Alan Brooks

Professor at TCNJ

Brief Bio

• first place in an art contest
• SVA- School of VIsual arts, high school never gave him a lot of direction
• he was at first intimidated, but stuck through and was named best graphic design student
• advertising, not a fan, but he didn't know why.  Then he found graphic design, because it was art and not just business sketches.
• not just creating a concept
• all marker drawn.
• envelopes 

CBS TV

• typographic titles
• age 22 using all different services
• vendors were then catering to his needs. Lots of staff when working for a big company
• Movie ads, only a few hours to complete.
• training to work on your toes, work faster.

SHOWTIME

• literally the art department
• freedom and open to his ideas
• left after a short time, quit

FREELANCE WORK

• networking with other channels and old bosses
• took an office in mid town, with a person from showtime and a person from CBS

BROOKS CHAMPION INC.

• dont have 3 designers start a business, needed more diversity i.e. accounting or business
• computers were beginning to come into play
• Transition to the first macintosh 
• tutortials for his computer to learn how to use software.
• TV shows 

MOVES TO NJ

• Princeton NJ
• Allen Brooks Design
• different cliental 
• Transition to corporate, get in the middle so it looks different and not like ever other pharmaceutical annual report 
• Expand the business- partner who knows marketing and sales
• VERGE180
• every company is on the verge of something, failure, success, change. Help these people see the new marketing and advertising ideas.
• never to specialize in any area of design or any industry- because he never wanted to be pigeonholed.
• Branding Company
• What is a brand identity? Outward impression of the brand

register the brands and logos that we see everyday

When logos change.. the branding changes

CASE STUDY

• Tower Water Management
• new logo
• protects pipes and heating and cooling infrastructure through proper treatment of water
• Cut out management.. first
• every competitor uses blue
• Pipes and water make the best element
• not just the logo, give it an environment 
• 3- 6 logo designs

CREATIVE PROCESS

• Laborers 55
• green materials for old homes
• sketch 
• keep sketching because the ideas come out and just keep going. there is a lot of nothing but the more you work it out the better ideas can come
• look at references
• sketch more
• then hang on a wall and do further development
• you need a sense of where you want to go

DISCOVERY

• Do your research
• the project almost designs itself, so you learn what they like and what they dont want
• MESSAGE?
• BENEFITS?
• AUDIENCE?
• PERSONALITY?

McGraw- HIll Federal Credit Union

• Credit union, like a bank 
• financial services
• most ambitious of their logo

How do you build your cliental?

• word of moth or referrals, weekly networking group. events.
• cold calls- least effective 
• Linkedin- effective but tedious 

How to rework a logo without totally changing it, keep it new but referencing the old?

•  present it in a way that everyone is on the same page, then you expose it to the customers 
• nothing bad happened, its not that things are changed just an upgrade.

Uncanny projects beginnings

still more layers to do but im liking the diea, I took three photos of eyes filtered them then photoshopped them all on top of each other with different opacities.  The shading is ghost images underneath and the darkest portions are overlaps. 

status update on the cave.. third iteration

Tom Gebauer

Graduate of the Class of 2007 with a BFA in Graphic Design and Visual Communication

Sr. Director of User Experience & Design at Advanced Digital/ Advanced Publication Inc.

• How a person interacts with a given system --> Scientific -->quantitative measurement (User Experience.. Analytical side).
• How Something Looks--> part emotional --> artistic and visual communication (Design)

Making Life style brands, how to use areas of business, art and design, software engineering and cognitive technology. This all adds up to what User Experience is, how people interact and have a "connection" to what they use either digitally and physically.

User Experience is based on measurement 

• tangible business- profit or loss
• design
• bond

Exists Everywhere 

• Human Factors/ Human Computer Interactions (HCI)
• grounding interactions

All of the factors that help create a business to be more customer focused.  How the people or consumers interact with products and the company, making it more user friendly.

Agencies today are both in Traditional and Digital media, there is not limit to who needs help with consumer design and how they interact with the company.

Advanced Publications Inc.

