Assignment Suggestions

When looking back at art and film through a scholar's lens, we often categorise the various periods and style changes as genres or movements - some of these arose fluidly and naturally, whilst others were constructed and deliberately formed. Art movements offer a unique opportunity to be a part of a creative community with a unified goal, but with different and personal manifestations of that goal.

Create a Genre:
Working in groups of 4, you will meet and discuss the creation of a new genre, micro-genre or art movement. Define your objectives, your worldview, your collective aesthetic, your choice of medium and what makes you distinct as a new art movement. Draw up a manifesto, or forgo one if your movement calls for it. You can draw from an existing culture to create a subculture or counter-culture, or you can be entirely original. Working individually, but consulting one another, each member of the group will create a piece of art in whatever medium suits your movement, which you will present to class in tandem with your group.

Example: The Seapunk micro-genre was created as a joke by a loosely assembled group of Tumblr users and the internet personality @Lil_Internet. Its aesthetic has since become co-opted by popular rappers and performers Azealia Banks and Rihanna in recent performances, and the style has been adopted by Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, among others.

We've explored the artistic process in our class, but we have yet to analyse the specific ways that media can directly effect a viewer. Propaganda can be used for good or for ill, for corporate or political or even humanitarian aims - we will be discussing the latter in the assignment.

Propagandhi:
Students will find and research a humanitarian cause - the positives and the negatives, the counter-arguments and the benefits. They will then decide their stance on the cause, and create a piece of propaganda that will influence the viewer towards making a direct change in regards to the humanitarian issue. It could be as simple as a poster or as complex as a stickerbomb or documentary. The student will then post or display it in a public space (without breaking laws) and gauge the reaction of the viewers. Your goal is to manipulate or change your viewer in some way.


Example: Shepard Fairey's work is heavily informed by propaganda, which reached a peak with his famous Hope poster for Obama's campaign - another artist made a detracting statement using a similar method, and both artists influenced their audience effectively. How can we make images that are powerful enough to change minds?

Concerned Citizen - Kendall Wilcox

Artist's Statement

The hardest part of this assignment was choosing what part of the interview to use - with a time limit of 3 minutes, it would be hard to include all of the depth and richness of the conversation. As such, we decided to focus on his personal story - not only does this reinforce the idea of empathy, it places the viewer in a specific context and mood and offers something of a complete narrative, and hopefully prompts the viewer to continue the thought process themselves.

We wanted specifically to interview an individual that had a definite contrarian viewpoint, whose experiences would help diagnose the society in which they lived - Kendall is not only a minority within a minority, he is an entrenched "other" and has a clear understanding of Mormon culture in spite of this. We feel that his perspective is invaluable and can prompt necessary and edifying dialogue. Through speaking with him, we were able to enter a conversation that we would have neglected otherwise, and that provided us a chance to forgo pity and sympathy and practice empathy in a real and meaningful way.

We chose to make this largely a talking-heads documentary as the theme is dialogue, and we wanted to reinforce that. We inserted shots of his belongings and apartment in order to visually convey a sense of personality and meaning. Jake conducted the interview and operated the camera and microphone, and Daniel edited it.

Protest Poster - False Profit

Hit the jump for the Artist's Statement.

Webspinna - Sources

Hit the jump for the artist's statement.

Medium Specificity - Glitch Art

Artist's Statement

I have seen all of these paintings on the internet. As Magritte so wonderfully depicted, these paintings, all full of disturbing or scintillating life, are no more than paint upon canvases. My whole interaction with them and my entire knowledge of them stem from the internet, the paint depicted on LCD screens - another frame away from reality. They are no longer paint upon canvases, but pixels on a screen - and even deeper, binary code. The physical painting loses its texture, its brush strokes becoming gauche flatness made of red, green and blue. The pixels are zeroes and ones, the raw data a mess of indecipherable static.

Van Gogh's Starry Night in .raw format

When you reduce a masterwork of art into binary, is it still valuable? The physical strokes traced by the artist's own hand are gone, no longer a testament to the careful recording of the transcendental inspiration or moment of sublimity. With that gone, it is only an image on a screen - even less, a castrated set of pixels, void of the deeply spiritual and humanistic ties with the creator, that relationship rendered mute. I decided that I might as well take it a step further, and visually portray the images as their stunted counterparts to the physical, hand-crafted canvas. Their faults are made bare, static and inverted colours overpowering the original paints. The medium is the digital image, the specificity is code.

Hit the jump for the originals and a brief statement.

Social Media Adaptation - Hamlet

(Click to enlarge)

Hamlet's Profile (Link to Facebook)

Artist's Statement:

For our assignment we decided to adapt William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" using Facebook. We felt Facebook would be the best way because we wanted to focus on the characters and their interaction and Facebook profiles let us do this. Rather then a chronological series of events we decided to use more of a conversational approach, and show the interactions between characters.

 We decided rather than photoshopping a Facebook list of things that happen in the play we would create fake Facebook accounts and interact. This way of thinking forced us somewhat to think how the character was thinking and formulate what he would say different contexts.

One problem that significantly effected what we were trying to do was the fact that some of our profiles were being deleted as well as their posts and comments.

Good Music That Everyone Should Hear: Das Racist

If you hate rap, then you haven't been exposed to enough rap. That's where these guys come in - Das Racist are a pair of rappers from NYC and Alameda, and they are obscene and vulgar brown men. However, they are also the most literate and hilarious rappers I've heard in a long time - it's hard not to open a new tab while listening and voraciously googling every reference they make, from Rumi to Gitmo to Harold and Kumar.

Joke rap sucks though, right? Well, not really, and especially not when it's as self-reflexive and intelligent as Das Racist are. They succeed in the face of the backpack-rapper backlash - people are sick of hearing about the shortcomings of hip-hop, but Das Racist bring those topics up and mock them without being didactic and preachy - quite the opposite, in fact. Just listen to the opening banter on hahahaha jk, and we already have a discussion and implicit derision for the tough-guy persona that most rappers build up.

Their discography is pretty slim at the moment - they came up with the rise of "internet music" and have only released two mixtapes and one retail album, as well as a handful of solo mixtapes and some unreleased stuff in the invaluable URC collection: a .rar full of their rarities and features, definitely worth checking out. If you're still undecided, give the impressive Womyn a listen:

They released their best stuff for free online, which you can grab when you hit the jump: