Image and Consumption

This is Tim Westwood aka 'Big Dawg', Radio 1 DJ and son of the Anglican Bishop of Peterborough, deceased. He has just done his shopping at Tesco and in his twittered words was "just gettin my shop on - big ballin and shop callin!". Tim was brought up in Norfolk and attended the Norwich School, one of the oldest and most prestigious schools in the country. Arguably Tim's image, his appropriation of a culture which is not his own, including vernacular speech, clothing, the spinners on the wheels of his very pimped up ride is a construct.

We are here looking at an image of Tim Westwood, selected by him to go on his Twitter site - in itself this is interesting because it is possible to 'read' the picture - this is deliberate we are meant to be able to read it. Big Dawg is quite clearly telling us that he is part of Hip Hop culture and he needs a lot of Loo rolls.

This is Tim eating one of his favourite breakfasts, waffles. Note the products featured in the background, Aunt Jemma's buttermilk waffle mix and maple syrup. I am not sure if Tim set this photograph up deliberately or not - it is unlikely, but what is interesting are the objects and products that surround him, that he identifies with, that go some way towards describing him.

Tim Westwood is an extreme example but the question we are exploring is to what extent are we defined by the images that we consume - I have chosen to include objects and products because they could be constituent parts of a bigger picture/image. Tim Westwood clearlymakes very deliberate choices - his decisions are considered and very particular, he definitely surrounds himself with stuff that amplifies the image that he wants to project. Additionally we are thinking about the extent to which the cultural shift from words to pictures has enabled these readings and altered the way that we consume.

Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are examples of this shift perhaps, enabling anybody with a digital camera and home computer to quickly construct an open and globally available [visual] persona in minutes. Easy to maintain and update the online identity can be changed and evolved rapidly, adapting to trend changes describing recent experiences - projecting out to the world the individuals experiences/taste/preferences or favourite things. But perhaps more indicative of the desire to articulate a set of ideas visually, to project a visual identity, particularly for designers, is the blogosphere - this aspect of online culture has become one of the major ways that we can express ideas/opinions - show the world what we like/dislike - describe our unique visual perception - display our network of connections and monitor our/our ideas popularity in the process. It is an environment which encourages discussion and encouragement for the blogger and some more successful sites have become arbiters of taste providing the signpost to vistas of new visual experience for hungry followers.

And everything that we see is reproduced, our experience here is via the mediated image. All design practitioners, graphic designers, product and object makers and illustrators use the medium [and the subsequent mediated imagery] to talk about their ideas/interest/identity - the imagery that we select and 'publish' to promote these facets of our practice are, arguably, key - so, in the image saturated world, who regulates this process? I suspect that we are both passive consumer and image retailer in one and the proliferation of image in our culture is an inevitable consequence of the development of technology - will it shift our means of communication permanently and as designers and visual communicators what part do we/should we play in that process?

Image and Taste

So, Otto Neurath known primarily for the development of Isotype, a "method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form" and the desire to create a system of Universal Silhouettes in an attempt to produce a Visual Language that communicated Universally - his claim that word separate and pictures unite is an interesting one if, as David Crow suggests, the system is fundamentally a linguistic one and relies on the viewers ability to create visual sentences from the 'grapheme' like icons. This may seem unrelated to the broader argument of image and taste. However Neurath's project was an attempt to bypass the 'problem' of Art, its readability and the necessity for prior knowledge and [cultural] education to understand what was being said. Bourdieu [cultural capital] claimed that our ability to understand the image was not innate but the result of upbringing, so [good]'taste', the sensibility/understanding and acquired cultural capital, is something that can be learned/owned by those priviledged with access to the 'right' kind of experiences. This suggests that taste generally is dependent on social class? This also suggests that how images are read is dependent on class related sensibilities.

So taste:

This is the front page of the clothing company Old Town's web site. It is interesting to look at, Old Town specialise in sourcing old clothing patterns and recreate them - the garments invariably are re-makes of workers clothing although some are more refined with names like Fitzrovia.

The 'Fitrovia'.

When Stephen Hayward spoke at the last key ideas symposium he mentioned the 'aesthetisization of labour' - Old Town arguably typifies a taste for clothing that signifies something - it is retrospective, indicative of a 'lost' quality, perhaps.

The Front page of Labour and Wait's web site - a similar visual flavour - utilitarian, austere and institutional. At Labour and Wait you can buy things like this:

A school writing tablet?