• Largest privately owned company in the world- Owned by S.I Newhouse
• Highly diversified 
• Lots to do and improve on in this sector, because some view the company as "evil" for taking away jobs or limiting services or just having a bad experience with a website or telephone operators.  With the used of new technologies and new design to appease the public and get back on the good side of consumers by offering services that are user friendly.

His more current work has been for the NJ.com website, taking a confusing and poorly designed website and breaking it down to its most simple components.

1. Starting with the original website, heat trackers were focused on what was getting used the most on the site
2. A simple sketch of a new site was drawn up
3. Digital blue print- wire frame design
4. Then a test site is put up for the public to use and interact with
5. Second launchings to fix any bugs or tweaking of buttons.
6. Final website.

Never stop getting inspired, and dont be scared to work in different sectors, the more you learn the more possibilities you have.

Over all I thought the talk was great. Tim started off with telling us who he was and what he likes to do, its a departure from what we normally see and it made it easier to connect with him as he spoke to us.  Digital isn't my discipline but he made it exciting for me to listen to and understand.  He has a wealth of knowledge and highly engaging.

Uncanny

The theory of uncanny is based on a feeling, an uneasy and fearful feeling.  It is not just the aesthetics of beauty.

What excites fear; how to use these fears to put people into this state of feeling. using peoples experiences and memories (using what it familiar) to excite a feeling.

But we want to move past the notion of the uncanny as unfamiliar, because in a definition stand point; it is seen as gloomy, scary, ghastly, daemonic, or gruesome. These things are something that is visible and known to us.

Manifestation of insanity

We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that we will treasure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phantasies and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. 

The notion of the double, the fascination with another. A shadow, mirrors, with guardian spirits, the soul.

The double has become a thing of terror, the notion of gods being turned into demons.

Uncanny- the feeling of helplessness experienced in dream states, like nightmares or repetitive dreams, you know what is going to happen but you cannot stop it.

Superstitions make us have the feeling of uncanny because we have been taught to know how coincidences could have negative connotation. Like repetition, of a number or name or event.

The fairy tales, how wishes could become true. or if they are just a coincidences. How magic is viewed, how is it translated? Is it baised off of belief that just believing in something and it happens, so then its magic? How does reality play a role in this happening.

Something familiar that has been repressed

The evil eye- the feeling of not only being watched but being disliked and despised and looked down upon for some reason.

Something that should have remained hidden but had come to light, like a myth or legend. Speaking of evil brings about evil?

Humans will never be free from this feeling

Modernity

The gaze- the look of affection, awe, wonder, or fascination.  How do artists use this in their works to draw the viewer into a dialog with the piece.

The gaze plays a central role in theories of looking and spectatorship in modernity

The Subject in Modernity

Modernity- historical, cultural, political, and economic conditions related to the Enlightenment; the rise of industrial society and scientific rationalism; and to the idea of controlling nature through technology science and rationalism.

Each culture has its own ideology when it comes to progress in economy, the United States views it much differently then someone in Russia or someone in China.

Marx speaking out against industrial capitalism and exploitation of and social alienation of workers.

There were major changes made in the early twentieth century, radical political and technological change began to generate significant cultural anxiety.

Spectatorship

1. The roles of the unconscious and desire in viewing practices.
2. the role of looking in the formation of the human subject as such
3. the ways that looking is always a relational activity and not simply a mental activity engaged in by someone who forms internal mental representation that stand for a passive image object "out there"

Meaning of the individual human subject is not universal but is both historically and culturally contingent.

When we describe the gaze as a field rather then an individual act of looking.

Discourse and Power

Foucault's concept of discourse is helpful to understanding how power systems work to define how things are understood and spoken about( and, by implication, represented in images) in a given society.

Discourse- usually used to talk about passages of writing or speech, the act of talking about something.

Foucault was interested in the rules and practices that produce meaningful statements and regulate what can be spoken in different historical periods

Discourse is a body of knowledge that both defines and limits what can be said about something.

The relation of image and power: panopticism (everything visible in one view), power/knowledge, and biopower (A term originally coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the practice of modern states and their regulation of their subjects through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations).

