Automatic Writing
In this exercise, we were tasked to write our thoughts freely without any planning or any revision and to see what naturally comes out.
For this first practice, I ended up writing about how I perceive the world as an artist, particularly with how I analyse things in my surroundings such as locations and people to find inspiration for my work. Following this, we were told to pick certain words that stood out in our writing and write another entry focusing on those words.
Two words I had chosen were ‘react’ and ‘interact’ which were originally written in regards to how I notice the way people’s personalities interact with each other as part of my observations of the world around me. I chose these words to write deeper into as I feel there is a lot to go into in regards to how I believe relationships are formed as a result of two different personalities reacting to each other.
Media Landscape
For this exercise, we were tasked to take and combine images from magazine scraps and form them into a story together. The instructions were to use metal squares provided to cut out squares out of the images provided. However, I misunderstood the instructions and instead cut out the images not as squares but as their own individual visual elements and ended up creating a collage of my own interpretation of the task. While putting the images together into a narrative, this was the collage of images I created:
I ended up creating a narrative with the theme of ambition and technological progress, as depicted with birds and flight representing a higher goal for humanity to reach and the buildings as the norm/status quo that they are trying to change with the rocket being a symbol of humanity rising above its limitations to reach its ambitions. The following is a journal entry I wrote on the themes I depicted in my collage:
Into the Woods
For this exercise we were tasked to wander in a library and find interesting books that seemed obscure or had been long discontinued. By finding books that were dated or had not been read much/had not been read for a long time, we were to find sources of inspiration from more unique perspectives and understand how ideas changed over time.
Book 1: Advertising and British Art by Walter Shaw Sparrow
I initially chose this book as the look of its worn-out spine stood out to me among the rest of the graphic design books it was placed with. I thought this book would have been interesting to analyse as being a historical book on graphic art would provide an interesting look into what art used to be contemporary and how design trends have changed since then.
Below are my notes on my observations and thoughts about the book as I skimmed through it.
Book 2: Beauty in History by Arthur Marwick
This was the second book I chose to analyse as I felt that a book covering beauty trends throughout history would provide interesting information on how societal and cultural values change over time.
Below are my notes on my observations and thoughts about the book as I skimmed through it.
Book 3: Form magazines
I chose to analyse this series of magazines next as they caught my eye from the bookshelf, particularly with how several of the issues were compiled as loose pages in a folder instead of as individual issues, having long deteriorated from their original state. Upon further digging, I came across a whole collection of the magazines which ranged from the 1940s to the early 2000s. Analysing this magazine series provided me a chance to compare and contrast how the visuals had changed from the earlier publications to the more modern ones with the influence of new technology and design trends. It further provided a look into how cultural and societal norms that the magazine covered had stayed the same or changed throughout the magazine’s lifetime.
Below are my notes on my observations and thoughts about the book as I skimmed through it.
Pseudonym
For this exercise, were tasked with creating a film review for a fictional film by a fictional film director. For the fictional film, I chose to use the plot of an actual story that I am working on for a personal project about two siblings who start a revolution to overthrow a military dictatorship on a fictional island in Southeast Asia. Thus, I was able to use this exercise to provide a critique for myself for what are the possible strengths and flaws my own story writing could have. For the fictional director, I came up with the name of Nguyen Van Khanh to have a director that would be of Southeast Asian descent such as myself and would have used his experience and knowledge of dictatorships and the struggle for democracy in Southeast Asian countries to provide the inspiration for his story.