19/2/15 – CTS lecture; Andrea Mason/ Exercise

Andrea asked us to write an ‘uncreative’ form of text using different things we find on the internet – rearranging and taking different words and text to create our own:

‘Burnt spaces cakes on fluffy American pancakes shouldn’t glow green’

I would have to say ‘Don’t knock it until you try it’. I was very skeptical at first of whether I would like the taste of The Glowing Green Smoothie™ for breakfast but then I tried it and it is delicious! Now I cannot get enough of it! If you start with this and slowly make other modifications you will be feeling so amazing that you won’t want to revert back to your old habits of eating.

Another thing I found really helpful was to remember: If you slip up and eat something unhealthy, don’t just give up for the rest of the day and have an all or nothing attitude. Accept you have made a mistake, move on and try your best to make up for it with your other meals! You can’t beat yourself up, just try the best you can slowly but surely.

Wow – when you really don’t want to hold back, pile all the toppings on these fluffy American pancakes.

1. Heat a large frying pan until hot, add the butter and heat until melted and foaming. Place ladlefuls of the batter into the pan and cook for 1-2 minutes, or until bubbles start to form on top of the batter. Turn the pancakes over using a spatula and cook for a further minute on the other side. Remove from the pan and keep warm until ready to serve. Repeat the process with the remaining batter

2. Meanwhile, heat a frying pan until hot, add the bacon and cook for two minutes on each side, or until crisp. Remove from the pan and drain on kitchen paper.

3.To serve, divide the pancakes among four serving plates, top with the bacon and drizzle with maple syrup.

Something really funny happened last Thursday. I was walking towards Washington Square Park to do some errands, and at the exact second I walked up to the park a medium-sized, moss green van pulled up. A few young guys in their early twenties, floppy jeans and baseball hats opened up the trunk and started pulling out cases of Zico coconut water.

“Hey miss, want a case of coconut water?” asks one of the dudes.
“A whole case?? Um, sure? I could go home and drop them off I guess.” I shrugged. I had heard of them before and knew they were all natural- though I had never purchased them before.
“Good, take two cases!”
So I got loaded up with 2 mango flavored pure coconut water cases of Zico, I turned and went the block and a half home to drop them off. Then I turned to walk back directly the same way…
“Wait miss— you have to take another one, ’cause there is the other flavor too!”

Okay, skip ahead to now, 4 days later. In TOTAL, I received 3 cases of the coconut water that was blessed to me by the universe. I mean, what are the chances to walk by the Zico truck at the same exact time??? There was like a 10 minute window there, b/c those dudes were obviously giving them away by the case to get their sample-giving job done with.

Cooking with marijuana isn’t always as easy as it looks. Burnt space cakes, weed butter that tastes like compost, a pasta sauce that doesn’t get you high: these are just a few of the problems that regularly vex would-be edibles chefs at home.

But it doesn’t need to be that way. In order to learn more about how to make pot play nice with food, I got in touch with Ruben Tillart, who works at PLLEK restaurant in Amsterdam and who invented a Super Lemon Haze ice cream for the annual Cannabis Cup.

When I ask Tillart why people fail to get stoned from their weed-infused food, he explains that it’s a matter of temperature. “Cakes shouldn’t be baked in a oven that’s too hot—320°Fahrenheit will do the trick—or you will burn off all the THC,” he tells me. “Also, weed butter is very important, and you have to make that in a bain-marie. Without weed butter, there’s really nothing you can do.”

Coconut water is packed with potassium and electrolytes and also helps build tone when you are doing strength-based activities, like practicing Hatha Raja yoga, etc. Spirulina is 67% green algae protein, and it also contains Omega 3 fatty acids, all the essential amino acids, Vitamin B12, over 2000 enzymes, and lots of iron and magnesium! ☺ You’ll also be amazed at how tasty it is.

