Lecture 5 - The Gaze and The Media

Here are my notes from the fifth lecture The Gaze and The Media on 24/11/2011.

'according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at' - Berger

Woman carry around an idea of being looked at - not vanity, proliferation of images.

The word vanity is used as some sort of sinful regard to oneself.

image of woman on bed

lost in thought, lost in a moment of reverie and this allows us to look at her without the challenge of her looking back at us. Her body is arranged in a fairly low view point, the main focus is between her legs but thats ok because of the mirror.

babys flying image


Depict the female figure in a reclining position. She's raised her hand which partly covers her eyes. This gesture suggests either just woke from sleep or just going to sleep. This position allows us to look at her body.

image laying on back


Sophie Dahl for Opium - withdrawn because of its overt use of nudity. The naked body takes up 3/4 of the image and the rest is where we rest our gaze.

portrait version

This version of the advert was allowed and the only change really is the image has been rotated. With the vertical image there's more emphasis on the face rather than the body.

girl on bed

Woman looking in an inviting way, so is looking directly at us from the image. Welthy woman who has servants in the background. Knows we are there looking and allows us to do so.

image of woman in bed with black behind

This image was painted during modernism, so this one has a modern view. Slightly elevated on the cushions and uses hands to cover area, but position is more assertive and endorses the likeness of a wealthy woman, not a hooker. Servant offering flowers but she is turned away disregarding which suggests they are from one of her lovers.

gorialla girls poster


Do women have to be naked to get into the met. museum? Was cancelled because the fan was taken as more than just a fan and suggested other things.

girl in bar


gentleman is stood face to face with the barmaid, this is represented through the mirror. We are also in front of the barmaid also seeing what he sees. The mirror reflection is a distorted reflection as we wouldn't see it if this was real life as the reflections would be directly behind the woman. Womans gesture is approachable suggesting she is ready to wait on us.

mirror image


Reinterpreted the previous image. No hidden device. The camera is directly in the centre of the image. We are in the middle section, the woman on the left and artist on the right.

The camera in contemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at women on the street. - Coward, R. (1984)

hello boys


Wonder bra ad. The link between the text and image, either the woman is saying 'hello boys', although she isn't looking at us she is looking down at herself, at her cleavage, her own body. Imagine it huge above a street, she is looking down on the people below the billboard.

Coward also looks at voyeurism, Peeping Tom, character with the camera spies on women and lures them to his apartment then records himself killing them. Obsessive take on women. Perversion.

image of guy


Underwear advert of male in the reclining pose the same as the previous looked at ones in paintings. He has his eyes closed, so we are able to look at his body in the same way.

d&g ad


From 2007. We see here a display of male strength, sport, the male body. Obsession with the cult of health. Every single guy returns the gaze in the image.

Ideas about the gaze comes from Laura Mulby's theory of the gaze. She looks at the cinema from the 1950's. The framing focuses on the areas that allows us to look at and be pleasurable to see. The body is an object for consumption.

Freud referred to the pleasure in looking at other peoples bodies being pleasurable. Mulby suggests that the cinema allows for more closer look into the bodies that are being displayed on screen. Pleasure in looking has been split between active male looking and female role.

beheading image

There's also a tradition in art history that suggests that the woman is passive. This image reverses these roles by beheading the man.

Women are 'marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history'

'I shop, therefore I am'.

is it her that did the 2 fried eggs and a kebab sculpture? its minging either way

polaroid money


Self portrait of her 'stuffing money in herself'. The idea of the body replicates a pornographic pose. The idea of women making money from their art.

Reality Television
Appears to offer us the position as the all-seeing eye- the power of the gaze
Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption

Turning voyeurism is turning this into an everyday activity. Contestants are performing for us to watch. Is it really real?

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'.

Lecture 4 - Critical positions on the media and popular culture

Here are my notes from the fourth lecture Critical positions on the media and popular culture on 10/11/2011.