I generally find myself liking the things at Labour and Wait, but it is interesting to think about why, as a shop it is an astute exercise in the curation of nostalgia - although it is a kind of nostalgia that is not really true, there is a apparent authenticity and 'quality' to the products, Breton sweaters, workers smocks, enamelled Japanese coffee pots, Brady bags, brands that have been around for a long time, we are conscious of the lineage....somehow, without really having an actual recollection or direct experience of them. Perhaps I think that I am making an educated choice, perhaps I respond well to the almost niche nature of the shop; I subscribe to its ambience and image because I think that it reflects well on me?

This is a spread from a book produced by Sara Fanelli - a very talented Illustrator. She has produced numerous childrens books - it is difficult to ascertain exactly how commercially successful these books are - however they represent a type of work that is the acceptable face of a world that is driven by the commercial 'bottom line'.

A spread from a book by Michael Foreman, a very successful children's book Illustrator - for the sake of comparison.

Taste is a contentious topic, particularly for designers. We spend time cultivating a sensibility, seeking out imagery/objects/things that we find interesting and inspiring, things that become part of our identity, beacons of our taste. Often guarding these 'things' closely, synthesizing and processing them and releasing them in to the world piecemeal, tantalising visual sweetmeats that describe a sophistication in our thinking. So the question is about how and why we make taste decisions. Kant claimed that our taste in images and things was innate, we would say genetic, nature not nurture, Bourdieu that it is a symptom of our experiences and education, nurture not nature - the latter is probably the popular and most commonly accepted view. Stephen Bayley, in his book 'Taste. The Secret Meaning of Things', claims that taste is a bigger social taboo than sex or money and that "making statements about taste expose body and soul to terrible scrutiny". So Thinking about Neurath's notion of division and unification and the issue of image and taste - it is interesting to explore the rationale that we employ [or not] for what we decide to like/dislike, perhaps to think about what sits behind those choices and whether images will ever unite.

Key Ideas: Image

Key Ideas: Image discusses our understanding of the image in its many forms; from its role as signifier of status and thing to be consumed to barometer of good taste and vehicle for communication. It is trite to say that images are everywhere – that their effect is unfathomable and that our experience of them is virtually uninterrupted so; Key Ideas: Image will attempt to address the multiple readings of imagery in contemporary society, exploring the image via three themes:

Image and Taste/ The social and cultural associations & readings of imagery, Image and Consumption/How we curate our identities through the consumption and creation of images, Image and Aesthetics /The role of beauty in image-making...

Image and Taste – The social and cultural associations & readings of imagery.

“Whereas the idealogy of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education”

Bourdieu, P. Distinction – a Social critique of the judgement of Taste, Routledge and Kegan, 1984, p.1]

We learnt in the ‘Object’ symposium that our terms of reference for the ‘readings’ of images and objects is borrowed from the study of language [linguistics] and signs [semiotics] and that images like objects are a ‘kind’ of speech. However Otto Neurath said that "Words separate" "Pictures unite". Neurath’s idealised/systematised modernism suggests a solution to the problem of qualitative readings of images, and an attempt to transcend the hierarchy of perception that is synonymous with Western Visual Culture. In a world where choice of image and matters of taste are part of complex social and cultural hierarchies do images really unite or do they atomize?

Image and Consumption – How we curate our identities through the consumption and creation of images.

“Images come to us more than we go to them” – [paraphrased from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.]

“The trend of all mass media is toward the visual – from the fairly recent replacement of the cash register in fast food chains and cafeterias with computers with icons and keys, to the proliferation of computer games”

Seward Barry, A.M. Visual Intelligence – Perception, Image and manipulation in Visual Communication, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997

Arguably the proliferation of transmitted and broadcast imagery has shifted the emphasis in mass culture away from the word towards the image.

To what extent are we defined by the imagery that we consume and in an image-saturated world how much choice do we really have?

Image and Aesthetics - The role of beauty in image-making...

Aesthetics [its numerous readings and misappropriations] and the idea of the viewer’s sensibility, or gaze, has been the subject of Artistic and Philosophical debate since the 18^th Century. Aesthetic, the word, can mean: "to perceive, to feel," and according to Immanuel Kant: "the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception."

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper

Bourdieu claims that our ability to read/appreciate/quantify an image or object is the result of ‘upbringing and education’ but Kant argued that there were Universalities – things that everybody agreed were ‘beautiful’. As designers and image makers we all have very different sensibilities, very different ideas of what is and is not ‘beautiful’, in short a unique and particular aesthetic.

