Pictograms and Ideograms

This afternoon we were looking at pictograms and ideograms and how we can create our own using Adobe Illustrator, on a more professional level. Pictograms are images of nouns; they can be seen in history as far back as prehistoric times, in cave drawings, and they have since evolved into ideograms i.e. a men's toilet sign.  …

Illustration Styles

For one of my outcomes for the Genius Loci project, I'm going to create a book of illustrations. I am currently experimenting with different styles of illustration I could possibly use. The illustrations will be of people who have been willing to let me photograph them at my location, Trafalgar Square, which so far has…

Holding Text: (Un)Creative Writing in the Digital Age – Andrea Mason

Prior to Andrea Mason's lecture today, we were asked to read an article from The New Yorker by Kennth Goldsmith, titled 'Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet”'. This argued against the criticisms of people, students in particular, being distracted by the internet, and suggests that this 'distraction' is still…

Cut-Out Activity

In today's lecture on Holding Text, lecturer Andrea Mason asked us to cut and paste text from sources of our choice to form a piece of creative writing. I started by looking at my Twitter feed, and was inspired by Katie Hopkins' controversial posts, which I then used, along with one of her articles for…

Bleached Dreams – Troubling Places, Greta Hauer

"Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation." - Jean Baudrillard It was after this quote came up in the slideshow of…

Lil Red in the Hood

On Tuesday we were asked to retell the story of Little Red Riding Hood, thinking about who's point of view we tell it from, the audience we aim it at, the purpose of our version and the media we would portray it in. As the original story was from Grimm's Fairy Tales, click here, it was updated…

More Genius Loci research videos.

I've been back to my genius loci location and taken more videos, however I've only been able to upload 10 of them this week to my Vimeo, due to the limits on my basic account. I'll will post the rest next week. Link to the videos: https://vimeo.com/jameslnd/videos As shown in a previous Genius Loci blog post, I was…

POSE! ‘That’s Not Me’ – Mark Ingham

"It's just a photograph" This was my argument when suggesting to our lecturer today, Mark Ingham, that some of Roland Barthes theories on photography were 'wishy washy'. Barthes talks about 'photographs being invisible' and 'the subject experiencing death when the photo is captured', both I can understand, and I follow where he is coming from, but…

Another ‘I remember’

Today's lecture was, to me at least, the most engaging in terms of theories discussed. I followed the ideas proposed by our lecturer, Mark Ingham, with interest, despite me not agreeing with all of the 'wishy washy' concepts offered by Roland Barthes in 'Camera Lucida' (of which we were asked to read 13 pages of, prior to the lecture). After the…

Crimes Against Design – Feedback from other group

As a homework task, we were asked to seek feedback from another group on our concept. After writing and sending them these questions; this is the feedback we received from our peers Max, Filipa, and Andreia, who are working on the same project in a different group. We then did the same and commented on their concept…