themselves, but they are attached to an idealasation that creates unrealistic expectations in real life.
"Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation polarises in terms of pleasure. But both are formative structures, mechanisms without intrinsic meaning. In themselves they have no signification, unless attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, and motivate eroticised phantasmagoria that affect the subject’s perception of the world to make a mockery of empirical objectivity”.

Mulvey also rationalises in a political use of psychoanalysis what is the role of a woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious, being someone that a men would not like to be because of an association of maternal roles and the lack of phallus, which is directly related with power.
"The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolises the castration threat by her real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end. It does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack."

Getting into a more tangible field, Mulvey focuses as well on how the woman's role is actually a mere image while the man is the one who looks. The man is the one who usually controls the plot making the spectator see through his eyes. This can be appreciated in the role females characters have in films and other kinds of spectacles where they are there in order to affect the main plot. For instance, in how women in films usually slow men down in their missions due to sexual reasons. Another example is the role of a woman in a strip club, where some men go to satiate their fantasies (notice the act of scopophilia previously mentioned):
"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to strip-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkely, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies the male desire"... "The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:
“What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has no the slightest importance"".

Although this narcissism and scopophilia defines the roles of females in media and in real world, it is important to notice that there are certain differences between the representation of a woman on a film, where the perspective of the audience can be shifted while in the real world the sense of spectacle do not have the same impact.
"The place of the look defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows and so on"... "
Playing on the tenstion between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire"...

..."There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion".

Thursday 15 October 2015

Reseach methods: Google Books

In the last session of Context of Practice we performed an activity in order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of research.

In my group we had to use Google Books and look for Theories of gender. We were asked to find at least 2 distinct research sources, note down the details of the source and evaluate the research.


I was able to find 3 different sources: "Food is love: Advertising & Gender Roles in modern America" by Katherin J. Parkin, "Gender, Culture and Consumer Behaviour" by Cole Otnes and Linda Tuncay-Zayer and "Developing a Stereotype index of Gender Role Stereotypes in Television advertising" by Kwangok Kim.

Using Google Books on an iPad (the device I had at hand) was not an easy task at all. I was not able to skim the book or make a proper search, so that is why I have not given chapters and pages numbers. It is a good complement for a research, but not very reliable. Even if you can read it, it is a little bit difficult to do it if it is not lacking of content, as normally pages are missing. Besides, some books are not digitalised, leading you to buy them, which is annoying. Even though, a tool to keep in mind when looking for a specific book or glance it.




Monday 12 October 2015

Visual Literacy Lecture

The purpose of the last lecture was for us to understand what Visual Literacy means and how can we use it in our favour, as it is our job to communicate, to solve problems of communication through type, image and/or motion and to be able to reach different audiences.


It was very interesting to be proven how images can be read based on an agreement across the world, no matter what language a person speaks. Anyone could say everything on the talk was obvious, but Fred nailed it when he said that we all know this stuff, but we do not know that we know it, therefore we cannot control it until we do.

I found also intriguing the way the Visual Syntax works and how the same thing can be represented in an unlimited ways. It is our job to pick an specific one for the right context. The 
Visual Synecdoche reminded me a film a really liked: Synecdoche New York. When I watched it I did not know the meaning of that word, so I will watch it again to see how the title fits in the argument. I also found myself a little bit struggled understanding the difference between synecdoche and metonym, but after some research on my own I could understand that the metonym is the substitution of a term, either visual or linguistic, that is related with the cause or dependency. Sometimes the difference is not clear between these two terms because they are based on the same fundamentals. But the Statue of Liberty as example for synecdoche and being burned by the sun (actually the heat produced by the sun) made me understand it much better.

Summarising, I found the talk very useful, so now we can identify better what we see and apply that knowledge to future works.

Saturday 10 October 2015

Image Analysis Exercise

This short essay will consist in the analysis and comparison of three different images split in two groups: 1) "The Uncle Sam Range" and 2) "East African Transport - Old Style" and "East African Transport - New Style". The purpose of this analysis is to show a social, cultural, technological, political and historical awareness examining the typography, purposes of the works and the audience of these.

1.- The Uncle Sam Range



Designed by Schumacher & Ettlinger in 1876 The Uncle Sam Range casts at a very first glance an American feeling as the walls and floor are covered in blue, red, white, stripes and stars, not to mention the maid's dress. The typography used is a Tuscan Typeface, and according to an article written by The University of Texas at Austin: "The majority of Gothic Tuscans produced in the second half of the nineteenth century originated as wood type in America", so this style was quite popular back then.


The guests seem to be invited by Uncle Sam, the masculine figure in the center of the picture facing the audience. The other adult, the woman, represented how women used to be considered those days: a servant in the background, not participating in that celebration. The Earth is also sitting on the table with a desperate and hungry face reading the menu full of stereotypical foods from all over the globe. It seems like the author wanted to tell the audience how almighty the Uncle Sam can be. The alpha male posture, exhibiting the food and giving to choose anything that can be cooked in the world as a gesture of omnipotence. Finally, the character that is not to be seen. The slave. The black kid cooking is the only one on the picture facing down and it is only possible to see one side of his face, like the designer wanted to add him but not entirely.

