Reading Assignment 8: Chapter 6
THE CONCEPT OF POST-MODERNISM IS NOT A SIMPLE ONE
POST-MODERNISM
-Dick Hebdige describes Post-Modernism as "modernity without the hope and dreams which made modernity bearable." It's modernity without certainty, without clarity or meaning, and without a common social purpose.
-Charles Jenks views post-modernism as a combination of modernist techniques and styles with something more sympathetic to the viewer. In "What is post-modernism", Jencks traced the confusion between post-modernism and lat modernism to the fact that both arise from post-industrial society.
SIGNS OF DISCONTENT
-In 1966, American architect Robert Venturi delivered a speech that was later documented in a book entitled Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. His "gentle manifesto" confronted head-on the contrasting values of modern and post-modern architecture, even though he claimed to have nothing to do with post-modernism. He describes this preference for the "difficult whole," a "messy vitality," rather than a certain unity; a hybridization of forms that celebrated "both/and" rather than "either/or" in their references and meanings.
-Jenks felt modern architects were deluding themselves by claims of universal form. He argued instead of Pluralism - a variety of styles that arise from the local culture - and that such a pastiche is rich with values and codes that are read differently by viewers.
-Several major themes emerged from early post-modern experiments in design and shaped work through the last decades of the twentieth century: -writerly rather than readerly text. -plural rather than singular meanings. - metonymy rather than metaphor. -cultural position. - vernacular, appropriated, and default forms. - hyperreality and the importance of image.
ONE VS. MANY
-At the core of post-structuralism is a concern for multiple meanings, for a lack of resolution about the meaning of something. Early structuralist theory sought meaning in the relationships among things, not in the things themselves. It asked questions about whether meaning resides in the object or in the its relationship to other objects and its context. Post-structuralism addresses the same questions but acknowledges that they will never be answered, because meaning is inherently unstable.
- Modernism assumes that there are Metanarratives that explain how the world works and that they are natural, true, and not the product of ideology. Such metanarratives, say the modernists, may be found in science, religion, and other social institutions. Post-modernism, on the other hand, questions these narratives and reveals their underlying value systems and biases.
METAPHOR AND METONYMY
-Metaphor: concerns analogy, or one things representing something else.
-Metonymy: Is when a single attribute or another object suggests the thing for which something stands in a less direct way.
-Metaphors aim to close down meaning - something is like something else in very specific ways, and is therefore not like other things. Where as Metonymy opens up meaning and defers our resolution of understanding about its intention.
CULTURAL POSITION
-The post-modern interest in plural meanings also hints at another overriding theme: recognition that we, as designers, frame a view of the world through the artifacts and representations we produce, and that this worldview will be formed and interpreted differently on the basis of cultural experience.
-Post-modernism views gender, race, class, and ethnicity as social constructions that are privileged (or not privileged), circulated, and maintained through the representations and practices of the dominant culture.
Dori Tunstall thoughts: Historical consciousness is people's understanding of where they come from, who they are, and where they are going. Life Goals embody what matters most to them member of the community. Community Structure addresses how the collective makes decisions and how individuals fit in and contribute. Relationships are the means through which people people gain understanding of common values and establish trust. Agency is the degree of the individual's control or influence over the things that matter to the community and themselves.
VERNACULAR, APPROPRIATED, AND DEFAULT FORMS
- Post-modern use or borrowed form differs from the meaning of these same forms in their original settings or as one-to-one illustrations of subject matter. The designer is therefore dislocated in a cultural sense-he or she comments from outside the represented culture, choosing these references as a second level signification or value achieved by their reuse in a new context. The repurposed cultural form may contradict or make ambiguous the meaning of its new context which forces us to consider the elitism of museums and their audiences.
HYPERREALITY AND LIVING IN THE IMAGE
-Italian philosopher Umberto Eco addresses cultural production and exchange of meanings in the relationships among producers, objects, and users. We can consider an object in any of five ways: as a physical thing that has an exchange value; as a sign of some social status; and a s a cultural unit that can enter into a discourse with other cultural units.
Design Project 4 - Constructivist Album Cover
Design Project - Constructivist Album Cover
DESIGN BRIEF
Album Artist: Kanye West - "Yeezus"
Audience: Teenagers and young adults whom are interested in hip-hop and R&B music.
Objectives of the work: Incorporate a feel of constructivism into the album cover. Add artist, album title, song titles, and attractive colors to attract the buyer.
Constructivist Influences: Music, Industrialization, Fashion, Politics, Emotion, Architecture, Language, Religion.
Messaging Hierarchy: -Kanye West, -"Yeezus", - track titles
References:
Reading Assignment 7
Reading Assignment 7
THE TROUBLESOME ISSUES OF CLASS AND STYLE
-The corollary to style is the taste, an interpretation "informed by experiences related to one's social class, cultural background, education, and other aspects of Identity. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdie studied the notion of taste in the 1970's and argues that it was not inherent in particular people but learned through "institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.
-The public appetite for style was fueled by the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century factories and standardization expanded public access to manufactured goods, and changed the value of image.
THE PUBLIC APPETITE FOR STYLE
-Walter Benjamin described the nineteenth-century Paris shopping arcades as "internal streets" for window shopping. Much like today's "mall rats", modern consumers wanted both to see and to be seen, creating an appetite for constantly changing visual appearance, status-conscious style, and the consumption of material goods.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
- Modernists who sought social progress, "style" was a dirty word - it was something dishonest, not to be trusted, the antithesis of function. Modern designers decried the ornament and form that were associated with historicism, with nostalgia for a specific past and places that no longer existed, and with an aristocracy that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the political agenda.
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT
- The initial goal of the movement was to provide fine design for for every home. This constituted a critique of mass-produced form and the loss of individuality and craftsmanship that was brought about by the Industrial Revolution and exemplified by the exhibitions of 1851 and 1900.
-The Arts and Crafts movement emphasized the beauty of of humble materials and also introduced the notion that middle-class ladies and gentlemen could earn money as designers of furniture and textiles without jeopardizing their social standing.
-By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement style had been reduced to an established visual language for home interiors, what the historian Christopher Crouch calls a "superficial coding for rusticity and tradition to provide an escape from the industrial present."
THE TROUBLESOME ISSUES OF CLASS AND STYLE
-The corollary to style is the taste, an interpretation "informed by experiences related to one's social class, cultural background, education, and other aspects of Identity. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdie studied the notion of taste in the 1970's and argues that it was not inherent in particular people but learned through "institutions that promote certain class-based assumptions about correct taste.
-The public appetite for style was fueled by the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth-century factories and standardization expanded public access to manufactured goods, and changed the value of image.
THE PUBLIC APPETITE FOR STYLE
-Walter Benjamin described the nineteenth-century Paris shopping arcades as "internal streets" for window shopping. Much like today's "mall rats", modern consumers wanted both to see and to be seen, creating an appetite for constantly changing visual appearance, status-conscious style, and the consumption of material goods.
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION
- Modernists who sought social progress, "style" was a dirty word - it was something dishonest, not to be trusted, the antithesis of function. Modern designers decried the ornament and form that were associated with historicism, with nostalgia for a specific past and places that no longer existed, and with an aristocracy that was becoming increasingly irrelevant to the political agenda.
THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT
- The initial goal of the movement was to provide fine design for for every home. This constituted a critique of mass-produced form and the loss of individuality and craftsmanship that was brought about by the Industrial Revolution and exemplified by the exhibitions of 1851 and 1900.
-The Arts and Crafts movement emphasized the beauty of of humble materials and also introduced the notion that middle-class ladies and gentlemen could earn money as designers of furniture and textiles without jeopardizing their social standing.
-By the end of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement style had been reduced to an established visual language for home interiors, what the historian Christopher Crouch calls a "superficial coding for rusticity and tradition to provide an escape from the industrial present."
