Summer is Coming...

And although mine will be filled with graduate course work, it is a reprieve from the multitude of tasks I am normally charged with during the year. It is my respite and retreat from a busy home/work life, a way to recharge my batteries and a time to reenergize my brain. I am looking forward to it and to meeting all my classmates with whom we will think, drink, and make merry! Cheers to a great summer session! :D

VLVC wk 15 - Team Lesson E: Consumerism

What is Consumption?

I spend the majority of the year having my students explore a big idea of Identity. We explore and investigate various facets of what it means to be an artist and how we construct our own identities. For this unit, I would like to introduce the subtopic of ‘Consumption’ and have my students investigate how we individually consume, how we are targeted as consumers, and how we make an impact on our world as consumers. In addition, I want my students to examine the role artists take on when tackling the concept of consumption in our world. How do certain artists and designers raise questions about consumption and consumerism through their work?  How does the role of consumer define our individual identity? How does it inform a collective identity?

For this lesson, I would like you to watch the Intro to the Art:21 episode Consumption created by the artist Barbara Kruger. Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist, designer and writer. In photograph-based images she examined the representation of power via mass-media images, appropriating their iconography and slogans and deconstructing them visually and verbally. How does this intro reflect Kruger’s knowledge of advertising and media? What tools does she use to turn the viewer into a consumer?

Your next guest speaker is the artist Chris Jordan. Watch his TED talk titled “Turning Power Stats into Art.” Photographer Chris Jordan trains his eye on American consumption. His 2003-05 series "Intolerable Beauty" examines the hypnotic allure of the sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day: cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods.

His 2005 book In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster is a chilling, unflinching look at the toll of the storm. And his latest series of photographs, "Running the Numbers," gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like "We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes" become a chilling sea of plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.

"As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us."

  ~Chris Jordan on Bill Moyers Journal

The last piece of your assignment is to think about what is it that you consume? Using a camera, document what you consume for a period of time you set for yourself such as 24 hours, 3 days, or a week. Share with us what you consumed. Reflect on the reasons for your consumption and if you were persuaded by any outside influences to consume (or not consume.)

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I find it completely interesting that my classmates photographed what they ate. I was think not only of what I ate in terms of what I consumed but also what type of products I bought, and what type of visual media I consumed. I wonder if that is because I set the constraint of recording the consumption with a camera. What would it have been like if I just said 'recorded', I wonder. 

Here is my post:
My record of what I consumed:
Consumption Wednesday

 As I was participating in this week's lesson, I realized I should have included as part of our activities defining the word "consumption" (which I did as part of my unit.) I found it interesting that each person's response centered around eating. In my mind not only do we consume food, but we consume media and visual imagery. So in my photo journal, I tried to record a little of the media I consumed in a day. It was kind of hard to remember to photograph everything.

VLVC wk 16 - Project 4: Multimedia Composition

As a culminating project for this class, you will adapt a short piece of literature (a poem, oral myth/tale, short excerpt from prose/script, etc.) into a digital, multimedia composition that incorporates images, sound, and music. In the spirit of Hugo, the final “film” should demonstrate mastery of various visual literacy concepts learned throughout the semester and capture the “magic” of visual culture.

After completing your Multimedia Composition, please write a short (~500 words) Written Reflection that discusses your experience in completing this project and participating in the course itself. Be sure to cite areas of growth, mastery, limitation, and further research interest in the realms of visual literacy, visual culture, multimodal communication, and visual pedagogy. 

I don't think it was until I was putting this piece together that I realized just how much I have  absorbed some of the concepts we learned early on. I've been very conscientious of thinking about who is being represented and who isn't, thinking about how media is targeting a specific audience. However, I didn't realize how much I've been utilizing the concept of abstraction, semiotics, connotation / denotation and the idea of critical literacy. I've really been looking at the images around me with a much more critical eye. I guess that really does go to support why many of us believe that teaching visual literacy is an important part of any student's education. It has made me a much more literate citizen. I feel like a blindfold has been lifted, and that I'm just a little bit smarter because of it - more on my toes, so to speak.

I have to admit I'm still a little baffled by the Orwell article. I tried going back to read it again after getting a few more lessons under my belt, but I'm still not convinced from his examples that superfluous language is bad. I see it as a matter of style and not incompetence or the degeneration of society. But I tend to go on sometimes and believe in the idea of nuance.

I can tell after doing this project I still need more exposure to the ideas of Van Leeuwen, I'm not sure how well I was able to consciously incorporate them. However, what I did realize was that I have gotten better at selecting images for meaning past the obvious, and at selecting ways to present the images so there is more meaning (i.e. deciding what to leave out or how to manipulate a person's reaction to an image using certain elements such as value or spatial relationships). I found my team mates's reading assignment from the Logo Design Workbook extremely beneficial in crystalizing some of Van Leeuwen's concepts in something concrete. I was also able to apply many of the skills from class in connection to that assignment. 

Although not an objective of the project exactly, I still need to work on my iMovie skills. This was the very first time I had composed something using iMovie as a tool. It is a bit rough, and something I would like to continue to use to get better at. I'm not sure I know what it is capable of yet. I would also love to get a bit better at the music connection. Music has never been my strong suit, although I'm a big listener, I have never been a composer (confession: never played an instrument and can barely read music to sing it.) I would love to take and could really use a class in musical literacy! And I can't tell if it is because I tend to think in pictures if it comes natural, so its hard to break down my thinking, or if I'm deficient in the area of multimodal communication. Is it because the lines blur so easily between genres and that they so naturally overlap, intersect and intertwine that I think I am unable to define them? Perhaps so.

I am still fascinated by semiotics, though I feel I have only scratched the surface of a very complex and deep pool. Sometimes I feel as if I am riding the waves, taking it all in, and other times it is as if I am about to swallowed by a gianormous wave. And there still so many swell's to ride. I am very interested in the semiotics of space as well as social semiotics in general. And of course, as an art teacher, I am very interested in the area of semiotics that looks at the way we choose to represent something.

I have a feeling that there are ways that the content of this course has seeped into my brain that I am completely unaware of still and will continue to be affected by them here on out. I almost wish there was a part two to this class so we could continue to dive into these great ideas, go deeper, and reinforce the use of these concepts.