Where does communication/function end and seduction begin? Who decides on beauty and is the notion of direct communication in commercial image making redundant?

The Camberwell Design Cluster Key Ideas - Object symposium will take place on Wednesday November 11th. Speakers include curator of the recent Telling Tales exhibition at the V&A Gareth Williams, artist Neil Cummings, designer Ralph Ball, design historian Stephen Hayward and editor of Crafts magazine Grant Gibson. The day will include a screening of the new film from the makers of Helvetica, entitled Objectified, which reveals the methods and people behind the design of everyday objects.

Utter nonsense

This film forms part of the cannon of BMW vanity projects. The notion is that you commission an eminent artists to 'paint' the shell of the car. It is described as a 'difficult and demanding job'. The rationale given by the artists is at best flimsy: 'I wanted it to look good in the daytime' for instance. It flags up an inability to describe the structure in thinking, the reason for the selected imagery seems arbitrary/random, perhaps with the exeption of David Hockney who wanted to take away the surface and see the inside of the car on the outside, an indication of his mawkish sentimentality about cubism and Pablo perhaps? These artists were commissioned because of their fame and renown at the time, a shrewd investment by the motoring giant no doubt. Beyond this the reason for the work is sketchy. Style over communication?

The true avant garde? Rhythm 23 by Hans Richter.



More extraordinary imagery from Alejandro Jodorowsky a polymorph genius/madman.

Touching Cloth

This is Holy Mountain. Truly avant-garde?

This is war in 2030 according to E McKnight Kauffer. This image was one of nine produced by McKnight Kauffer in response to 'The World in 2030 A.D.' written by the conservative politician FE Smith (Earl of Birkenhead). some quotes:

'In 2030 women will still use men as the media by which
their greatest triumphs are wrought; they will still be able,
by their wit and charms, to direct the activities of the
most able men towards heights which they could
never otherwise hope to achieve.'
ouch!

"If the next century is tranquil and prosperous,
life in 2030 will be adorned by cultured and urbane
amenities in excess of the pleasant accompaniments
which our contemporary civilisation can exhibit."



Witness the Future of the Avant Garde. This is the subject of our next key ideas debate.

'Early morning' [1825] by Samuel Palmer.
Vivid, intense and extraordinary, Palmer's sepia ink landscape drawings are his attempt to describe the majesty of creation. There is a manner of visual description that he is developing here, a stylised language that is both naturalistic and abstracted. The treatment of organic form is systematic, creating a 'patchwork' of texture/pattern/line. Unpicking and rationalising the information, representing it in a semi-abstracted way, stylising but communicating.

style over communication

“There has never been any design without style”

David Pye, in his book The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, explains that, “ shape, for us, is what gives individuality to things. All of us are extremely expert in recognising the individual. Character of shape in closely similar things, such as human faces and hands of writing, the individuality of shapes is the stuff of art, whether in design, painting, or any other field.”

We learn to become extremely sensitive to these differences.

These three houses are generic models of their particular time yet all stand out clearly as belonging to a particular style.

(Georgian terrace, Victorian terrace, 30s semi)

Indeed when people try to mimic style it can go strangely wrong

(neo Georgian house)

miffy from 'miffy's birthday' and 'miffy at the art gallery' by dick bruna

It can even go wrong when someone tries to imitate their own style old and new miffy, Mr Nencini would now direct you to examine the ears, shape of the head, feet and size and quality of the mouth. Where is the wabi sabi?

Shaker chair , boxes, tools and storage hooks

The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing) by all accounts a particularly modest bunch, it is suggested that they might become upset if buttons on their clothes got too exuberant, they designed their objects with a minimum of expression, yet still made furniture that stands out as designed by certain people at certain time period. You could argue that they do not have a style but a design methodology, it only became a style later when it was imitated. People buying into the look but with out the religion. Likewise with minimalism the tenets of which travel from art to architecture to some watered down expression meaning white walls rather than wallpaper

John Pawson London appartment 1984 & somewhere claiming to be a minimalist interior
So even though they tried to ignore style inevitably they created one. Some others are not so reticent

Here we have some work by the architect and designer Zaha Hadid, shoes for shoe label Mellissa, aura sculpture for the 2008 venice biennale based on the theories of palladio, interior shot of proposed opera house in dubai, Nekton stools. It seems though her style is her design method, so much so that its elasticity knows no bounds. In that she can move freely from architecture, art, furniture and clothing with the same fluid movements.

