Figuring out the Output
After my presentation, I can summarize my feedback as mainly pertaining to my output idea of projecting images over text. The consensus was that I didn’t need to add another layer of rhetoric on top of the quotes by Presidents using the word “freedom” in order to create fear of an enemy and justify going to war (either cold war or combat). Simply using the quotes and designing it in such a way would be enough to visualize the rhetorical power of political language. So I decided to ditch some of the agitprop ideas I had.
I therefore decided to do some experiments focusing on creating a timeline (purely typographic) using the quotes that would visualize my message. I wanted to reach reference my Unit 2 output by creating a typographic timeline and the final output would be in the form of stenciled graffiti. Each presidential term would take the form of an A2 poster and each poster would contain quotes using freedom in relation to fear and war. I started by designing out a few of the A2 posters in Indesign and printing a few of them out to see how it would work. However, designing this timeline has proven to be a struggle and the laser cutter machine at LCC is down.
Experiments:
To me, these experiments don’t seem to get my idea across strong enough if it all. It’s a bit too sterile. I do like the stencil font of Stencil I found that looks very military (the font used for “W. Bush” and the years). I also wonder if the stenciled look is a bit arbitrary? I was originally turned to the idea by the guerrilla look and history of stenciled graffiti.
Poster from Berlin:
Being unsure of where I was heading, I decided to go back to hand drawn methods of typography and to experiment with hand writing the quotes to form a word. My idea was that the word or phrase would implicitly or explicitly imply my message and the use of the quotes to form the words would reinforce the visual idea. I decided to do an experiment using the word “WAR.”
If I take this approach for my final output, I’m not sure if “WAR” is the correct word. A longer phrase might be more interesting than simply a word. Also, hand writing might not the best form of typography here. If I do take this approach, I can introduce color to codify certain phrases (i.e. green would represent the context of the first Iraq War, etc.) NOT SURE and 3.5 weeks to go… DECISIONS, DECISIONS, DECISIONS!!!!!
At this point the main questions that I need to think about which will (hopefully) guide my output are:
+ Will impeding readability hurt the output?
+ Will more expressive forms of typography work better than a more sterile, modern approach?
+ How expansive does the output need to be?
+ If my audience are people who don’t realize the full scope of how certain rhetorical devices can “sell” war or persuade the public, what means are the most effective to communicating with them in a way that is not too simplified or preachy. I.e. I’m not looking to create my own form of agitprop.
Restructuring My Focus
Creating my final presentation allowed me to reflect on my ideas and construct my arguments and the framework around which my work is centered.
Field of Study:
Historical Comparative Study of Emotional Language in American Politics Post-WWII.
Research Question:
How can Graphic Design expose the manipulative nature of Emotional Rhetoric in American Politics?
Methodology:
culling emotional quotes from the State of the Union Addresses from 1946 to 2011. The State of the Union Address is a speech that the president gives every year at the beginning of the year that outlines the current condition of the nation and the legislative agenda and policy for the upcoming year, both domestically and internationally. By picking 5 to 10 emotional quotes from each years speech and writing them down by hand in a timeline, my idea was to identify any recurring trend(s) in the use of emotional language across the years from 1946 to 2011.
Audience:
Americans (and Non-Americans), who understand that political rhetoric is a form of persuasion, but who are not aware of how and why certain rhetorical devices are used and how they can be manipulative.
My Research Question further got narrowed down to:
How can Graphic Design explore the manipulative usage of the term Freedom in American Political Rhetoric?
The PDF of my presentation and the accompanying text can be downloaded from my website.
Photos of latest timeline experiments:
Major Project Pre and Post Vacation
It’s now time to resurrect this blog. We are currently in the middle of completing our Major Project. My original idea was to use graphic design to dissect an Obama and David Cameron press conference. My idea was to break apart the language to reveal other meaning… Well, that idea… was not meant to be.
After doing a series of visual experiments with the press conference, I decided the scope was too small and just… not interesting enough to hold my attention for 3 months.
Writing out the adjectives from the Press Conference:
Typographic generative design experiment exploring the countries they mention in the Press Conference:
Color coding the press conference by topic (Info Design??):
From some of these experiments, I decided to focus in on some of the more specific quotes. I pulled some of the more “stock” or empty phrases and decided to do some letterpress experiments (b/c I had not other great ideas at the time).
From there, I thought it might interesting to do these letterpress experiments on Newsprint: superimposing text on images from Newspapers:
From these developments, I changed and developed my focus towards exploring the Emotional Language in Political Rhetoric. More specifically the manipulative use of Emotional Language by politicians.
I came across an article discussing George W. Bush’s use of Negative Emotional Language to strike fear in the American public (namely the under educated, low income, and conservative base): http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/P-I-Focus-Power-of-presidency-resides-in-1119158.php
In the article, Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist, breaks down Bush’s language use into three areas: Empty Language, Personalization, and Negative Framework. She defines them as:
Empty Language
Broad statements that are so abstract and mean so little that they are virtually impossible to oppose.
Negative Framework
A pessimistic image of the world. “Learned Helplessness:” people’s notivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment.
Personalization:
Localizing the attention of the listener on the speaker’s personality.
These three types of emotional language can be contrasted with language that is optimistic or positive. I therefore did some experiments using some the more emotional lines from Bush and Obama. The idea was to do some word and image experiments and examine how/if the images can change the meaning of the words. It’s kind of like using images to either enhance or contradict the manipulative emotional language.
I am now at a point where I do not know where I am going. In trying to resolve my focus, I’m currently at:
Field of Study: Political Language.
Research Question: How can graphic design explore how emotional language in politics intentionally exploits and manipulates the fears of an audience?