Aims

• critically define 'popular culture'
• contrast ideas of 'culture' with 'popular culture' and 'mass culture'
• introduce cultural studies and critical theory
• discuss culture as ideology
• interrogate the social function of popular culture

What is culture?

Gain culture - they grow and as they grow they gain culture - the process of general emancipation 

A way of living - a certain subculture, values, attitudes, certain ways of thinking about the world.

Global cultures - thinking globally.

It can be used to describe a cannon of really important artworks or type of literature, i.e Shakespeare, Beethoven.

A marx's reading of culture is that you have a particular class/relations, and because of these relations a superstructure forms  ideology.

boat image

Culture emerges from the base, then culture almost legitimises and makes possible the relation of base production.

Culture could be a site of political conflict.

Popular culture

If you think about popular culture instead of culture, you get different answers. Theres 4 answers for this all of which are different.

1. The idea of popular culture as an idea of something that is popularly measured. The problem with this is that it leads to confused results.

2. Different but most common is that popular culture is a somewhat inferior form of culture, work that is mass produced as opposed to individually produced. Works that aspire to be important but for various reasons they fail.

3. Anything that aims to be populist comes under popular culture.Work that is easy and for the people is easy and less important. There's an elitism.

4. Culture that's made by people for themselves. By the people for the people. The working class popular culture would be brass bands.

Inferior or Residual Culture

• popular press vs quality press 
• popular cinema vs art cinema
• popular entertainment vs art culture

The reason why we question wether something is good or bad comes from the fact that we're coded to think and accept certain things - to do this is flawed.

There are different levels to popular culture, and the dynamics.

Prior to modernity and urbanisation, society had a modern culture on top of a shared common culture. The first time this changes is with industrialisation and urbanisation, people are condensed together  but aso physically separated. Where these people now start to live when industrialisation comes in to action the classes get really separated, working class, elite, etc. 

You get a physical distinction between the rich and the poor. This starts to create a cultural separation. Classes then start to create their own culture forms, and activities- such as drinking, playing piano. They find their own form of literature and music. 

This starts to emerge a working class voice/working class culture. Before this moment in charge of setting what was important culturally was the ruling class. Now there is two voices competing against each other.

Massing people together gets them to start thinking about how their culture should be, writing new ones.

Culture and Anarchy - M Arnold (1867)

He tried to define what culture was. The book's about him defining what culture is. 'The best that has been thought and said in  the world'. He explains how one gains culture by the perceit of culture.Culture is the force that can minister the diseased spirit of our times - meaning the opposite to culture. Anarchy, that has its own voice heard. If we teach them how to respect our culture, they can be welcomed in, but if they start to develop their own then its classed as anarchy.

These theories start to emerge when the control of the working class starts to be questioned. 

Leavisism- F.R Leavis & Q.D Leavis

- still forms a kind of repressed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country.

Throughout the 20th Century, we have seen a dumbing down of culture. A cultural decline. 'Culture has always been in minority keeping'. 

It's a form of snobbery that can still be seen now in attitudes towards popular culture - such as attitudes towards x factor and big brother, the snobbery in the way that people just dismiss these programmes emerges from Arnold and Leavis. They have an agenda.

Frankfurt School

Theodore Adorno & Max Horkheimer

'the culture industry'

At this time there was the start of mass production in America.

Frankfurt School

Herbert Marcuse

Lecture 3 - Marxism & Design Activism

Here are my notes from the third lecture Marxism and Design Activism on 03/11/2011.


Aims

• to introduce a critical definition of ideology
• to introduce some of the basic principles of Marxist philosophy
• to explain the extent to which the media constitutes us as a subject
• to introduce 'culture jamming' and the idea of design activism

What can designers do to change the world that we live in or alter the situation that we find ourselves in?

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" - Marx, K. (1845) 'Theses On Feuerbach.

Praxis - a unification of thought and action.

