Visual Language week 9

The topic of lecture was Semiotics. I had no idea what semiotics was until miss Niamh showed us the painting by Rene Magritte “The Treachery  Of Images”:

The words underneath are translates as “This is not a pipe”. It means that an image or sign of a thing is not the thing itself. The concept of semiotics is based on signs, symbols and communication.

All signs have two aspects: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is any material thing that signifies, the signified is the concept that a signifier refers to. Here is an example of this process:

The word “rose” literally signifies a kind of flower. But when connotation occurs multiple concepts are signified by the original signifier.

Semiotics are used quite often in advertisements.

On labs we had introduction to Photo Shop. Lecturer showed us how to use some of the Photo Shop tools. Our task was to create “fruitman”.

IMMA and… Visual Language week 6

Last week was crazy, crazy and one more time crazy!

Thursday, 25^th of October, 3.30 pm: I am in Blanchardstown SC with my boyfriend and friend Dorota. We are looking for holiday to some hot place, starting from Saturday or Sunday. The idea to fly somewhere appeared in our minds 2 hours earlier. I did not have any holiday from about 3 years so I decided to take an opportunity as I have mid term break in ITB. For this period there is only trip to Turkey (from Sunday, 7 nights) available. Perfect! We have to only check the weather. Hmmm… the weather in Turkey for the next week: Monday – 22 HC, Tuesday – 20 HC… No! No! No! To cold! Resigned, we came back home. 5pm: we are checking offers of travel agencies at websites. There is nothing instead of trip to Morocco for ‘only’ 700 euro. Suddenly there appeared an offer of holiday in Lanzarote. Weather – HOT! It is our last chance. But wait a minute. There is one difficulty: the flight is from Knock airport next day at 11am. I behaved irresponsible and thought ‘what the hell, let’s do it’. And then it started: packing, preparing everything. We woke up at 2 am and go to Knock and at 6 pm we landed in Lanzarote. I will not be writing how wonderful this trip was, just add a picture:

Because I missed the field trip to IMMA I decided to do it on my own. Honestly I was never a fan of Modern Art. After visit in IMMA I changed my mind. The biggest impression made on me art work of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov : The Children’s Hospital.

There was a hospital bed and next to this was mechanical model theater telling a story through words, music and movement of puppets.

I liked very much ‘The Process Room’ by Tine Melzer. This exhibition was definitely connected with visual language. In my opinion the book : ‘The Grass is greener on the other side’ is very interesting.

On every photography, projected in The Process Room was some sentence (for example: ‘Look South and Smile’). There was also one example of Melzer’s exhibition called ‘When in doubt…’. In this case it was: ‘When in doubt, close your eyes’.

There was a few interesting art works, however this two made on me the biggest impression. Unfortunately I could not take photos inside of IMMA, however I took some shots outside of the building.

UPDATE

I have read today that there is assignment according to field trip to IMMA. We have to publish 3 sketches of art work and describe them.

1. Ann Hamilton – American artist best known for her installations, textile art, and sculptures, but is also active in the fields of photography, printmaking, video, and video installation. She trained in textile design at the University of Kansas and later received an MFA from Yale University in sculpture. She taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara from 1985 to 1991 and won the MacArthur Fellowship in 1993.

 

Hamilton’s work which I choose is called ‘Filament II’. It was made by organza fabric, steel mount with electronic controller. This is the part of exhibition “Between Metaphor and Object”. Honestly, when I saw this art work my first thought was “baldachin” and dreams. I am not sure if I understand how massage artist wanted to deliver. I was searching information about this work, however unfortunately I couldn’t find anything.

2. Tine Melzer – The interdisciplinary work of visual artist Tine Melzer primarily focuses on the coded nature of language and aims at deconstructing the fears and desires bound to its imaginary. Her theoretical and practical research challenges our behaviour and codes in language.Melzer studied visual arts and philosophy and has been a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten. She teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and currently reads for a PhD at the Planetary Collegium.

Especially I was interested in one of the example of Melzer’s exhibition called “When in doubt”. This is part of “Process Room”. According to artist’s official website  ‘An ultimately interior dialogue takes place in moments of doubt. It is a private, fragile and often secret experience. A work which pretends to offer ‘solutions’ in this state offers simple suggestions in a random order, trying to camouflage the complexity of coming to a decision in a dilemma.’ This ‘advice’ is presented out of their context, yet reveal different levels of relevance.’ I think that partially I understood artist’s intention.

Visual Language week 4

60 apples..

I was convinced that it would be easy. However it was NOT! I am ambitious person and according to this every drawing/photo/photo manipulation had to be perfect.  Now I can honestly say that I am proud of my results. There is a few:

And a few more..:

Photography is one of my objects of interest. I took a few photos of apples:

The picture below is a real photo:

This optical effect is called bokeh. Here you have some information about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

At the very end when I was tired of drawing, I was having fun with photoshop. Here are my results:

Color was the topic of the last lecture. The most interesting part of the lecture was the part when we found out how the can influence on our lives.

Visual Language week 3

I was going to update my last post, however, I was really busy. I have not expected that studying and working at the same time would be so hard..

The topic of last lecture was ‘Elements of Visual Language: Point, Line, Pattern and Texture’.

I have learnt that  compulsion to connect parts ( if there are three points, it is unavoidable to interpret them as a triangle; the mind supplies the connections) is described as grouping, or gestalt.

There was a task in which we had to draw concept of woman and man using only dots, and emotions like anger, confusion, in love using only lines. This is my result:

In my opinion pattern is very useful in our first assignment (about which I will mention later). I am adding a few examples of pattern:

I didn’t mention about our first serious assignment in my previous post! Now I have to catch up on.. We have represent an object (we could choose between inter alia apple, ant, sun, paper bag or frog) in 60 different Visual ways using mixed media. The topic of my assignment is an apple.  There are a few examples of my apples:

In my opinion this assignment is developing our creativity. It is allowing us to see the objects from different perspectives. I can admit that it is quite hard task, however, there is a lot of fun using our imagination.

Visual Language week 2

Second week is finishing. I see that the time in college is running very fast. Today’s visual language lecture was about form, shape and space. We had an exercise in which we had to draw our hand without watching at the paper(blind contour drawing). That was really interesting task.

Visual Language week 1

Creative Digital Media. When I heard about this course for the first time I was very intrigued. It was about year ago and after getting familiar with program of the course I decided become a student of Institute of Technology in Blanchardstown.

I have set up this blog for Visual Language course. I have never run a blog before, so it is a big challenge for me. If I could give a name of this first week in ITB, it would be ‘the newness’: new people, new places, new subjects, everything new. At the beginning I was a little bit confused and frightened but now I am slowly building my confidence. At the first Visual Language’s lecture we have learned what exactly Visual Language is and what we are going to do during the first semester. After that we had first lab session on which we were creating our blogs and getting familiar with Macs computers.

This week was very excited and the second one is right before us…