Reading Assignment 6
Reading Assignment 6
A NEW CENTURY
-The assembly line fragmented the production process into discrete tasks for which individual workers held only a fraction of the knowledge and skills necessary to bring products to market. It standardized form so that the same object could be made repeatedly with identical effort and quality by a large number of workers.
-A century of dramatic population growth and advances in manufacturing technology had therefore transformed a culture of famers and craftsmen into a consumer society.
STRIVING FOR OBJECTIVITY AND LOGIC
- Overturning the centuries of belief in tradition and superstition under oppressive monarchies and the church, the progressive movements of the Enlightenment embraced Objectivity, rationality, and order.
-The twentieth-century workplace was also subject to new objective measures of success. Taylorism, developed and promoted by the mechanical engineer F.W. Taylor, determined the optimal method for performing a manufacturing task, trained workers in standardized jobs, and rewarded increased production output through incentives.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGE
- Photography, fully developed by the end of the nineteenth century, was a medium that as consistent with an objective view of the world and the public's appetite for images of a new age. The representation of places and events was no longer subject to the individual, edited interpretations of illustration; the stylistic mannerisms of drawing; or the longer exposures of the Daguerreotype, which made it impossible to capture the movement of busy urban life.
- The use of photographic images in advertising, journalism, fine art, and the depiction of everyday life drew as the century progressed, and the photograph gained particular status in illustration modern culture to the people who lived in it. Through its technological production, the photograph carried the imprimatur of "objective truth", of its maker having "been there" and recorded the state f affairs accurately.
GEOMETRY AND ABSTRACTION
- Many modern movements were experiments to define new roles for the pure sensory experience of abstract visual form. Rejecting the illusionistic visual conventions of the nineteenth century as irrelevant to the conditions of a new age and as too closely associated with elitist visions of high culture, these artists and designers created new, never-before-seen relationships between form and function.
- Designers therefore found in abstraction: an embodiment of the values of scientific reasoning and objectivity; the language of technology; the properties of non-representational, sensory experience; and a semblance of elemental order in a world of political and social chaos.
STANDARDIZATION
- Geometric form also lent itself to Standardization, which was increasingly necessary as factories and building construction flooded the market with components that had to work together.
-Abstraction eliminated such artifice, and the experience of space, weight, motion, and color was the result of direct perception, unimpeded by our intellectual understanding of representational systems that mediate our true experience of the world.
SEARCHING FOR THE UNIVERSAL
-Modern design ideologies therefore shared a belief in underlying principles of form that transcended specific cultures and contexts. If direct, sensory experience of this abstraction exists outside the influence of cultural conventions, it could be seen as Universal, as fundamental to human existence. If such forms are essentially human then it was through form that design could further the humanistic social agendas of the early twentieth century and escape the cultural superficiality of style and historicism.
THE UNIVERSAL PICTURE LANGUAGE OF NEURATH
-"Words Make Division, Pictures Make Connection." Otto Neurath saw reading pictures as a universal experience that could be applied to the translation of statistical data, scientific explanations, and the problems of transnational travel.
A NEW CENTURY
-The assembly line fragmented the production process into discrete tasks for which individual workers held only a fraction of the knowledge and skills necessary to bring products to market. It standardized form so that the same object could be made repeatedly with identical effort and quality by a large number of workers.
-A century of dramatic population growth and advances in manufacturing technology had therefore transformed a culture of famers and craftsmen into a consumer society.
STRIVING FOR OBJECTIVITY AND LOGIC
- Overturning the centuries of belief in tradition and superstition under oppressive monarchies and the church, the progressive movements of the Enlightenment embraced Objectivity, rationality, and order.
-The twentieth-century workplace was also subject to new objective measures of success. Taylorism, developed and promoted by the mechanical engineer F.W. Taylor, determined the optimal method for performing a manufacturing task, trained workers in standardized jobs, and rewarded increased production output through incentives.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMAGE
- Photography, fully developed by the end of the nineteenth century, was a medium that as consistent with an objective view of the world and the public's appetite for images of a new age. The representation of places and events was no longer subject to the individual, edited interpretations of illustration; the stylistic mannerisms of drawing; or the longer exposures of the Daguerreotype, which made it impossible to capture the movement of busy urban life.
