Skip to main content

Murky: into Print


Moving from a photo investigation of my ideas to a printed book was an exciting follow up after a narrative emerged while organizing the initial album. Incorporating text in this step of project development offered so many different avenues of approaching the layout. Throughout the semester, I’ve realized I struggle with prompted projects, as I’ve always been pretty strictly process based. The challenge of responding to the prompt, while not creating something inauthentic to fit the boundaries or making something that feels more representational than an artistic response, was an engaging way to begin to explore new approaches to my creation process. 




I knew I wanted to use text to reinforce the narrative of the photos themselves, but didn’t necessarily want to present a fully explained project. With my focus on encouraging viewers to consider themselves and the world around them, I don’t want them to just read a message and move on to the next part of their day. Studies on viewers interacting with art have shown that it is a perceived feeling of mastery over understanding that most heavily impacts their level of involvement in the work they’re viewing, and it’s remained a consideration in my work ever since. 




I settled on including the words of others, specifically in the sections of the book focusing on the interaction of public and private. I hope the inclusion of wider perspectives offers more for readers to add dimension and their own conclusions on the project’s ideas.



I feel like this project led me where it wanted to go, and I’m either satisfied with how it turned out, or intensely motivated to do it again but better. I liked segregating the different messages through the editing styles, and the general atmosphere and compositional choices. Moving forward, there’s definitely a lot to learn about over-utilizing editing to distort without entirely killing quality, on top of a million other skills that wouldn’t hurt to brush up on. 



“We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old. This class naturally occurs in transitional periods. […] a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old.” (McLuhan, 94-95) 

Thank you for reading.
GCF 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It Gets Murky: The External Manifests

"We approach the new with the psychological conditioning and sensory responses of the old. This clash naturally occurs in transitional periods. In late medieval art, for instance, we saw the fear of the new print technology expressed in the theme The Dance of Death. Today, similar fears are expressed in the Theater of the Absurd. Both represent a common failure: the attempt to do a job demanded by the new environment with the tools of the old." (McLuhan, pgs 94-95) The social world becomes increasingly less atmospheric the further into the Digital Age we get. The cacophony of of information constructing the world we live and interact in conflictingly becomes oversaturated while dulling to a white noise. As the social world continues to entangle further into our lives, we’re threatened with dissipating, and meet this with the time-honored practice of holding true to our values, our belief, our idea of Self as rooted in our Western, individuality-centered culture; we feverishly...

We''ll Find Ourselves Not So Far Away

    With an assignment asked to respond to the notion of time becoming the new space, and of a society where we “march backwards to our own death” (McLuhan 63), it was inevitable I present a video portraying a fragmented journey.      I was fascinated by what McLuhan was saying, and just how well it holds up to this day. What we as a global society face, the consequences of our own actions—it’s doomed to implode through our self-designed, structural failures. We can’t build more with fixed materials available while remaining sturdy. We began as tribal worlds established from the here and now, to the fixed individual developed through printed literature and the vanishing point of visual representations. We’re facing a global return to a tribal culture, and the interaction of human-created media upon the discord of this transition is something that fascinates me personally. Modern media has erased the vanishing point that furthered the perspective of the...

Something Brutalist is in the Village

  The idea of a global village personally hinges on the direct impacts of technology, resulting in more deeply intimate interactions, and at a larger scale than ever before—and only increasing in its pervasive attacks. This new world and culture requires us to match the levels of actualized involvement to the intellectual involvement; meeting this as individualistically as so much of the mass does leaves us unable to reach the totality of integration. Regardless of an individual’s adaptational capability, the harsh boundary of individual versus Other remains despite the exposure; the stories don’t impact us, and with so much capacity for achievement (benevolent or malevolent) partnered with newly-relevant globally-faced issues, we must learn to completely conceptualize the true reality we have created and reside in. We must learn to acknowledge our perspectives in relation to the wider world, allowing ourselves to be affected by and thus completely exist within the global village....