The Gaze and the Other

The gaze helps establish relationships of power.  the act of looking is awarding more power to the person who is looking then to who is the object of the look.

All function to varying degrees to represent codes of dominance and subjection, difference and otherness.

the appropriation of the figure to fit into new contexts of today, in an ad, and also by the Guerilla Girls.

The Gaze in Psychoanalysis

There are fantasy structures that are set up when viewing a movie. The camera position to the actors and how the audience views them in the situation, this creates a relationship. 

the concept of the unconscious is crucial in the theories of cinematic spectatorship.

Gender and the Gaze

The understanding of the female nude as the project and possession by the male artist. 

• the woman is posed as objects of an active or "male" gaze.

"Rear Window" (1954)- is a movie that focuses on the gaze and how the possession of the gaze is valuable.

• when he gets caught looking he becomes vulnerable and trapped; the murder comes looking for him. Clearly, male looking is not without limitations and its consequences 

Changing Concepts of the Gaze

Changing the traditional gender codes

changing the way the masculinity is viewed in consumer culture




 

The cave pt.2

The second iteration of the cave, instillation piece, also the use of moth balls to create a repelling odor.

Viewers Make Meaning

Much of the social context and cultural influences make up the meaning that we associate with art.

1. codes and conventions that structure the image and that cannot be separated from the content of the image.
2. the viewer and how they interpret or experience the image
3. the context in which an image is exhibited and viewed.

the viewer is an individual who looks, and audience is a collection of lookers.

is the image private or public.

to interpellate, in traditional usage of this concept, is to interrupt a procedure in order to question someone or something formally, as in a legal or governmental setting.

Louis Althusser- believed and said that the subject of the image reaches a wider audiance and the viewers understand it is not intended "just for me"

By focusing on the viewer, it shows how emphasizing the practices through which images and media texts reach out and make a connection.

Producers Intended Meanings

Produce can refurr to the individual maker, artist, or many people from production to display, or a corporate conglomerate engaged in parts of an ad.

Sometimes "producer function" tells us that "authorship" is not just one who creates but sometimes

Many if not all advertisements and pictures have one preferred meaning by the producer. but many time there are different interpretations and ideas that can go along with cultural and social difference.

Even though the maker or producer has an intended meaning, this doesn't man that everyone who comes into contact with the piece will have the same reaction.

Aesthetics and Taste

All images are judged on their quality and their capacity to impact an viewer and audience.

Taste- how a viewers informed experiences i.e., social class, cultural background education and other aspects of identity, help them interpret images. It is how people understand something in context with their lives.

"Good Taste" is the  notion of middle to upperclass notions of what is pleasing even if they are not in these social perimeters.

Kitsch- is iconic of a historical moment in which everyday life is over saturated with cheesiness.

Social wants of art differ as the regions change. Americans favor landscapes, wild animals and George Washington. While Russia's taste is more religious.  It does not mean one is wrong they just see things differently, and favor different aspects of culture.

Most favor realism over abstract

It used to be High Culture was fine art, classical music, opera and ballet, while working class, or low class, was comic strips, television, and the cinema.

Popular Cultural is something that is now studies because there is now a belief that we cannot understand a culture without analyzing its production and consumption of all forms of culture, from high to low.

Collecting, Display and Institutional Critique

"Art-culture system" - shows how the movement of objects through the collecting practices of museums, scholars and connoisseurs effect transitions in the meaning and the value of works from not art to art and authentic to inauthentic.

When art is not being shown or objects not being used the become "dead" and keeping them out in the publics eye and in interaction with viewers they keep their vitality.

Fred Wilson- use of juxtaposition objects created and interesting dialog.  He went through the archives of the museum and took out many objects that were not being shown and gave them a new home, he also gave lectures to a tour on why he chose specific objects and positions.

Reading Images as Ideological Subjects.

Karl Marx- both the roll of economics in the progress of history and the way that capitalism works in terms of class relations. Those that own the means to production are also in control of the ideas and viewpoints produced and circulated in a society's venues. whom ever is dominant is what will be portrayed because of the dominant social class that controls it.

hegemony- power is not wielded by one class over another, but rather it is negotiated among all classes of all people.