- The use of photographic images in advertising, journalism, fine art, and the depiction of everyday life drew as the century progressed, and the photograph gained particular status in illustration modern culture to the people who lived in it. Through its technological production, the photograph carried the imprimatur of "objective truth", of its maker having "been there" and recorded the state f affairs accurately.
GEOMETRY AND ABSTRACTION
- Many modern movements were experiments to define new roles for the pure sensory experience of abstract visual form. Rejecting the illusionistic visual conventions of the nineteenth century as irrelevant to the conditions of a new age and as too closely associated with elitist visions of high culture, these artists and designers created new, never-before-seen relationships between form and function.
- Designers therefore found in abstraction: an embodiment of the values of scientific reasoning and objectivity; the language of technology; the properties of non-representational, sensory experience; and a semblance of elemental order in a world of political and social chaos.
STANDARDIZATION
- Geometric form also lent itself to Standardization, which was increasingly necessary as factories and building construction flooded the market with components that had to work together.
-Abstraction eliminated such artifice, and the experience of space, weight, motion, and color was the result of direct perception, unimpeded by our intellectual understanding of representational systems that mediate our true experience of the world.
SEARCHING FOR THE UNIVERSAL
-Modern design ideologies therefore shared a belief in underlying principles of form that transcended specific cultures and contexts. If direct, sensory experience of this abstraction exists outside the influence of cultural conventions, it could be seen as Universal, as fundamental to human existence. If such forms are essentially human then it was through form that design could further the humanistic social agendas of the early twentieth century and escape the cultural superficiality of style and historicism.
THE UNIVERSAL PICTURE LANGUAGE OF NEURATH
-"Words Make Division, Pictures Make Connection." Otto Neurath saw reading pictures as a universal experience that could be applied to the translation of statistical data, scientific explanations, and the problems of transnational travel.
Design Project 3 - Signifier & Signified
Signifier = The shoes
Signified = The text
The design I came out with out of the blue one day while trying to decide on a new project to come up with. The meaning of this piece is to show what a life may be like in some parts of the country. Shoes over a telephone wire resembles a few different things; a drug lord is in control of particular area and neighborhoods within that area; a certain gang controls that part of the area, and it could also mean that there could be prostitution going on within that area.
With that kind of lifestyle, that is one that you wouldn't want to associate with. What I have tried to portrait is that in these kind of areas, that lifestyle may actually be the "good life". A life of partying, sex, drugs, music, and no responsibility. A may be a dream life to people, but most often it isn't an ideal kind of lifestyle to live. For a lot of us, I think we are still trying to find "the good life."
Reading Assignment 5
Reading Assignment 5 - Chapter 4
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE: THE BIRTH OF SEMIOTICS
Semiotics: The study of life of "signs."
-Ferdinad de Saussure: His study was the approach to the study of language focused on the exchange of meaning between individuals and on the commonalities across languages, rather than on the eccentricities arising from their specific cultural origins. He thought that language should be viewed not only in terms or its parts (words) and their histories, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts.
-Signified and the Signifier:
- The Signified: is the person, thing, event, place, or concept called forth by the stimulation of the signifier. The signifier is the sound or word (or image, in the case of graphic design) that recalls in our mind the signified, even in the absence of the real thing.
- The Signifier: The designation of the Signifier as a discrete component of language makes it possible to discuss writing as different from speech, visual signs as different from verbal signs and, consequently, form itself as a critical contributor to meaning.
LANGUE AND PAROLE
-Langue: is the set of abstract rules within the language system that governs the combinations of signs; a group of general linguistic conventions adopted by a particular social or cultural group that allows them to construct exchange meaning among their members.
-Parole: is the individual utterance made by a single member of the linguistic group in a specific, concrete situation - an individual act of discourse among many of infinite variety.
THE ASSAULT ON SYNTAX
-If the conventional correspondences between meaning and form were arbitrary to begin with, as the early writings in semiotics professed, then they were subject to recognition. And that renegotiation could take place through the visual media of art and design.