Marxism is: was both a political manifesto which outlines what Marx saw as a better way of organising society, and described the road to achieving that. As well as politics describes how workers will always be in conflicts. A physiological method. It lead to the rise of the soviet union. 

What is Capitalism?: This is the stage of which we live in, the society in which we live in. It's a society where control of the means of production is held by a few individuals, therefore a few individuals makes loads of money.Everyone else works for these individuals. Everything is bought and sold. People are commodities in the way of shoes. Our interactions evolve around the logic of a market. It's a system which makes us compete, and says that if you end up at the top of society it's probably because you deserve to be. Compete against each other for grades, jobs, etc.

The evolution of humanity

1. Primitive Communism - society would change and hierarchies would emerge

2. Slave Society - someone had something someone else didn't

3. Feudalism - develop the ruling class

4. Capitalism - capitalists are the ruling class

5. Socialism - people will gain class consciousness, overthrow the capitalists and take control over the state.

6. Communism - people who own the ability to own money

The materialist conception of society.

Marx argues that society can be broke into teo sections - first is economic, the base. At any given moment society will have certain technology/tools/skills etc. This has relations of production, and develops things like employer and employee sides. Certain relations emerge. 

Everything is a result of the forces of production and everything that surrounds that production.

Everything can be traced back to issues of class, gender politics, racial polotics. Anything can be read as a certain political attitude.

Capitalism produces laws, culture, politics, education, art that reflects that attitude.

pic of boat

The base determines the content and form of the superstructure which then reflects the form of and legitimises the base, and so on.

Education - the base are ones of bosses and workers, the boss telling the worker what to do. The education emerges. This then makes people think where workplace relations where the boss is like do this, do that is acceptable.

house image

We're forced into situations that we don't really have control of.

image of pyraid thing

The ruling class.

Ideology - it has a double meaning. One can have an ideology of beliefs. The way in which a certain system of ideas distorts the power of relations, through creation of 'false consciousness'. We don't understand things the way we could, but how could we. We wouldn't let it happen.

Ideology usually emerges from the ruling class, and represents their world view. The exploited class then start to think that this is also their world view.

There's all sorts of forms of ideology. 

   - Art is about one persons expression, yet it's never been like that. In classical art, the only people allowed to be artists were the people who could afford to be educated, so you had to be rich. 

   - Women weren't allowed to be artists, just white rich men making art. 

   - A culture is then developing by rich people for rich people. 

   - Looking at art and thinking about art can influence you into thinking the way that the artist wants you to think.

image of gorilla woman

Ideology is not just something produced by society, but also a relation.

Theres various different apparatus in society.

Education isn't about freeing you up, it's about training you up to turn how how you're expected to be.

All media outlets are owned by super rich people, and what the media does is reflect ideology that is in the world already and creates a false consciousness.

Lecture 2 - Technology will liberate us

Here are my notes from the second lecture Technology will liberate us on 20/10/2011.

Summary

• technological conditions can affect the collective consciousness
• technology trigger important changes in cultural development
• Walter Benjamin's essay 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' (1936) significantly evaluates the role of technology through photography as an instrument of change.

Task

• draw a doodle - original
• faithfully copy this - copy
• and again... - reproductions
• and again - reproductions

A reproductions can either be a work in its own right, or merely an image representation of the original.

The relationship between art, design and media is born from this scenario. Who is copying who?

The transformation between that is the relationship between art, media and design.

Machine Age; Modernism

Walter Benjamin and mechanical reproduction - wrote some critical essays but his work was never completed due to him committing suicide after the war.

• the age of technology of art
• parallel and specific to new developments; a duality expressing the zeitgeist
• dialectical due to the copy, reproductive nature and the role of the original
• the aura and uniqueness of art

On encountering an original work, there is an ora that is distinct from anything that is then reproduced or copied.

Photography is at the beginning of this technological relationship between art and design.

The camera eye is still one of fascination as it can come from a number of points - not just your perception or what you see, it can be used for multiple viewing points.

