Global Issues in Design and Visuality in the 21st Century

As you all know, visual presentations begin next class. As discussed in class, your presentations should be 5 – 7 minutes long and should touch on questions such as:

What was your block? What approach did you take? What was your thesis? What cultural dynamics did you use to describe it? What is your proposed change? Why did you propose it? What do you hope to have happen as a result?

Remember, this is an opportunity for you to share your research and your ideas with the class so be as clear, thorough, and concise as you can be.

THINK ABOUT THE PRESENTATIONS WE’VE SEEN IN CLASS THIS SEMESTER — Which ones were the most interesting and why? They were most likely the ones where THE PERSON DID NOT READ, made eye contact with the class, did not cram their Power Point slides with too much text, spoke clearly and slowly, stood up, and was knowledgeable about the information they were delivering to the class.

You will be graded both on the quality of your presentation (organization, timing, clarity, structure, quality of visuals) and the quality and originality of your proposed change. Per my rules stated at the beginning of the semester, if you READ your presentation, you will receive a ZERO.

Please bring your presentation on a disk – or email it to me once you have completed your presentation – for the class’s digital archive.

Filed under: Assignments

April 30, 2009 • 2:02 am 0

As mentioned in Sheila Kennedy’s lecture

Click on the image to visit the website and find out more about the illuminating project.

Filed under: Lectures

April 28, 2009 • 1:17 pm 0

Immigration controls tighten due to Swine Flu

Click the image to read a story in today’s New York Times discussing the tightening of borders around the world
due to Swine Flu, which ties into our recent readings into migration, transnationalism, and human rights.

Filed under: Contextual Reading

April 23, 2009 • 12:55 pm 0

Japan Pays Foreign Workers to Go Home

Click here to read a great and relevant article to our focus this week on citizenship and migration in the New York Times.

Filed under: Contextual Reading, Lectures, Readings

March 30, 2009 • 5:29 pm 0

An interesting excerpt by Nicolas Bourriaud on the Tate Triennial, which speaks to many of the theories we’ve been discussing to-date

picture-21

ALTERMODERN MANIFESTO – POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.

More generally, our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.

Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal.

The times seem propitious for the recomposition of a modernity in the present, reconfigured according to the specific context within which we live – crucially in the age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodernity.

If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities.

We are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing. Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image weave between themselves. Artists traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs, creating new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The artist becomes ‘homo viator’, the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.

Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history. This gives rise to practices which might be referred to as ‘time-specific’, in response to the ‘site-specific’ work of the 1960s. Flight-lines, translation programmes and chains of heterogeneous elements articulate each other. Our universe becomes a territory all dimensions of which may be travelled both in time and space.

The Tate Triennial 2009 presents itself as a collective discussion around this hypothesis of the end of postmodernism, and the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Nicolas Bourriaud

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain

Filed under: Resources

March 26, 2009 • 1:45 am 0