Relationships are constantly changing, so once dominant ideologies have to be often reaffirmed because now people can work against them

Encoding and Decoding

Stuart Hall

1. Dominant- hegemonic reading. what the majority of people are meant to decipher
2. Negotiated reading. you understand the meaning but negate it also
3. Oppositional reading. they listen but they don't agree 

 negotiation invokes the process of trade

interpretation is a mental process of acceptance and rejection of the meaning that are assigned to the image given the dominant ideologies that surround it.

Reception and the Audience

Reception theory has for the most part looked at the practices of individual viewers in the interpretation and making meaning from watching and consuming cultural products

Bricolage is taking things and using them in ways they were not intended as to separate them from their normal or expected context.

Appropriation and Cultural Production

appropriation- taking something for oneself without consent.

textual poaching- changing the original idea

Heather Ramsdale

She is a sculptor who's art is focusing on the domestic aspects of life, and our connection to the objects that may inhabit the space.

• "Fall From Grace" 2009
• "Quarrelfuck" 2009
• These pieces had to do with the objects that we find in our homes, mainly tables, but they were taken rearranged and repurposed. In a way that they would have never been used. 
• "24 Hours" 2009 
• This is find one of her most interesting works that documented her movement throughout her apartment in 24 hours.  Showing the "dead spaces" of where she lived.

Breaking away from where she lived to places that become a surrogate home, the automobile.

• "Backseat dreams" 2009
• This was the beginning of her exploration of the framework and chassie of cars.
• "Wolf Car" 2010
• "Real-Fake-Believe-Make-Travel-Machine" 2009
• Lights hooked up to a car battery under a constructed chassie.
• "Separate Time Alone" 
• The full experience and forced but voluntary reaction and interaction with the piece.  Chanting playing through the tailpipe as you lay under the lights.

I really enjoy looking at her work and her basic ideas of shape and form are intriguing and engaging. Her concepts of the domestic life and what we cherish that may show status and wealth, and what keeps us attached to these things over something that would truly be precious.  The objects that were placed in the bay windows of the brick-row houses in Philly.  

• "Black Thunder" 2011
• "White Lightneing" 2011
• Using a display and having objects interacting with a base and not just put something on. taking the pedestal to the next level.

Using found objects. 

Synthetic matherials to make us feel better 

OBJECT ATTACHMENT= SYNTHETIC EMOTION

Over all I found her inspiring and her work to be creative and thought provoking. 

Some of my pieces

sequence of production. still more shading in the next few days but I'm close to completion

Chapter 1 Review

Images, Power, and Politics

• The world we live in is so saturated with images that have a variety of purpose and intended effects.  These images can produce in us a wide array of emotions and reactions.
• one single image can have multiple purposes and appear in many different settings in order to get different reactions from different types of people.

Arthur Fellig (Weegee) - He was a photographer who's main goal was to take images of things we normally would never think to look at or even want to look at.  The depictions of violent crime scenes in New York, which he later developed on site.

• "The First Murder" - the camera has the capability of capturing an enormous amount of energy and emotion.
• Emmett Till- The gruesome murder of a young man because of hate and racism. His mother had his casket open at the funeral so that everyone would see what had happened.  The picture was published in Jet magazine.

Representation 

Representation- the use of language and image to create meaning about the world around us.

• still lifes had representational meaning by the food they used or objects that symbolized peasant life.
• these paintings produce meanings through the ways that they are composed and rendered and not just in the choices of objects depicted.
• intentionally altering object to give them new meaning

Rene Magritte- "This is Not a Pipe"

• breaking the rules of various systems of representation and to push the boundaries of definition and representation.
• "This is Not a Pipe" is just a painting, or representation of a real pipe.

The Myth of Photographic Truth

• The art of photography is usually associated with realism
• Photographs, unlike drawing, offers and unprecedented parallel between what is here now and what was there then. 