Her ‘style’ has become a self promotional tool, it is fairly recognisable and I guess if you commission her you kind of know what you are in for, she could be described as a vending machine in Alan Fletcher terms as mentioned in the design process debate, but maybe she has a point.

As Peter Dormer describes: “ artists do not need to be in tune with societies values (on the contrary much art criticises or subverts those values), but it is essential for designers to be in sympathy with the times, or to at least echo them, because much of the designers usefulness to a manufacturer is in his or her ability to identify current popular taste”




Barcelona chair Mies van der Rohe
Stephen Bayley believes that if you review the history of design and the opinions of those that have written about it, it seems that, there are agreements in approach to design.
And although the style of an object may differ, the items that stick out and become admired by successive generations have certain qualities in common, which he believes to be:
an intelligibility;
a coherence and harmony between form and detail;
an appropriate choice of materials to the function
and an intelligent equation between construction and purpose, with available technology exploited to full.

caveman club?

I suppose years ago a caveman/woman designed through necessity chose furs on their thermal insulation properties, picked up sticks and tested them for there ability to crack bison skulls
later we he/she was preoccupied in preserving food; less than 100 years ago preserving foodstuffs was still of primary importance to health, nutrition, longevity and ultimately survival.
Today our primary concern is not to find a solution to the method of preserving foodstuffs, but the colour of that solution, is it available in a brushed stainless steel finish
So what do you do? go for the solution you want, in the style that most suits your own.

style = choice (?)

MOD DOT COM

Eek. Comments to come.


Just stockpiling pictures for next week...

Techniques at a Party

By Saul Steinberg, subject of a current show at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Comments to come...

The Stylist

In three-dimensional design, the style over communication issue might be read as style over functionality, or usability.
Early industrial designers in America were dismissed as 'mere stylists' by their Bauhaus-influenced European counterparts because their role often involved only the design of the external skin of the product, and did not consider its internal workings. However, when functionality and complex components are reduced to a minimum in the design of, say, a fruit bowl, as opposed to a camera, the intuitive, formal aspects of design (“styling”) naturally become the focus of the designer’s activity. Conversely when the object becomes too complex for one person to grasp (as with car design) the division of labour results in the designer's role again being reduced towards the 'cosmetic'.

Our next subject for discussion is 'style over communication'. The 'issue' of style is a sticky one for designers of all hue's but particularly Illustrators. Those of you studying at Camberwell will know that the 's' word has become virtually outlawed because of its association with momentary trends/aimless uses of particular, fashionable technology/superficiality and a lack of rigour in process. We have chosen to supplant this word with an idea of visual language. Perhaps it is time to revisit this thing called style, the thing that we associate with individual designers and practitioners. The thing that [sometimes] helps identify ways of thinking/making/producing with a period in time and to see if it is indeed in conflict with an idea of communication or if it operates in tandem with the ebb and flow of visual language development.

DOG!
this is how you would answer [in English] if I asked you what this was. It is a sign and the thing that is signified is a four legged, domesticated, omnivorous mammal. But if I wrote the word dog on the screen and asked you to visualise something in response you would all construct a different set of images and visual associations!
This is the eternal paradox that is the subject of semiotics.

The Holy Trinity by Tommasso Cassai aka Masaccio is the first painting to use linear perspective. This was a system devised by Masaccio to create the illusion of depth in a two dimensional image. This painting has been the subject of much scrutiny by artists and designers alike because it also utilises a system of visual hermetics [apparently]. The notion is that if you look at the painting your eye is deliberately taken on a journey from one 'invisible' point to another. It is a contrived and deliberate tool used to make you see the image in a particular way, the 'hierarchy' of visual information, what is more/less important, is determined by the producer while the viewr passively receives information in a pre-determined way. It is visual communication/dictation/indoctrination.



This is an image depicting a scene from the memoirs of Babur, a Prince from Samarkand in the Uzbek province. The image seems free flowing/dynamic/organic and almost baroque. But if you look more closely it is systematic. There is a hierarchy evident in the arrangement of the figurative elements and the characters who appear are generic, stripped of individual personality. They represent something, arguably they are abstracted. This enables the informed viewer to read the image accurately. Again this is systematic, a language, an agreement between producer and viewer.

