seminar 8 - rachel sleight

This talk was a very interesting insight into how a product designer fits into the structure of various organisations. Rachel began the talk with a walk through of her work at the RCA, this focused on her her work with paper - where she ended up designing a paper wedding dress - which was heavily influenced by her interest in green issues within design.

The dress itself uses origami folding techniques to create a stimulating aesthetic, but this is merely a by-product to a process brought about by a desire to minimise distribution costs by decreasing its size. wedding dresses are (generally) one shot items, in theory, you only get married once and yet the dress - an absolute essential in the mind of the bride and many others - is such an expense... and not just to the bride. economically speaking wedding dresses are extremely inefficient due to their 'bulky' nature and yet they cannot be packed or compressed for transport. Sleight's dress however ships flat pack increasing the economic efficiency of the product. And yet this to me doesnt seem the most important aspect of the work - to me it is also a statement against the way we view marriage in modern society. the fact Sleight has used a material with such obvious connatations with disposability means that the dress itself is disposable and suggesting - by extension - that so is marriage.

seminar 7 - anne douglas

Todays tutorial with Anne was concerned largely with the way in which we - as artists - draw. specifically the communication of what we as observers see in our mind's eye. Anne's work is also concerned with art in the public sphere, referencing the decline in socially relevant 'gallery art' and the rise work being produced as the result of a process - rather than the process of making arising out of a desire to produce marketable work to sell in a gallery. The Latter is now seen as an undesirable, almost shallow way of producing work - similarly, the idea of an artist producing work in a signature style is also considered a negative characteristic in socially engaged art. during the seminar we were urged to consider the way things work and the perspectives from which we view them. The example cited by Anne was from Paul Klee's notebooks, volume 1, the thinking eye. it deals with how we can depict parts of a system in order to emphasise their role within the cycle. Klee postulated that any system/organism/cycle can be broken down into 3 distinct categories: the first being the active organ, the brain, the instigator; another is the passive, the part of the puzzle which actually effects the change; the final component is the middle or median, the bridge between the active and the passive. Each of these components exists as part of the other, and are inextricably linked. what i got from this can be summed up like this: Klee's three-part organism model for drawing allows a person (not neccessarily an artist) to identify information required for an illustration to make sense, or at least the best sense which the administrator of a said drawing can provide. The process is a method of distilling information within a drawing (or rather an iterative series of drawings) and making sure that the imagery used within that drawing is as succint and relevant to what you are trying to portray as possible. all this is fine, except that to me a simpler and better set of rules already exists, the work of bill buxton in 'sketching user experiences' provides us with another mode of thought which states that in order to express your ideas you should at no point be concerned with creating a finished work, you are engaged in the process of sketching, of ideas generation, it is important - in fact - vital to accurately

seminar 6 (incomplete) Francois matterasso

This seminar was entitled : "Asking better questions about quality". It will come as no surprise then that the majority of discourse during this seminar was concerned with defining exactly what 'quality' meant within the purview of the creative industries and specifically Art. We began by evaluating Sir Brian McMaster's attempt at defining excellence, which states: "The best definition of excellence i have heard is that excellence in culture occurs when an experience affects and changes an individual." A statement which is uncomfortable in my mind to say the least. First of all is the preoccupation with the individual - rather than the individual as part of a group of people. In my mind excellence cannot be attributed to a work(or series of works) by one person alone, rather it is a status inherited by the work through intense scrutiny and eventual appreciation. One could say however that opinion leaders hold so much sway over what is deemed to be 'good' art that they are in indeed capable of granting an artwork a de facto state of excellence. thankfully there is no such figure in the world of art that holds so much sway as to be able influence such huge percentages of the establishment, it seems to me that if a work is of a certain level of contextual brilliance that the educated members of the populace (the members of the Art establishment) simply cannot reach a conclusion other than that the work in question is for all intents and purposes 'excellent'. In short good work always shines through. The statement "quality is relative" which was uttered a copious number of times throughout the seminar is a rationalisation of taste - nothing more. Materasso would be the first to admit that musing over the definition of the word quality can only get one so far, and that in order for your understanding to progress you must continue to question the crux of the matter, in the words of Materasso "we need better questions" - better questions about art, why we like it, what is it about a piece that allows me to derive pleasure from experiencing it? the better the questions, the better the answers - however it is often the case that the better you frame your question or the more specifically you phrase it - the harder it is to answer. it is these answers which are craved by the people responsible for making decisions regarding what work to show - exhibitors, curators, private collectors, gallery owners, government officials. knowing what work meets the criteria making it worthy of public display will allow these individuals to provide a more efficient facility for their patrons, giving them a significant competitive advantage. so in the end i guess it all comes down to simple numbers, specifically those preceded with the symbol of currency. is this how things should be run? should the prospect of financial gain hold such great sway over the art world? clearly i realise that there are certain economic necessities which must be met, and i also believe that if you are good at something then you should never sell yourself short. the problem here seems to be that there is a significant polarization of wealth, where only a select few hold the majority of the wealth.

seminar 5 (incomplete)

For the third seminar we left aberdeen and decided to travel to dundee to see the Thomas Hirschhorn exhibit currently on show at the Dundee Contemporary Arts building. The trip seemed cursed from the off, after 45 minutes in the van we broke down on the A90 seemingly miles from anywhere, and after a visit from an initially not so friendly policeman and a chirpy R.A.C. contracter, oh and a freak encounter with a turkey leg (claws and everything) we manged to eventually make it to dundee.

Not having had the chance to do any real research into what the subject matter of the exhibition was, meant that i was eagerly anticipating getting there and seeing the work in person. imagine my horror when i walk into the first room of the exhibition - immmediately on my right was a giant cardboard representation of a heart, festooned with images of such gore i (along with some members of my peer group) could not bare to look at long enough to view each separate image (there were around 20 in total). the impact of the work was then exaggerated by the two life size cardboard cut outs of yet more mutilated remains, on an altogether different level of distaste, so one could say that my impression of the first part of the exhibit was far from positive. Moving into the second room - the main hall space, which was for this show filled with a monstrous cardboard facsimile of a felled tree. Stretching from one corner of the room to the opposite, it was a dominating visage to behold then as i attempted to navigate the trunk i realised that the entire floor had also been covered with cardboard styled to look like wood, it seemed as though this entire space had been commandeered by a twisted form of nature. Passing a gallery of fashion manikins sporting vast 'wound-like' holes in their chests and crude 'amputations' provided a contrast by introducing the human element of the world. the third room contained collages containing more images of graphic violence. emerging from this room i was left shellshocked as i had been by most of the work on show, however i began to see why the artist had decided on this visual cacophony of symbolism and metaphor. the work itself is deceptively technical, its thoroughly disgusting imagery prevalent as it was had been drawn together from several sources and painstakingly arranged, the materials used were crude yes but are intended to be so - to be viewed as cheap, representing how we view such things simply as fuel rather than objects in their own right. and now we come to what i feel is the crux of the entire exhibition, the commentary on war and human conflict, and how it is reported on in western media.

Hirschhorn seems to despise the way in which the media reports on warfare, he believes that for us to exist in a complete world we must show both the good and the bad, in this case, this means that we must view the images of extreme gore alongside the good images - the comfortable images. It is Hirschorn's aim that by doing this we become better (i hate using that word) people, more conscious of the cost of all kinds of human conflict.