The camera eye has a variable gaze, and a new consciousness conveys and represents technological progress and the faith within it.

Photograms - the early experiments with technology and photography

Benjamins provokes two strands of thoughts which have then been explored by Freud and Marx

Marx brings about that an understanding of technology and how it is a work of art.

Once art and design enter modes of production and consumerism, the values of it can be changed.

A copy of something onto something can increase its value - up for reinterpretation.

Margo Lovejoy - photography has overturned a seat of art. Form of aesthetic. Technology moves something into a new context, therefore meaning the value of it becomes under question.

Freud - What the material aspect of how it can express our deepest unconscious. 

Films can play with our subconscious and deepest desires. The material way at looking at the developments of technology.

Kineticism - the idea of capturing movement.

The pre curser of cinema photography. Exploring how we pursue space. The understanding of space and time begins a whole dialogue of de materialism of art and design.

Once you start to look at the moving image, it starts to move away from form and object. Once you move into just image, you can replicate and reform it. With photography becomes the de materialism of art and design.

Dadaism is clearly using technology to produce image. Instead, with photography and technology, images and objects are ordered and coded and styled. This is the beginning of the development of art and design merging together- how you code and replicate and style and order it can be resting in either the context of art or context or design or both. It is why you see design increasingly from this period within art.

Marx is associated with the term technological determinism. He believes there is a logical relationship between economical reproduction and social existence. He sees it as a role and tool for progress, and also a tool for alienation.

The main issues Marx discusses - 

• technology drives history, 
• technology and the division of labour, 
• materialist view of history, 
• technology and capitalism and production, 
• social alienation of people from aspects of their human nature as a result of capitalism,

Electronic Age; Postmodernism

Post modern and post machine - as we move into it, many electronic works were still made with modern aesthetic, the emergence of information and conceptual based works, the computer has become a centre in both art and design, there is an openness to industrial techniques, and collaborations between art and science.

We consumer the technology, and in term develop new techniques - everything becomes that much more image and illusion based. 

Boundaries are broken between different forms of medial and subjects. 

Simulation and Simulacrum

• It is the reflection of a profound reality
• It masks and denatures a profound reality
• It masks the absence of a profound reality
• It has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is it's own pure simulacrum
•  - Jean Baudrillard (1981)

Whats to say by reproducing an image doesn't make it a object/form in its own right? What do we call original and what do we call copy? It is a reflection of a profound reality, masks and absence of reality. Becomes a reality in it's own right. It's confusing, because it's all to do with what is virtual and what is not.

What is a reality and what isn't a reality? 

The word of mouth masks the absence - we take it as real, we take it as factual because it's what we hear.

Nam June Paik

The illusion of power.

John Walker and art and mass media; Art in the age of mass media (2001)

• art uses mass media (1990 - 2000)
• Art in advertisements
• The artist as media celebrity

Digital Age

Margot Lovejoy; Digital Currents

• digital potential leads to multimedia productions
• technological reduction of all images so they are addressed by the computer
• new contexts

Multimedia work

• interactivity
• performance
• transdisciplinary
• time, space and motion explored in art and as art
• collaborations
• computer as a tool for integrating that media

Colclusion

• art comments on the ideology of every day life
• art can be expressive of progressive
• technological tools can blur the line between production of fine art works and commercial and design production

Seminar Notes - Panopticism

Notes from seminar on 17/10/2011.

Review of Panopticism lecture.

Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham, design for building, 1971, used for prisons, schools, hospitals, institutions.