The Tangram is an ancient Chinese game which comprises of seven pieces derived mathematically from a square. The object of the game is to put the pieces together to form something recognisable. The pieces must touch but not overlap, this means that each shape retains its integrity but the whole forms a shape with a specific meaning. Like words in a sentence, almost.

"Words separate" "Pictures unite" claimed Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath was a designer/philosopher working in Vienna in the early 20th Century. His Universal Silhouettes form the basis for most of the ideographic wayfinding and information systems in the world today. He strove to achieve a "humanistic visual austerity" and claimed that "those who drew educational pictures as servants of the public and not as its masters" were superior in every way. He rejected Art for Art's sake. He attempted to develop a picture language as an alternative to written script. Paradoxically his ideas and work coincided with the development of a Universal spoken language, Esperanto.

Hello Miffy.
Miffy is Dick Bruna's most famous character. Thinking about the notion of a rationalised visual language and referring back to Norm there is something austere and efficient about the way that information/narrative/character is communicated in Dick Bruna's work. It is systematic. This poses an interesting question about visual language because this is most definitely a way of working that we associate with one person, it is his style or a personal visual language. What do we mean by 'personal visual language'? and is this a contradiction in terms?

Here are examples of signs from the British road signage system. They were designed in 1963 by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. This is a visual language that most of us are familiar with. The system uses key indicators that tell us how to behave/react to what we see, for instance imagery placed in a triangle is warning us of a potential danger or a situation that we need to be wary of and prepare for. Who decided that a triangle should mean such a thing?
This is an example of how we collectively agree on the meaning of something, it is an example of meaning becoming detached from seeing, of abstraction, of language.

This is an image from one of the remaining Mayan Codices, possibly it is familiar? The Mayans used ideograms [although this is a debatable description as the term grapheme or morpheme may be more accurate]to document their history/religion/science/prophecies/agricultural cycles/culture etc. The scribes who produced these works were said to be communing with the Gods often using an imagined spiritual realm as the frame of reference. The point is that this is an almost lost visual language, it is specific to a culture and therefore highly problematic for us to decipher but it is image based. How can this be if we aspire to work with a language that is universal? Perhaps visual language is inextricably linked with spoken language is inextricably linked with era or epoch?

I am interested in the complexities and paradoxes of visual language and the difficulties that we inevitably encounter when attempting to make images that communicate to a mass audience. Numerous approaches have been tried and various systems implemented with more/less success but the relationship between speech based language and visual language is a complicated one. Above is the cover image from Norm's book Die Dinge [The Things]. It is worth looking at. Norm attempt to rationalise the communication of visual things by developing a grid based system to reduce all things to visual icons/ideograms/heiroglyphs. Whether or not you agree with this approach is academic the fact remains that as human beings we know that imagery has the power to communicate in a much more sophisticated and powerful way than can be quantified by words but we wrestle with its inefficiency and ambiguity and its reliance on the interelationship between subjectivity and objectivity on the part of the viewer.
I said to David when we looked at this book, "look, its a speech bubble" he replied " or a wingmirror!"

There is another way to explore ‘language and design’ which is to consider what is meant by that word ‘language’. This word is sometimes used to describe pictures and objects but more often to describe something else. A quick Internet search gave 14 definitions of language most of which described the ‘something else’, for instance; “communication by voice in the distinctively human manner, using arbitrary sounds in conventional ways with conventional meanings; speech.” However there is another way of defining language, one that sets itself in opposition to the abstract and arbitrary nature of speech and is in concert with a means of communicating familiar to designers and image makers. It is one that has its roots in the earliest forms of communication and belies [or so some believe] deep rooted structures of ‘signs’ that we subconsciously use to say something to each other or make ourselves understood. “the system of linguistic signs or symbols considered in the abstract (opposed to speech ). “any set or system of such symbols as used in a more or less uniform fashion by a number of people, who are thus enabled to communicate intelligibly with one another.”

Quick, Quick, Slow…

The act of describing ones work, or more precisely the ideas behind it presents opportunities for how to pace your description. If we consider the typical novel, the author has certain expectations of how we, the reader might, encounter their work. More often than not sitting or laying down and dedicating a period of time of concentration to read the work. We can of course also consider the untypical novel, such as James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. In this the final chapter of the book has no punctuation. It forces the reader to change reading speed and create their own pauses and pacing. In terms of how this translates to printed language examples within design we can cast our vision back to the early 1990s and West Coast America. A certain David Carson. But how many of his immense army of fans realise just what he was attempting, behind the revolutionary graphic language?