SOURCES:
http://munchies.vice.com/articles/two-dutch-chefs-answer-all-of-your-culinary-weed-questions
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/americanpancakeswith_86498
http://kimberlysnyder.com/blog/2009/02/22/the-raw-superfood-drink/
http://kimberlysnyder.com/blog/ggs/

19/2/15 – CTS lecture from Andrea Mason – ‘Wasting time on the internet’

‘Why I am teaching a course called “Wasting time on the internet”‘ is an article by Kenneth Goldsmith that Andrea asked us to read before the lecture. My first thoughts about it was that is is very interesting and sadly very accurate to all of us today, especially in this day and age. We are all subconsciously internet addicts! Whether we want to admit this or not. I am guilty of this myself, as I sit here typing my notes out through Andreas lecture, I would be a liar if I said i didn’t check my phone once or twice to reply to a facebook message or whatsapp. What is it about this? Why can’t we liberate ourselves from this cyber world for a while. I would love to have this freedom and not rely on the internet but sadly I do. Without it, i think we all may be happier but with it, it has made us happier too! It almost paradoxically works with one another.

Here are the notes I got from the lecture today:

• Writing and literature today are 50 years behind art
• It is a dying form of art and expression that people are trying to hold on to, today
• Access to art is limited – individuality is lacking
• Uncreative writing is booming – almost rebelling against the social norm of what is expected of writing i.e ‘conceptual writing’

  Methodologies (Technique of cut up/ collage technique): – This is a technique I want to look up more as it’s a strong and evident way to express a message.

• William Burroughs – ‘cut ups’ – used newspapers to make a video
• David Bowie – ‘igniting anything that might be my imagination’
• Matt Siber – ‘most often my work employs strategies of deconstruction to reveal aspects of my subject matter that are difficult to address through everyday encounters.

Alt Lit

• Movement born of the internet
• Eg ‘black out poetry technique’ – another good form of literature and rebellion/ expression

Plagiarism/ transcription/ appropriation

• Kenneth Goldsmith’s novels include:
  Day- a transcription of an edition of the new york times
  The weather- a transcription of weather forecasts
  Sports- transcriptions of a baseball game
• ‘Uncreativity as a creative practice’ – Kenneth Goldsmith/
  silence, and vaue and freedom are important in this practice

12/2/15 – CTS LECTURE; ‘Bleached dreams, troubling spaces’

Greta gave us a very interesting lecture today on the concept of reality and Utopias. She gave us movie clips and examples that included a clip from the Truman show. This concept really made me think about the idea of disneyization and such.

‘From Places to non –places’ reading:

•  Ideology=2 similar but different realities: spaces that relate to ends and looks at thought and means of travel in between/ the relationship that people have to their destination
• Place is reality
• Non Place is the individual relationship one has with their self when on this journey – reflecting/ meditating on it
• Non places are the spaces that we can’t always get to, so we use our imagination to create what it would be like – ‘BANAL UTOPIAS/ CLICHES’ that are all down to the pleasure of our mind
• Super modernity is a non –place

Andrew Slatter- ‘The author’

“Authorship has become a popular term in graphic design circles, especially in those at the edges of the profession: the design academies and the murky territory between design and art. The word has an important ring to it, with seductive connotations of origination and agency. But the question of how designers become authors is a difficult one. And exactly who qualifies and what authored design might look like depends on how you define the term and determine admission into the pantheon.” Michael Rock: The Designer As Author

What is the role of a Graphic Designers role in relation to the authorship of an industry? Andrew’s lecture focused on this in particular, and answered the question of whether or not a Graphic designer is purely just a designer or the author of work as well. In the modern sphere of how the industry works, the designer doesn’t just make things look aesthetically pleasing, yet it required to write the content and have the knowledge and facts that the brief or client asks for. A one man wolf pack, if you will, a man of all traits, a single mother who washes and dries! We have to do it all! So do they get the recognition or do they focus on one or the other?

Andrew showed us an example of Graff found in one of the LCC toilet cubicles that was done by a student. It said: ‘They wipe the walls to clean our pen, but creative students wlil strike again’. This image and line struck me deep. To me it implied how authority and law will always try restrain e from creative expression, yet we will continue to be free as we please.

Artists and photographers have to mood the divide between groups. They are required to eliminate ownership and authorship, whilst simultaneously trying to bridge the divide. They are the ones who connect literature and art.

Andrew proceeds to discuss the ‘author as a producer theory’. This is what changed the industry of design within the last 50 years. He explains the theory by stating that the designer is a thinker and not just a visualizer. Your reader is also involved in the construction of meaning.