Constant visibility/invisibility - institutional gaze

Self discipline - depersonalises

Self regulating

Isolation - like a laboratory, experiment

Individualising the experience increases psychological actions

Binary division - eg mad/sane

Productive - concentrate harder, no talking, got to work

Seek to correct unproductive behaviour

Make people insane to make them sane

Under surveillance

Shift from physical to mental discipline - modern disciplinary society

Society where social control is woven into every kind of existence

Examples of Panopticism

• Facebook - performance of yourself behaving how you think someone else wants you to present yourself to the world
• Schools
• Hospitals
• Media
• Advertising - shows images of 'perfect' life all the time. should look/should act? makes people not comfortable with who you are, correct body for someone else

Dosile Body - easily trained, controlled

Power - power is a relationship A > B

   - school teacher has control over a class rather than its more

   - a <-> b

   - only exists because they allow it

   - students sit quiet let themselves be controlled

Affects the controllers as well as the controlled

Lecture 1 - Panoptcism

The ways in which our society controls and disciplines people.

Complex institutional framework.

   - think about the way the way we, artists, designers, makers, our ideas are not only produced by us independently.

   - before we get to the creative act determines what we produce.

Panopticon is an allergry of social control.

<image of panopticon>

This, as a building, has the same principles of controls as our society has the same principles of control.

Michael Foucault (1926 - 1984)

   - philosopher

   - activist

Two of his works  

 - madness & civilisation

   - discipline & punish: the birth of the prison

These both survey the rise of madness and civilisation, and social control.

Discipline. Punishment. Madness.

Madness & Civilisation

   - madness is different socially 

   - mad people were incorporated into society 

   - part of society

Towards the 1600's - a different attitude starts to emerge

   - moral attitude

   - those who 'weren't useful' were stigmatised

   - 'the great confinement' - houses of correction

        - everyone who weren't socially productive were thrown in.

        - the insane

        - criminals

        - poor and unemployed

        - single mothers

        - idle - people considered lazy

 

Take those who aren't productive and force them to be productive with violence.

   - the error was that it corrupted people more

   - the insane made the sane more deviant

   - specialist institutions start to emerge

   - a different between sane and insane start to emerge

Inside the asylum, the inmates are controlled in different ways.

   - treated like children/minors

        - if  they do well they get a reward

   - important shift

   - society realise there's a better way to control people

        - mentally rather than physically

All sorts of knowledge emerge

   - they legitimise these institutions 

   - this mental source of social control represents from someone else being in control of your own behaviour to you being in control of your own behaviour.

Those who were deviants, were seen to by social embarrassment.

   - to show if anyone chooses not to obey they will also be socially humiliated

Guy Falks

image

Quote under image.

Not to correct his behaviour, but to make an example of it. That anyone who dares to confront the king will be treated the same and have the same punishment

   - made to scare people off the thought of even considering it

Disciplinary Society and Disciplinary Power

   - modern discipline - making us useful for society

The Panopticon

   - designed by Jeremy Bentham - proposed 1791

   - could be a school, hospital, asylum, prison

Modern one is build in Cuba.

image of it

Another modern one in the states 

image of this

The panopticon - the ideal mechanism of gaining power and control

   - each prisoner in their cell constantly see the central tower so they know they are being watched, but can't see each other.

   - the central tower wasn't lit so the prisoners couldn't tell if they were actually being watched

   - knowing you are/might be watched has a peculiar effect

        - it internalises the individual

        - always behave in the way you feel you should whilst being watched

   - gives immediate power

   - once you accept you're always being watched the people start to control themselves

        - keep themselves disciplined

   - resulted in not even needing guards to control it because the people just control themselves.

image of in cell

People controlling themselves rather than being controlled

   - don't need any physical way of controlling people, just mental

Faucault Quote, 1975

The institutions were used for a variety of purposes.