DESIGN PAROLE
-Paradigmatic or Associative Axis: (in this case Synchronic) All of the possible word choices are available to us simultaneously and we interpret the meaning of the sentence, not only by focusing on the on chosen word, but also by knowing what other choices were available and not chosen.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE: A PRAGMATIST'S APPROACH:
He believed that Signification, or the consumption of signs, is essentially a mental process, and that meaning resides in the mind, not in the objects themselves. Peirce called this process Semiosis.
(A sign (representamen) stands for something (object) to somebody (interpretant) in some respect (ground).
Peirce's four conditions of design: 1) Sign must represent and object. 2) Must represent something in some sense or capacity. 3) Interpretative condition, sign must have an interpretation. 4) Must have a fundamental relationship between them, one that cannot be reduced to any simpler form.
A TAXONOMY OF SIGNS
-Describes natural groupings of signs that behave in analogous ways, and their classification, in terms of different relationships between the signifier (the reprsentamen) and the object for which it stands.
-An index points to something or describes a casual relationship.
ROLAND BARHES: A BRIDGE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM
-Barthes professed that no form of writing is a free expression only of the writer's subjectivity, but is the product of larger social and ideological values. H viewed writings as all style and never free of ideology; each literary work signifies literature in general, in addition to whatever content is contained within its text.
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE: THE BIRTH OF SEMIOTICS
Semiotics: The study of life of "signs."
-Ferdinad de Saussure: His study was the approach to the study of language focused on the exchange of meaning between individuals and on the commonalities across languages, rather than on the eccentricities arising from their specific cultural origins. He thought that language should be viewed not only in terms or its parts (words) and their histories, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts.
-Signified and the Signifier:
- The Signified: is the person, thing, event, place, or concept called forth by the stimulation of the signifier. The signifier is the sound or word (or image, in the case of graphic design) that recalls in our mind the signified, even in the absence of the real thing.
- The Signifier: The designation of the Signifier as a discrete component of language makes it possible to discuss writing as different from speech, visual signs as different from verbal signs and, consequently, form itself as a critical contributor to meaning.
LANGUE AND PAROLE
-Langue: is the set of abstract rules within the language system that governs the combinations of signs; a group of general linguistic conventions adopted by a particular social or cultural group that allows them to construct exchange meaning among their members.
-Parole: is the individual utterance made by a single member of the linguistic group in a specific, concrete situation - an individual act of discourse among many of infinite variety.
THE ASSAULT ON SYNTAX
-If the conventional correspondences between meaning and form were arbitrary to begin with, as the early writings in semiotics professed, then they were subject to recognition. And that renegotiation could take place through the visual media of art and design.
DESIGN PAROLE
-Paradigmatic or Associative Axis: (in this case Synchronic) All of the possible word choices are available to us simultaneously and we interpret the meaning of the sentence, not only by focusing on the on chosen word, but also by knowing what other choices were available and not chosen.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE: A PRAGMATIST'S APPROACH:
He believed that Signification, or the consumption of signs, is essentially a mental process, and that meaning resides in the mind, not in the objects themselves. Peirce called this process Semiosis.
(A sign (representamen) stands for something (object) to somebody (interpretant) in some respect (ground).
Peirce's four conditions of design: 1) Sign must represent and object. 2) Must represent something in some sense or capacity. 3) Interpretative condition, sign must have an interpretation. 4) Must have a fundamental relationship between them, one that cannot be reduced to any simpler form.
A TAXONOMY OF SIGNS
-Describes natural groupings of signs that behave in analogous ways, and their classification, in terms of different relationships between the signifier (the reprsentamen) and the object for which it stands.
-An index points to something or describes a casual relationship.
ROLAND BARHES: A BRIDGE TO POST-STRUCTURALISM
-Barthes professed that no form of writing is a free expression only of the writer's subjectivity, but is the product of larger social and ideological values. H viewed writings as all style and never free of ideology; each literary work signifies literature in general, in addition to whatever content is contained within its text.