*’Indexhibit’ – Daniel Eatock, Jeffery Vaska, 2006 (Big brother artist)

*’Tree of codes’ – jonathan saffron foer, publisher: visual editions.

Q: After all this, do you see yourself as an author or designer? Aren’t they often the same?
A: I see myself as someone who makes things. Definitions have never done anything but constrain.

Safron cut out words from an original book to change it into a work of art. This instantly involves the designer with the technical part of visualizing the text and writing in a different way, thus being the brains and thinker behind this piece.

* ‘The life and opinions of Tristam Shandry’ – Gentleman Laurence Stern, Designed by a practice for everyday life, publisher: visual editions.
‘I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous’
This is an excellent form of ‘visual writing’, yet wasn’t always perceived this way. It was previously called a folly in 1760 as the audience and societies then didn’t understand it. It contains many visual tricks and illusions that the normal eye wasn’t used to. It broke the rules and norms, thus being immensely praised up until today, and especially now.

* ‘white painting (seven panel) , Robert Rauschenberg, 1951, oil on canvas .
The piece that I was most intrigued with that Andrew showed us was this. This piece is all about ‘silence’ and white space. Can silence be a sound? Rauschenberg, in my opinion most certainly proves that it can be here. I am very much compelled to this piece as white space is noise to me. You don’t necessarily need many things and colours to convey an emotion. In this case, I believe that the saying ‘less is more’ is very much accurate and connected to this piece. ‘His intention was to have a non-intention’, quotes John Cage who was a musician and composer. He was so inspired by this piece that he composed a 4 minute and 33 second piece to accompany Rauschenberg’s ‘white painting’ piece. Cage was inspired to pursue the correlating sound of silence. He says Buddhism and the idealizations and practice of Zen inspired it. White can project meaning and he masters it here.

This evolved to become more than a painting. It proved to be psychological on many levels; it was a ‘non-intentional’ collaboration and piece by these artists. Andrew reminded us that this was all at a time when abstract expression was ascending in New York, yet was still very daring and controversial. It was most certainly a revolutionary moment in the movement of art and design. The White painting shocked the audience: The art world thought it was almost a scandal.

Overall, I enjoyed this lecture very much. It made me connect to it on a personal level and reflect these ideas to where I stand as a thriving (and very much amateur) graphic designer. We aren’t here to visualize our thoughts through images and type. It is far more technical and deeper than that. We are the thinkers at the same time. Every brief is a challenge, and the most important thing is to keep pushing your boundaries and to have fun with it.

5/2/15 – CTS Lecture from Dr. Mark Ingham – ‘Pose that’s not me’

Our 3rd Lecture this term came from Dr. Ingham who discussed the meaning of a photograph and how it can be modified by a caption. Some say photographs have too much meaning with a caption or not enough meaning without.

When was the first photograph? 1836, ‘Rooftops’ by Nicéphore Niépce – ‘View from the window at Le Gras. It was made using a camera obscura, which is a man made lens that one can use today to take images with distorted effects/filters – similar to a pinhole camera. In 1839, this was the year where photography really commenced.

Niepce was a French inventor, now usually credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field.  Niepce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world’s oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825. In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a world scene. Among Niépce’s other inventions was the Pyreolophore, the world’s first internal conmbustion machine, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude.

• Photography is merely ‘light’ and ‘drawing’
• A posing holder is a device which constraints so people could not move when posing as this would make the image blurry.
• For example, in Victorian times, no one in photographs smiled as the mouth would get warped and blurry – they would have to sit there for sometimes up to 5 minutes for the image to be taken! Such a change from today and the ‘selfie’ generation we are all involved in.

Above is an example of the blurry image quality of a smiling photograph – but this makes me happy how they tried! It didn’t seem too depressing back then.

The first self- portrait photograph

The difference between selfies and a self portrait is different. A selfie is a photo that one takes of themselves, yet may not be as serious as a self portrait. Is it possible to take an unposed self portrait? The class argued ‘no’, yet perhaps one could take the ‘accidental self portrait’, which just seems contradictory to the whole process and point of a selfie.

Here is our ‘selfie/self portrait’ in the class:

Our selfie…… my ears are big. Thanks Armel for being such a good model.
He has experience of this: http://www.topnews.in/armel-bellec-pink-panther-2-new-york-premiere-arrivals-2120368