It's been a very quick week over in the Visual Communication studio. To begin, i never made it into the studio for our first session on Monday due to the Underground strike. Nightmare. I heard it was a really fun day and intend on doing an independent catch-up on the task with random words i end up searching online. Should go okay, i just need to buy myself a sketchbook and i'll get on it. With the rotation change came the change of my day off through the week, and so i was back in College on Tuesday. In our Vis Com brief, we were told which materials to bring in with us, so i bought all i needed, yet i ended up completely lost; the tutors put a project to us that we were to begin and continue for the rest of the week; we had to form a narrative out of 13 random images we had bought in with us. There were titles given to us to help steer our narratives, but literally, we were just told to Go. I sat there for a good while just drawing, because i felt completely lost with what i could do with all my images (they were really very random indeed). I eventually got so bored that i opened up my colour supplement i bought in with me to scan for inspiration, but ouila, it was just what i needed; i found myself staring at an image of a very serious and partly scary-looking man, holding a whopping big knife, staring back at me. I ripped it out, and pairing that with the drawings of animals i began to create, i found myself a narrative and a title; "There are always other options." My narrative isn't based on my views but it's looking to the way other people look at things; people influence me, and having moved into halls of residence and sharing a kitchen with a Vegan, i thought my narrative seemed necessary. I ended up with three images by the end of Tuesday, which isn't so bad.

Wednesday was no longer a day off either, for i had my first Seminar. After getting into our small groups, we put our Summer Project Photos up on the walls, paired up, and discussed which ones we liked most of all and why. After doing this, we discussed John Berger and how there is a certain mismatch between seeing and looking; we are born with the sense of seeing, however it takes looking to understand what we actually see. With observation, there is a reciprocal relationship, and when looking at something, we bring with us our own experiences and opinions; it is never a neutral action. Not only did we talk about his views of seeing and looking, but we also talked about reproduced images, and how the reproduced versions make the original loose it's uniqueness or 'aura', however it does increase the value of the original, to some extent, making them priceless pieces.
This is the same for past art; art which is erased will always stay in memory and being able to see that piece would be looked upon now as an experience; for example, the 2009 Turner Prize Exhibition; the winner was a work of art all over the walls which have now been painted over, making the winning piece a fond memory which would have been an experience to be a part of.
Not all of the focus was on the John Berger book, but also Gregory Crewdson and our opinions on his work; i personally have looked at Crewdson before and had watched a documentary of him creating a certain photograph; as beautiful as it looked, i couldn't help but not like the whole idea of creating this mock scene; photographs should be memories of a moment, time or place, not a fake set thrown together and directed. However, the same could be argued with film; his photographs are just like stills of a film. The last point of discussion was the Edweard Muybridge exhibition at Tate Britain; in groups we discussed what we liked best out of his works, whether it was the earlier landscape works that appealed to us or whether it was his movement series of works. Other points mentioned were on why the rooms of the exhibition were different colour and what we thought about the layout of the exhibition. For a two hours-ish seminar, we covered a lot of ground. For the rest of the afternoon, i tried to create more images to be used in my narrative.

Here we are at Thursday; Independent Study Day. I've actually used this day very wisely today, for i've ended up staying in and actually cracking on with my narrative so much so that i believe it's finished; there's not many images, but it does bring across the basic message in the simplest form possible. Photographs will be put up after the crit day, which is tomorrow, in which the whole group will be putting their narratives up all around the room. It'll be really interesting to see what other people have done and to see just how creative everybody can get. Otherwise, today i've been researching more illustrators and copying some of their images into my notebook. I've come across some really interesting people, one illustrator in particular standing out to me is Ceri Amphlett; her work is beautiful, messy and damn-right quirky. I'll be looking to her as an influence with the rest of the work i produce on this rotation.
Vis-Com - so far, so good. i do miss David from Fine Art though - whadda darling.

safe .x