Positivism- a philosophy that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, holds that scientific knowledge is the only authentic knowledge and concerns itself with truths about the world

• photographic camera, in the context of positivism  could be understood as a scientific tool for registering reality more accurately.
• there is a dividing line between what an image denotes and what it connotes
• connotative meanings can change with changes in social context and over time
• it can be argued that all meanings and messages are culturally informed, that there us no such thing as a purely denotative image.

Images and Ideology

• ideologies are systems of belief that exist within all cultures. 
• Photographs were used for documentation purposes, police, mental institutions , prisons  and public health and safety used photography to take documentation of what was going on and what needed to be addressed.

How We Negotiate Meaning of Images

• what symbols do we associate with products, religions, cultures.
• Neutral elements such as tone and color can take on cultural meanings, like the O.J. Simpson mugshot.
• The smile signifies happieness
• Image/sound/word= signifier
• Meaning= Signified
• The production of a sign is dependent on the social, historical and cultural context.

The Value of Images

• why is a Van Gogh worth so much money?
• because it is believed to be among the best examples of the innovative modern style
• the same goes for Pollock, he was a force in the 20th century. The innovation and the awe of something new makes them people who changed how we look at art today.
• But because of how easy it is to reproduce a digital image the price for many items has dropped.

Image Icons

• An icon is an image that refers to something outside if its individual components, something(or someone) that has great symbolic meaning for many people.
• They are of then used to represent universal concepts, emotions and meanings.
• The reference to mother and child.  How now many artists reference this in their art work.

Progress so far

So far I have about 1/2 of my project resolved still more to add and shade and what not but I'm loving the outcome

Symposium with the TCNJ Art Department

Anita Allyn

-- Chair of the Art and Art History Department
--Works in video, photo, installations, time based art, animations.
--Themes- Political and social commentary of identifying herself in social issues in the world. but takes an interesting standpoint from looking at a view that most artists do not take. And in identifying this she is creating a new dialog to be further explored.
-- "Ivory Tower Mountain" was probably one of the most intreating. The composite of the mountain ranges and the use of both inside and outside space; the photography of the on lookers (who you later learned were spectators of lynchings) had this eerie dead stair on their faces. It is something that evokes conversation and is something that I thought I would have never come into contact with. It's an interesting view I don't think I have ever encountered.
-- Installation art is intriguing to me and learning more about her pieces "News from Nowhere" and "I Heart Post democracy"drawing from events like occupy Wall Street and other political happenings using pictures of public faces that are from the past.



Elizabeth Mackie
--Associate Professor of Art and Program Coordinator for Graphic Design
-- Fabric and sculpture
-- The social taboo of femininity, clothing, and high fashion, referencing dolls and the fashion of her mother.
--"A String of Stories" was a compiling of semi transparent fabric all comprised from many different people, all about women.  After the dress is compiled and to read the story you have to go up the skirt, this creates a strange tension because of the social accepting views of looking up a skirt.
-- The wedding dress was so meticulously crafted and the whole story behind the factory and their life after marriage. The whole ascetics of the piece the projection of the farm animals on the dress and the audio of the animals and 40's and 50's wedding music.
--I loved her photographs of the skirts and it had a beautiful floral and feminine look to them. The lighting. They are beautifully composed and have great lighting
-- Over all I liked her work and I would like to see more and further see her ideas.

Liselot Van Der Heijden
--Video and installation art focusing on visual gaze.
-- studying the awkward relation between the tourists and the Navaho Indians of Monument Valley.
--Combination of the Movie the Searchers from the 1850's, the documentation of the movie which took place in the 1950's, and her own footage from approximately 15 years ago.  Her work challenges the visual perspective and making the viewer become part of the piece.
- How the past informs today and the future.
-- I like the view of the relationship of how people react to the space and how tourists interact with the Native American and how there is a sad relationship is and the social problems that happened to the native people.
-- Its also interesting how she is also originally from Europe, so she had to do research on the relationship.

Kenneth Kapolwitz
--He is inspired by the universe
--The surreal and fantastical
--"we are the universe become of itself"
                --because we are all made of the same material