   - the had the function of laboratories

   - they used to measure things like performance and contrast

   - allows scrutiny

   - allows supervisor to experiment on subjects

   - aim to make them productive

This lecture theatre is designed to make us learn more productively

   - we can only really talk to people to left and right of us where as Richard can see us all 

   - the way we are arranged are most productive 

   - allows him to survey us

   - make us more useful and do what he wants us to do

   - reforms prisoners

   - helps treats patients

   - helps instruct school children

   - helps confine, but also study the insane

New mode of disciplinary power - Panopticism

   - don't just want to punish those who don't do what we say - correct and punish them

   - surveillance of bodied/people

   - about training people

   - getting people to train themselves the way you want them to be trained

Constantly visible

   - easier to be caught out

Open plan office

   - not just a trendy design

   - efficient system for the bosses

   - allows the boss to constantly see what the workers are doing

   - the fact you know you can be constantly seen makes you not because you know you can be caught out

   - the boss can just be sat there as a visible reminder

The Office

   - film crew following main character around

   - he knows he is constantly being filmed

   - he modifies his behaviour

   - put on a face of being the perfect boss

   - just the idea of being watched caused him to change his behaviour

You are acting in a way you think a correct citizen is supposed to act.

   - behaviour conditioned by all sorts of factors

Right now

   - monitored

   - registered

   - grade

   - can be seen

Library

   - automatically know you have to control yourself in a library

   - same with art galleries

   - just know you have to be quiet

   - perfectly behaved, despite what like out of it

Modern Bars

   - open plan

   - change from being intimate to spaces where you now you're being watched

   - walk into a modern bar feeling less atmosphere

   - everyone is watching you

   - spaces are much easier to control

CCTV

   - most obvious example

   - another example is Google Maps

        - photos of streets 

        - personal levels of own homes are available to everyone

        - another way to get caught out?

Lives are recorded

   - everything that we do is recorded

   - fear of being caught out

   - resulting in more productive, well behaved people

Not just physical places, or the design of places

   - fundamentally, for it to have an effect it relies on you being visible and knowing that you're being monitored

A register is not just a record, but it's also a panoptic sign to be monitored 

   - our knowledge of ourselves goes into Richards hands

Don't question it, just cooperate to not raise any awareness to wether would be doing something wrong

Security cameras are usually revealed to visibly instruct people that they have to behave, not to catch them out

Some just put as a reminder that you could be caught out, but not actually set to catch you out - speed cameras, etc

The fact in college how staff have red cards and we have blue cards controls us, and gives us a status of power. If you see someone you don't know with a red card, you would immediately act more appropriately.

It's not just a form of mental control, there's a direct relationship between mental control and physical control. These power relationships control our bodies and forces us to act in a certain way and has physical responses. We become docile bodies - self monitoring, self-correcting, obedient bodied. Docile bodies in the terms that we won't repel. Makes ur work harder and come in when were supposed to, etc.

The whole keeping healthy thing

   - not just keeping healthy, but also to endure people work harder and better

   - people are living longer so expected to work longer and harder because they are healthier

   - constant physical reminder that our bodies are constantly on display

   - no one makes you go to they gym and fret about how you look, you do it to yourself. You make yourself anxious.

Everyone watches telly, but it's like a metaphor for the panopticon, fixed forward watching something centrally.

Foucault and Power

   - definition is not a top-down model as wth Marxism

   - power is not a thing or a capacity people have - it's a relation between different individuals and groups and only exists when it's exercised.

   - the exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted

   - there there is power there is resistance.

Facebook - everything you post is recorded by everyone who can see it. You control what you post, put on an act of yourself for others. A form of control - must announce to people things like relationship changed, and can actually loose jobs over it as there is always someone somewhere watching.

There is always something controlling our actions.

Things to go away with today

   - Michael Foucault

   - panopticism as a form of discipline

   - techniques of the body

   - docile bodies

Level 05 - Briefing

14 lectures - Thursdays 11:00am

Seminars - Group 2 1:00pm - 3:00pm
We will be split into 4 groups then we will have a seminar every 2 weeks.

Private study - 120 hours / 20 credits
2 hours reading per lecture
10 hours seminar development
20 hours essay development
60 hours e-learning

bagd-10cts.blogspot.com

CTS Blog
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741.6 library

Introduction to Communication Studies - John Fisce

23rd January - essay deadline