CTS LECTURE 6 - Postmodernism

Keypoint

• no more innovation and originality things often get
• repeated
• recycled
• quoted
• regurgutated
• modernism was the opposite of this
• doubt in modernism and its eutopian aims
• modernism designed around being 
• original
• experimentation
• interesting
• purity (work reduced to just paint in its purist form)
• to repeat or look back in a historical practice was bad

Postmodernism - characterised by:

• exhaustion
• pluralism
• pessemism

Modernism - expression of modern life/technology/new material/ communication

Postmodernism reacts to this

Origins.

• 1917 - Rudolph Pannwitz - spoke of 'nihilistic, postmodern men'
• 1964 - Leslie Fielder

• uses for the term postmodernism
• after modernism
• the historical era following the modern
• contra modernism
• equivalent to 'late capitalism' (Jameson)
• artistic and stylistic eclecticism
• 'global village' phenomena - culture, products together

'15 July 1992, 3:32pm - modernism dies, according to Charles Jencks

Modernism. The idea that technology is improving the world celebrating it

Postmodernism. Rejecting it - questions everything

• a reaction to the rules of the international style architecture

Park Hill in Sheffield  - prime example of modernist international architecture thats failed

AT+T building

taking old and new - jokey, more human

J. F. Lyotard

"the postmodern condition can be summarised as a total belief system - where you come from where your going to"

totalising belief system - "metanarratives"

result - crisi in confidence - don't believe in the vision of modernism anymore but now we have no vision

Bricolage

with the rejection of meta-narrative and replacement of mini-narrative - a turn to bricolage sees high art and low art crumble

Robert Venturi (quote on sheet)

Las Vegas to a modernist would be a degenerative society

Las Vagas to a postmodernist would seem destructive of modernist doctrines

Andy Warhol - nihilistic attack on the role of the artist - art that attacks arts meaning - rejection of the values of art

1984 - a new depthlessness - waning of affect

Marshall Mcluhan "advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century"

Post Martisits and Graphic Designers

- Memphis group

- Jenny Holzer - abuse of power 1983

- Adbusters - design anarchy issue 2001

INCONCLUSION

- a vague disputed term

- Postmodernisms attitude of questioning conventions (especially modernisms)

CTS LECTURE 5 - New Media and Visual Culture

Characteristics of new digital media

• Literacy
• we're living in the late age of print
• 'age of print' began around 1450
• Guten Berg' printing press
• Start of mass prints of literature
• people become educated
• people have access to news on a level they didn't have before
• print was invented - print develops - computers were invented - computers develop and printing becomes more obsolete
• the role of the reader - an emergence of the role of the reader and the decline of the author
• idea of the 'E Book' - challenges the concrete nature of the book and the power of the author
• technology such as 'E Books' are democratic allowing us to change the things and the way we read

Computer media

• the way we read has changed because of
• hypertext
• hypermedia - many media, pictures, sounds, etc.
• example - Wikipedia (in some ways we lose out from reading this)
• books allow us to slow down and lose ourselves
• Internet stimulates information and knowledge gives us a felling of power
• new technology changes society

Definition of mass media - Modern systems of communication and distribution supplied by relatively small groups...(inconclusive)

negative criticism of mass media

1. superficial, uncritical, trivial - attempting to be populous
2. viewing figures and measuring success
3. audience is dispersed
4. audience is disempowered
5. encourages the status quo (its conservative) resistant to change
6. encourages apathy
7. power held by the few motivated by profit of social control (propaganda)
8. bland

positive criticism of mass media

1. not all mass media is of low quality
2. social problems and injustices are discussed by the media
3. creativity

Artists use of mass media

• book - John A. Walker
• Oliviero Toscani Benneton campaign
• traded on images of unity
• traded on images of horror
• traded on images of war victims
• politics are not of social control but one of concrete effect
• key questions
• can art be autonomous? (exist on its own in a vacuum)
• should art be autonomous?
• Jackson - the epitome of art above mass media and social purpose
• Picasso - used mass media, exploited it
• Richard Hamilton - using mass media representing the modern but using mass culture
• people dismiss pop art in the same way they dismiss mass media
• negative effect is bombardment of images
• once repeated they lose their shock value.

Advertising Essay research

http://www.slideshare.net/mcmrbt/advertising-theory-299204

very useful slide presentation highlighting the key points of the relation between advertising and the emotional human response to advertising.

http://www.slideshare.net/mcurphey/advertising-theory

another slide presentation from the same site talking more about the idea of making something look beautiful or adding beauty to a product or business by using methods such as celebrity connection and communication to the advertised subject.