Methodology: hmmmm… continue doing more word and image experiments and also experiments involving different fonts. From there (in a week) I will need to critically reflect on all the work and research done thus far and come up with a methodology to complete an output, etc.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Unit 2 Final
Leake Street Graffiti Experiments
Unit 2: Design & Rhetoric Presentation
Poster presentation for Unit 2 idea. More text to come, need to crash out tonight.
Unit 2: Design & Rhetoric
“Pure” information exists for the designer only in arid abstraction. As soon as he begins to give it concrete shape, the process of rhetorical infiltration begins.
Gui Consiepe
Rhetoric is both an art of argument and persuasion and an instrument of investigation which can provide connections between issues such as ethics, morals, politics and social or cultural values.
- from the Brief
For my Unit 2 idea, I decided to keep working along the topic of political graffiti. In my Unit 1, I explored using handmade methods of craft production to create information design about handmade craft. I decided to continue working along handmade methods of visual communication, and thus moved along to graffiti. Inspired by the photo i took of the “Puta Espana” graffiti, I wandered around London looking for politically oriented graffiti (messages indicating a conflict of power whether is be government policy, international affair, political figures, nationalism, racism, class struggle, sexuality, etc.). I found Leake Street (aka. The Tunnel) by accident one day and found wealth of good and shitty graffiti. I later found out that Leake Street is a legal wall (graffiti is tolerated there) and was the area of the 2008 Can Festival, a graffiti festival organized by Banksy, a famous London based graffiti artist.
I took over 500 photographs of various type of graffiti within a week span, concentrating on graffiti that communicated a more overt political message. I used the following definitions in my research method:
Graffiti: unauthorized writing or drawing on a public surface.
Politics: social relations involving authority or power.
From the photographs I took, I weeded out the political pieces and then made a typology of those pieces and separated them out onto mood boards based on the category. On these mood boards, I scribbled notes as a way of trying to organize my thoughts.
Mood boards:
Generative Design Brief 2
For Brief 2, we were asked to work with the same six numbers again and create three self-initiated projects to describe relationships of either color or light. The projects should be generated by three of the four previous methods: system, chance, progression, and/or collaboration.
“The question you are seeking to answer is: how can I apply three alternative generative methods to my six numbers in order to describe color differences or light changes?”
My idea was to use my six numbers to create six colors and then use various methods of organizing these colors into various compositions. To create those colors, I sorted my iTunes by popularity and choose the 6th, 10th, 22nd, 26th, 30th, and 40th most played songs. I then took the album art from those six songs and shrunk them down into 1 pixel of color in photoshop:
A few select compositions:
For the final hand in on June 13, I plan to refine my approaches and final piece, as well as create a visual summary.
Generative Design
For my Elective B, I took Generative Design with Paul McNeil. Before starting the elective, we were required to bring in:
- a completed UK Lottery Ticket
- 24 175 x 175mm master grid squares
- a large quantity of 25 x 25mm squares of black paper
- a short sentence on what we think Generative Design is
My Lottery ticket numbers were: 6, 10, 22, 26, 30, 40
My blurb:
To quote the brief: “this elective will allow you the opportunity to explore the use of systematic, parametric, conditional or rules-based methods in generating visual outputs.”
In Brief 1, we were required to take the lowest number from our lottery ticket and use that number amount of black squares to make a composition on one of our 175 x 175mm grids based on the 4 following methods:
System: achieve perfect mirror symmetry throughout in the vertical axis.
Chance: distribute the black squares randomly. Avoid subjective choices.
Progression: use a consistent accumulative numerical throughout. If black squares touch, connect edges before corners.
Collaboration: verbally instruct a non-participant (or more than one) to produce a set of designs.
We would subsequently repeat this process for the rest of the 5 numbers on the lottery ticket until we had 24 compositions. After everyone in the class had completed the task, we then as a class stitched all of the compositions into 8 combined blocks using our sum number (of the 6 lottery ticket numbers) as the hierarchy. Then we combined all of the blocks together into one piece.
Photos:
Leading Into Unit 2
I ended up posting some of the photos I took of graffiti in Bricklane on Facebook and unintentionally sparked a small, albeit playful, Facebook feud regarding Spain and Catalan Independence. Photo in question:
In the photo, a passerby scrawled the words “Puta Espana” on a store front using green paint or a green marker. Presumably, another person added “Visca Catalunya” using a thinner black marker. As I do not read or speak Spanish, I didn’t realize what this discourse meant and didn’t take a full picture of “Visca Catalunya.” Translated into English, the 2 phrases mean: “Bloody Spain. Long Live Catalunya.” This accidental discovery/incident led me to think about graffiti that is used to express messages of a more overt political nature (regarding power struggles, government policies, etc.) rather than the more juvenile graffiti messages that one normally sees such as: “fuck you,” “so-and-so is a dick.” Usually, when we think of graffiti, we think of public defacement created by adolescent wannebe thugs or graffiti artists who have tremendous skill in using spray paint to create elaborate illustrations. For Unit 2, I am interested in exploring the use of graffiti (specifically words) as a means of expressing political dissent. I do not have a Research Question at the moment, however, I plan to continue documenting graffiti in London, focusing on the political messages. My initial ideas revolve around creator, reader, and environment. What meaning can we take from these messages, however temporal they might be? Can these messages be surveyed in a topological manor in order to analyze our current global state or just the current political climate of Urban London? Do they convey an overall sense of despondency or energetic anarchy from the creator? And does the location of where these messages appear lend any significance? Until I do more primary and secondary research, I’m not sure what format the final output will take. Leading from Unit 1, however, I hope to carry forward my exploration of the handmade and focus on improving my skills in editorial design and typography.
