Caio's Graduate Diploma

Since I already knew the basics of Photoshop that were being taught in the workshop, I went to the computer room to do some experimenting with the program. This is the first composition I did:

The initial idea was making a picture montage on Photoshop that looked fairly realistic. I soon realized that this wouldn’t be too easy, though, since I only had around 1 hour to do so and was limited to using pictures I found on Google images (which are often low quality or have bad angles), as I don’t have access to any stock image banks in here, so instead I tried using some filters and effects to make it look deliberately artificial (and to try and mask the low image quality of the pictures I used).

I think I ended up using somewhere around 10 different images I found on Google to make the composition. There are several problems in the piece, some of the most obvious ones being weird angles, poorly cut objects and mismatched textures. Some of those could be accounted for had I had more time, I think, so for the next projects I should probably take into account the time I’m going to have to execute them in the initial planning phase so that I don’t tackle more than I’m able to accomplish.

After that, I played around a bit with one of the filters I like the most on Photohop to make a much simpler composition:

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My idea with this one was making a simple illustration based on digital surveillance, mostly just exploring the process of image distortion by digital compression.

After having been through the brainstorming session, we had a manifesto writing session and were tasked with finalising the first draft of the manifesto by the end of the day. If I recall correctly, we started the session by considering base questions such as what is the context of our publication, who our audience is supposed to be, and what is exactly the message we want to convey and what its effect would be.

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After we had done that, we were shown some examples of famously compelling and impactful manifestos to analyse, discuss, and draw inspiration from, so that then we could start writing our own:

I had a quick look at two other manifestos as well, but these two are the ones I had more time to analyse. I liked both of them a lot. Haeg’s one is very fun, has a seemingly lighthearted tone but uses that very effectively to convey a very important and serious issue. Rainer’s manifesto is simple and direct, which I think is a very positive point, and seeing the annotations she did upon revisiting it is very interesting in the sense of realising how she developed as a person and artist and how her attitude towards the subject radically changed. I think it requires a lot of courage and boldness to be so openly and strongly critical of your own work, and I think all the points she made towards her old manifesto are very valid and sensible. I consider myself to be very critical of mine and other people’s artistic work as well, so as a critic I think her notes are very inspiring.

My group seemed to prefer the ironic narrative lightness of Haeg’s manifesto, but also liked the directness of writing a manifesto in bullet points as well. We felt like the 5 polemical statements we had written in the previous brainstorm were narratively strong and planned on using them for the final manifesto, maybe writing it in the form of bullet points like Rainer did.

Probably inspired by Haeg’s manifesto, I suggested experimenting with writing an ironic manifesto from the viewpoint of someone who is thankful for the surveillance while exposing its creepy implications, which my group immediately loved and started giving lots of suggestions and ideas, which was very nice.

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From the group discussions we seemed to all feel like the format we were going with was a great idea since it made use of two of the strongest points from the examples we had just read: The direct and structured simplicity from the bullet points format and the persuasiveness and fun narrative twist from the ironic tone. After much playing around, ordering and reordering of ideas and careful considerations to make sure we were conveying the exact tone and message we wanted to, we had our final piece:

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Everyone in the group seemed to like the result of the manifesto writing workshop, and despite there being some small problems (there always are) I feel like we did a very good job and left the room with a sense of accomplishment. 🙂

Late as usual (I swear I’m trying), but I’m going to relate the process in which my group developed the final piece of our Manifesto for Project 1, which allowed us to then develop our individual works based on it.

As stated in the Manifesto Project Launch post, the theme we went with is Surveillance. From there, we went on to write 5 polemical statements that reflect our stand towards the theme:

Our 5 statements were:
1. No privacy, no freedom.
2. I want to know who is watching me.
3. Cameras on the streets, not in my room.
4. I couldn’t find the disagree button.
5. Our data is not for sale.

We tried to make our statements as direct and impactful as possible, and I think we were all very satisfied with the results. From there, we tried synthesising what they all meant to us in relation to our topic and propose solutions to the problems that they posed. We discussed various solutions like making publications to raise awareness on the issue, and inventing an utopic personal information database that could be accessed by anyone and could inform each user about what personal information they had that was out there, and what company or organ detained it, also possibly allowing users to delete the information depending on what it was.

The latter proposal raised a lot of debate, though, about the ethical and public safety implications of that service, and some points we discussed were the ease of access to the information and who would be able to access it; if we needed someone to manage the service and if the person necessarily had to have access to all the information in it; and the extent to which the deletion of personal information would be viable, and by who; convicted criminals deleting footage of their misdemeanours, for instance, would be obviously problematic, so if we were to further develop this idea we would need to think up a lot of the logistics of how it would work.

After this, we went on to brainstorm about different ways in which we could respond to the manifesto for each of our pathways. The whole group shared ideas and proposals that came to us at the time about how the different pathways could apply the theme to their work, which was very nice. We threw around ideas for fashion garments that deal with transparency and vision, fine art performances and interventions that deal with the idea of being seen without knowing, anti-surveillance products, informative publications and websites, and much more.

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I haven’t posted in a while and am a bit late with the blog updates, but I’ll try to cover most of what I’ve been doing on the last few weeks and catch up to where I’m at now in the next posts.

We visited a couple of exhibitions in Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern in order to get inspiration for our Manifesto project and have a discussion about what we gathered from the visit in relation to our group project afterwards. These are some of the pictures I took at Hayward Gallery:

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I was mostly focused on photographing works that had common themes with our subject (surveillance), such as technology (the sculpture) and vision (the eye details) but I did end up taking pictures of works that I could take inspiration from aesthetically to produce my own, as well. Some particular elements that I liked in those that I ended up photographing were the use of well defined solid shapes, vivid colours, layouts that use type and image, and the cheeky, ironic tone in some of them.