CTS SEMINAR 5 - Critical Positions on Advertising

Different stand point to the lecture, introducing advertising as a harmful social source manipulative but not in the sense that it becomes propaganda

• advertising is impossible to escape
• its everywhere
• instructions
• lifestyle
• ideals
• bill boards
• website popups
• sometimes forget adverts sometimes remember them but we're always affected by them
• probably the most dominant medium of the 21st century
• 25 million adverts, new prints, made every year
• KARL MARX (1818-1883) wrote communist manifesto - never wrote about advertising, wrote about capitalism but people have written about advertising as he would (Marxist analysis)
• Marxist cultural theorists would say "we live in a commodity culture"
• Judith Williamson quote - means people are measuring themselves and others by what they own or what they can buy - (you are what you own)
• we judge and categorise people on what they own
• superficial flimsy appearances
• shows peoples social values
• Commodities
• Mac/P computers - up to date with technology
• clothing brands - Topman, American Apparel - mainstream affordable - Dolce and Gabana not so much
• music genre - your taste in music is often the most defining thing about you in terms of the social connotations it brings, the messages it purports in the music and lyrics, the venues the music is played at - stereotypes are heavily tied to the type of music you listen to
• note: advert where people plug head phones into each other head and can hear what they listen to, think its BBC radio 1
• mobile phone brand and models - again up to date with the latest handset or contract, always evolving steadily
• the home you live in - if you had a large house with lots of space and niceties and luxuries you would be classed as well off and rich, possibly snobbish or spoilt whereas if you lived in a ghetto or council estate you'd be seen as trouble or a waste of space and not given much credit - judged on nurture instead of nature in a sense of the environment your brought up in
• how would we be affected if we took away all the commodities? 
• would we be more equal?
• would people be encouraged to be more productive?
• publicity/contemporary culture
• glamour and envy coincide
• one is glamorous when envied by others
• glamour is being envied or being able to afford not to be envied
• publicity id the vehicle that purports this situation
• advertising on the surface sells things
• advertising's symbolic association
• false needs - ads promote the false desire, they do this to keep selling to keep the system going
• example the Ipod - self perpetuating cycle
• how does commodity culture perpetuate false needs?
• aesthetic innovation - idea of needing something because it looks better
• planned obsolescence - e.g. circuit boards are design to fry after a certain amount of time
• novelty - having the newest toys, gadgets, idea that we are more up to date
• Commodity Fetishism 
• basically, advertising conceals the back ground 'history' of products. In other words the context in which a product is produced is kept hidden
• e.g. an object can be made sexy with the connotations of the situation they're used
• Reification - products are given human associations - personified
• boots are sexy
• mobiles are cool etc
• human bonding becomes connoted through things - flowers and chocolates on valentines day classic example
• we lose sight of the products worth
• e.g. Nike shoes - cost pounds to buy but pennies to make.
• advertisers say - advertising creates wealth for our world - beneficial for the economy
• encourages choices
• gives us the illusion of freedom - questionable, how free are you when your constantly being told your not good enough, you need this you need that, start doing this stop do that?
• adverts perpetuate stereotypes as much as they debunked them
• it becomes an ad-diction like a heroin
• cynicism advertising causing feelings of inadequacy and envy advertising things that are bad for you (sweets, junk food, alcohol)
• we never gain the happiness we see in the pictures.

CTS LECTURE 4 - Advertising in the Media

New media - media that works no through persuasion

• Robin Wright - '118, 188' 'the future's bright the future's orange'
• Wiliam Hesketh Lever (1851) auspicious year - founder of the lever bros - first to package sunlight soap - adding value to the product
• Newspapers - advertising boom, abolishment of tax's 
• Posters - golden age of the poster, colour printing breakthrough
• colourful innovative advertising was crucial to Levers success
• Sunlight Soap was amongst the first to go internationally advertised
• made promotions interactive
• collecting wrappers to send off for prizes 
• boat rides with banquets and people demonstrating how good the soap is - social promotions
• advocated truth - use it interestingly, the truth can be disarming
• used the truth wisely focusing on the ways of society and the stereotypes of the time
• psychology of advertising
• creating new customers
• new jobs in advertising
• NEW MEDIA MODEL
• viral advertising - advertisements being passed on via e-mail, word of mouth etc much like a virus
• Tever Beattie: ideas - says the biggest idea since the wheel is the Internet  because it allows smaller ideas to circulate
• viewer generate content
• diet coke and mentos YouTube video
• old spice viral ads
• oasis NYC promotional YouTube video
• Embrace life always where you seat belt YouTube video
• The Third Screen
• the mobile phone will become the most persuasive method of advertising
• the impact of new media is up for debate - it effects the creativity itself
• Hegarty and Beattie
• Giant Hydra video - mass collaboration, bringing people together to make lots of ideas and nurture them

THINK ABOUT HOW NEW MEDIA CAN AFFECT YOUR DISCIPLINE.