For my contextual Portfolio: Write some reflections - with images - on the ideas covered today and in particular think about how they might feed into your own studio work and essay topic.
For my essay: How some of the ideas might reflect in our essays.
...Discuss the effect of subcultures on influential graphic designers.
The subcultures as a kind of postproduction, 'remixing' of, or response to a dominant culture. All three essay questions are interconnected. Seminars can apply to any of the questions. Depends how we structure it.
Postproduction can be defined as:
- The stage in the production of a media output, typically involving editing and the addition of other elements.
- The set of process applied to recorded material eg. montage, the inclusion of other visual or audio sources, subtitling, voice overs, and special effects.
- It can be seen as taking data that has been captured, cutting it up, moving it around and filtering and shaping it into a finished piece of work
Digital media:
...as somethings which is encoded and machine readable, which can be created, viewed, distributed, modified and preserved on digital electronic devices, is contrasted with print, media, such as printed books, newspapers, and other traditional; media, such as film or audio tape.
Nicholas Bourriaud, 2002. 'The artistic question is no longer 'What
can we make that is new?' but, 'How can
we make do with what we have?' ... Artists
today program forms more than they
compose them.'
Culture as screenplay: How art Reprograms the world (2002)
"Since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis
of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by
others or available cultural products. This art of postproduction seems to respond to the
proliferating chaos of global culture in the information age, which is characterized by an increase
in the supply of works and the art world's annexation of forms ignored or disdained until now.
These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the
traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and
original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of
elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in
circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects.
Notions of originality [...] and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred
in this new cultural landscape marked by [...] the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting
them into new contexts.‟
How are cultural practitioners using postproduction according to Bourriaud?
- By creating hybridised art forms emerging out of interdisciplinary media arts practices.
- Using new media technologies to both compose their art work as well as display it and/ or stream it through the networked space.
- Repurposing or 'versioning' their works-in-process for a wide away of media genres and platforms.
- Using online performance of digitally constructed or fictional artistically generated identities , a more open mindedness to alternative distribution where we locate audiences via electronic media, underground club spaces, store fronts, DVD labels, social networking sites but also in combination of more traditional venues such as museums, print publications, university art centres and galleries.
Marcel Duchamp, The readymade as postproduction. Fountain, 1917.
To create is to insert an object into a new content; to consider it an element of a bigger narrative. In a sense, the works journey becomes part of a dialogic process - each artistic or interpretive decision made on its behalf might be compared to conversational turn-taking.
Marshall Macluhan, the medium is the message.
Bricolage
- (In art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things.
- Bricolage does not necessarily need to have a clear end in sight.
- Bricolage means to engage in a dialogue with a heterogeneous collection of materials and tools, in which items are repurposes and rearranged to solve a problem (Sharples et al, 2014).
- Bricolage is a French word that means the process of improvisation in a human endeavor. The word is derived from the French verb bricoler ("to tinker"), with the English term DIY ("Do-it-yourself") being the closest equivalent of the contemporary French usage.
- 'The expansion of available information and exposure to diverse cultures and networks' increases the opportunities for bricolage. (Wuthnow 2010).
Mark Amerika, Remix the Book, 2011
'DIY trends in contemporary practice [...] challenge our 20th century notions of what an artist is.'
Amerika develops a model of contemporary theoretical writing that mashes up the rhetorical styles of performance art, poetry and the vernacular associated with 21st century social media and networking culture.
'Remixes' for America might include literary cut-ups and procedural composition, image appropriation, internet art and sound art.