These are some of the pictures I took in Tate Modern:

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For Tate we split up the group to analyse thoroughly each of the exhibitions that we thought had to do the most with our theme, which were: Artist and Society, Media Networks and Living Cities. Me and Tong were assigned to check out the Living Cities exhibit, but since it was a short one, I managed to go through all of the artworks and check out some from the Media Networks one as well. I focused, once again, mostly on works that relate to technology and urban life, but also took some pictures for layout inspiration (guerrilla girls).

My group decided to leave the exhibitions 30 minutes earlier to be able to discuss and share our findings and ideas with each other before the bigger class discussion, which turned out very productive and generated some fun ideas.

In the Visual Communication Pathway Session we were first give a lecture going over themes such as the relation between type and meaning, visuality and narrative, looking and reading. We were shown some exemples of designers that explore these relations in their work, mainly using typography in ways that visually represent the content of the words beyond just writing them out.

We were then given an assignment to look through newspapers to find phrases or words that we could use to explore these relations in a similar manner. We were advised to work with the photocopier and printer to explore as best as we could the unique possibilities that they allow, and were restricted to using the Univers typeface (with all its different weights and styles) to do so.

I found an article about a child’s death with the headline “good bye my angel: now you’re untouchable.” I thought it sounded quite lyrical and allowed for different interpretations when separated from the article, so I set out to try to use it.

My initial thought was to try to contextualize it in a way that it read like the end of a relationship instead of a death, but I don’t think I managed to achieve that, and my final piece ended up looking more eerie and dark than romantic and sad:

I couldn’t get the typeface to work on my computer so I manually photocopied it, cut and pasted each individual letter to form the sentence. I like the crooked look of the different style types cut and glued together, but that ended up costing me a lot of time that I could have used to experiment and create different approaches to my theme.

I used heavier type weights for the first part of the phrase and lighter ones for the second to try to make the lightness of the letters represent the emptiness and space that the word “untouchable” evokes, but maybe it would have looked more visually balanced (and aesthetically pleasing) if I hadn’t. The small images on the corners of the paper sheet in the middle are illustrations of a surgical procedure for the separation of conjoined twins I found on the newspaper, I used them to symbolize the process of separation.

I think my classmates’ works were mostly very good but I didn’t like the outcome of mine very much. I think I ended up straying a bit from the intention of the activity and should’ve tried exploring more the visuality of type and maybe used less images. I could have managed my time a little better too in order to be able to experiment with different possibilities. Oh well, there’s always next time. 😛

Also on Monday, we had the manifesto project launch lecture and a workshop for helping the pre-assigned groups brainstorm about what the theme of their projects was going to be. Our project is, basically, writing a manifesto statement and later producing a zine containing it along with artistic/design works from each of the students relating to its subject matter.

We were instructed beforehand to bring a newspaper, scissors, a glue stick and markers to the workshop. The first step of the workshop was cutting up newspaper headlines and individual words or phrases to try to answer, based on them, what are the most important global issues of our time, and glueing them all up on a blank a2 paper sheet.

Based on that, we brainstormed on another sheet of paper trying to put into words what we took away from the previous exercise. The goal was still figuring out what the most important issues of our time were, but this time we were also focusing on actually choosing one of them to base our manifesto on.

After some debate on a range of different topics, we ended up settling on the theme Surveillance. I like the theme and feel like there are many different possible approaches to working with it in interesting ways, and I think everyone on the group is satisfied with the decision as well.

Last Monday me and my classmates were shown a zine collection in preparation to our Manifesto assignment, both to draw inspiration from and to physically illustrate what a zine is to those of us who weren’t familiar with the concept. I didn’t manage to take a close look at all of the zines from the collection, but I took some pictures of a couple of them that I found particularly amusing:

These are from a zine entirely about cats. I forgot to write down the name of the zine so I could credit the authors properly, will try to remember next time, but these specific comics are credited to Ben H. I enjoy the surreal yet (playfully)dry sense of humour on these, and love the satirized pop culture reference approach leading to a perfect punchline on the first one. I like the odd specificity of “space crabs” on the second one, but thought it was a bit weaker overall.

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This was my favourite zine from the ones I looked through in the collection. Forgot to take the author’s name as well, but upon a bit of investigation it seems to have been made by Tommy Brentnall aka piggybankshoe. From what I recall, the zine relates, through a non-linear experimental narrative, the transformation of the author into a printer/photocopier as a next step in human evolution.

The narrative is presented as a superimposition of different media, including drawings and deconstructed doodles, photographs, graphs and stock images, 3D modelling, handwritten and digital lettering, all apparently copied, pasted and arranged through a photocopier and printer machine (perhaps the author himself?), and infused with a playfully surreal and cynical sense of humour.

Both of these zines toy with a concept that I can relate to and would like to explore in my work, which is the wringing of seemingly simple and silly subject matters to their last consequences, through the extraction and reproduction of the most diverse and extreme narrative possibilities that they allow.

My first assignment at the RCA was making a Pecha Kucha slide presentation to show a bit of my work and influences/inspirations to my teachers and fellow students. I tried mixing in some of the designs I’ve done for work and university with some personal projects and experiments. Here is the presentation:

Assembling the presentation was kind of a difficult process for me since I’m not a big fan of most of my previous work. I’m reasonably confident in my potential, nervertheless, and feel like exposing my work is a crucial part of the road towards improving it, so I’m glad I managed to get through that.

I was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the other students’ works, and a bit intimidated as well, I guess. I love how everyone’s got such different styles and attitudes towards their work, and how you can catch a glimpse of each person’s personality and inner workings through their art. I’m looking forward to seeing how our practices are going to interact in upcoming projects.