2.- 'Colonial Progress Brings Home Prosperity' series of posters


These two pictures were illustrated by Adrian Allison back in 1931. They are much less detailed than the first one but the meaning to contemporary audience may be mistaken. These posters were part of a colonisation founding campaign.

The first image shows a group of people during a migration. They look lost and angry. The leader and the majority of other adults in the image are mostly women, something negative for that period in time, symbolising that with chaos most likely. They are also armed and look scared, moving for not knowing how to survive in that moor.

The second one, a white English man in control. The empire has arrived, and that sofisticated western and well dressed man smoking a pipe bothers to giving the savages civilization and technology (the trucks). Today these last lines can be read using an ironic tone but back in the 30's they were the plain truth.




3.- Final comparison

In the images we can appreciate the old societies where the white man was the most important concept, while black people and women are there just to serve him. As a cultural aspect we can appreciate how they conceived the oppression and the imperialism. While the Americans were proud of being independent and free to establish their own government and politics the British thought they were doing something good for the rest of the world colonising it, which was dramatically incorrect. They bragged about their technologies as something that was there to improve Africans lives, when in reality was just a tool for the slaves to be more efficient. All the images are proof that history is written by those who win in a conflict, telling what they consider opportune and from their perspective.

Monday 5 October 2015

The topic of the essay


During the briefing lecture we had last week, where Simon introduced us to our first module of Context of Practice, we were given 6 different topics/questions to base our work on. They were the following:

  • “To what extent have Modernist design principles influenced contemporary Graphic Design?”
  • “How did Postmodernism impact on Graphic Design practice?"
  • "To what extent does advertising construct our ideas of gender?"
  • “Discuss the role that Graphic Design can play during periods of political and/or social upheaval."
  • “What is the relationship between branding and The Consumer Self?”
  • "What is the role of print media in the digital age?"

The two in bold are the ones I was most interested on. After thinking on it for a while, I decided to go for the first one, advertising and gender, as now it has been some time since I became very interested in feminism, so I think this is a very good opportunity to take my personal concerns to an academic level. Writing an essay about how gender roles are tremendously affected by advertisement it is something I think I can really talk about. Besides, applying these ideas into a design could also be an opportunity to explore new concepts.

Following Simon's suggestions on eStudio, I borrowed 3 books that are being really helpful in my preparation:
  • A short guide to writing about art - Sylvan Barnet
  • Visual and other pleasures - Laura Mulvey
  • Media, Gender and Identity - David Gauntlett

So far I have been reading the first one: A short guide to writing about art as preparation for next session and I find it really interesting and handy, as English is not my first language and writing about art in academic terms is not something I have done before.

Friday 2 October 2015

Helvetica

During Simon's introduction to our first brief, 'This is Graphic Design', he mentioned the documentary Helvetica. He said something like: 'Have you guys watched the documentary ? No!? Well, it's amazing' with an expression on his face that suggested that we had to do it ASAP, so I wrote it down (before realising that it actually is on eStudio). One or two days after, I was checking my notes and I decided to use my free time in the library to watch the mentioned film. A very well invested time, I must say.

I believe that the director, Gary Hustwit, did a great job taking us into a historical and contemporary journey. The film starts with great designers, such as Wim Crouvel or Matthew Carter, convincing you on how amazing and perfect Helvetica is because of its impossible-to-improve design, its subtlety and its adaptability. In the middle part, other geniuses in Graphic Design, like Erik Spiekermann, attack the typeface with strong arguments, stating that Helvetica lost its personality and function long time ago. That it is what people that do not know about Graphic Design use, and many other reasons. And just when I was starting to hate Helvetica, some other brilliant designers explain that you cannot do anything against something that is genuinely good. That Helvetica does not have a personality itself, it is able to adopt designer's. Many very well presented contradictory opinions that made me question myself about my own tastes. The documentary made me also realise something I was not aware of before, that Helvetica is everywhere. Literally, just like air, as many designers compare during the film.

Helvetica was not just a very nice cinematographic experience in terms of narrative, photography, music and content, but also a great opportunity to see how top designers spoke about other related aspects of design. Like Massimo Vignelli, now deceased, spoke about modernism and post-modernism, a period he claimed it was when artists were running like chickens without head when choosing a typeface. He also claimed something I found really interesting, since I do not like to be obvious when designing:


"I don't think that type should be expressive at all. I can write the word 'dog' with any typeface and it doesn't have to look like a dog. But there are people that think that when they write 'dog' it should bark".

Also, watching Erik Spiekermann speaking in a private environment was like looking through a hole how he actually felt about the design world in general, as he was confessing some feelings in a youthful and funny way.


"The guy who designed it (Helvetica) tried to make all the letters look the same. Helloooo. That's called an army, that's not people because people doesn't have the same fucking helmet on".


I can say this film changed my life. Yes, I am serious. It is impossible for me not to see that Helvetica is everywhere now. My favourite font used to be Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, now I do not know anymore. Did I like it by myself or I was told by Max Miedinger's bright mind to love it? Graphic Design can get really serious, and I am just getting started.