SPACE – urban space
Social space – sites of power
Ways of looking and interacting in spaces
All urban spaces hidden are mechanisms of control and power the more you think about them the more you can spot them.
Leeds
Cant park wherever you like
Attempts to order space and control people within it
Adverts – billboards etc (try and effect how you feel, to encourage to consume and spending) businesses.
Dehumanising and regulating society.
Single point perspective – unique to western art, optimises a particular way of thinking about the world.
Quote 1
Jemima Stehli – strip
Henri Lefebvre (1905-1991) French intellectual Marxist sociologist
Revolution via everyday life
Influenced the situationist in 1950’s and 60’s
(Guy Debord)
Influenced student leaders may 68.
A theorist of radical movements.
A rambling revolution of provocations.
Creation and function of space – spatialisation.
‘the production of space’ 1974
The reality of space is defined by how people use it, not just a plan on paper.
Choose a social space in leeds.
‘Illusion of transparency’
The illusion that; 1) understanding is possible
2) the objective viewpoint exists and somehow enables understanding.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
seminar notes 10.12.10
2000 word essay – 18th feb 2011
Choose your own title - critical and theoretical, something you’re interested in.
pick a lecture or a visual communicator
think about things through a certain lens (feminist/Marxist etc)
pick an initial topic or title
chose something you’re interested in and links to your practise (i.e animation, film, photography) and a particular aspect of it.
Do a library search and select the books which will be most useful.
Plato – allegory of the cave – to teach us a lesson about how people interact with the world, slaves
Prisoners shackled facing wall, born in the cave, die in the cave.
Only reality known to prisoners is shadows on walls.
We only see what we are shown.
TV, tabloid newspapers – present a certain image of the world.
Metaphore – psychological imprisonment, only fed a one dimensional vision of the world.
People chose ignorance instead of reality.
Boudrillard.
Reality and representations of reality.
Hyper-reality – a condition of the modern age where images become a representation of the world.
Haddon Sundblom – illustrations for coke ads 1930’s, santa – what we think he looks like. Used to dress in green, red-branding.
Cognitive illusion – an illusion that appears in your brain.
A world of hyper-reality and simulation.
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) also a post structuralist
Structuralism – all culture is a language and can be read and analysed.
Post-structualism – its not as simple, more broad than that.
Society is obsessed with the spectacle of the world – produced by mass media, TV film etc.
Guy Debord – similar to Baudrillard.
Rather than being you, you are living the way you think you should.
Sign value – symbolic value, dominates symbolic exchange, more important than monetary value.
A copy of reality that makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and a copy.
The desert of the real – Baudrillards explanation of reality.
Charlie brooker.
Choose your own title - critical and theoretical, something you’re interested in.
pick a lecture or a visual communicator
think about things through a certain lens (feminist/Marxist etc)
pick an initial topic or title
chose something you’re interested in and links to your practise (i.e animation, film, photography) and a particular aspect of it.
Do a library search and select the books which will be most useful.
Plato – allegory of the cave – to teach us a lesson about how people interact with the world, slaves
Prisoners shackled facing wall, born in the cave, die in the cave.
Only reality known to prisoners is shadows on walls.
We only see what we are shown.
TV, tabloid newspapers – present a certain image of the world.
Metaphore – psychological imprisonment, only fed a one dimensional vision of the world.
People chose ignorance instead of reality.
Boudrillard.
Reality and representations of reality.
Hyper-reality – a condition of the modern age where images become a representation of the world.
Haddon Sundblom – illustrations for coke ads 1930’s, santa – what we think he looks like. Used to dress in green, red-branding.
Cognitive illusion – an illusion that appears in your brain.
A world of hyper-reality and simulation.
Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) also a post structuralist
Structuralism – all culture is a language and can be read and analysed.
Post-structualism – its not as simple, more broad than that.
Society is obsessed with the spectacle of the world – produced by mass media, TV film etc.
Guy Debord – similar to Baudrillard.
Rather than being you, you are living the way you think you should.
Sign value – symbolic value, dominates symbolic exchange, more important than monetary value.
A copy of reality that makes it difficult to distinguish between reality and a copy.
The desert of the real – Baudrillards explanation of reality.
Charlie brooker.
seminar notes 26.11.10
The gaze
Men act, women appear, men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at (Berger 1972)
Imbalance of power, power relation
Hans Memling – Vanity (1485) implies she enjoys looking at herself and enjoys being looked at.
Double power game
The nude becomes a genre of painting
Venus – goddess of love
Produced by men for the consumption of men
Ingres ‘le grand odalisque’ (1814) a western perspective on the east, weird and wonderful women to perve on.
The gaze that meets you is not a powerful one, usually a weak one
Doe eyed, look up as opposed to down, look of innocence or youth
Manet – Olympia (1863) a gaze that meets your gaze, more powerful, not in fantasy land, fantasy born out of reality
Manet – Bar at the folies bergeres (1883)viewing it in the first person, power, real.
Erotic appeal of paintings is it’s a one way gaze.
Jeff Wall ‘picture for women’ (1979) 1st person is the camera – we are seeing what the camera sees, an updating of the gaze critique.
Susan Sontag (1979) ‘on photography’ book
Image making is always about power, trying to show someone in a certain way.
Photography judges and aims to be judged.
Mechanical extension of the male gaze.
Images are produced in a male way, even if they are produced by men or women.
Commodity fetishism
A – B A finds B sexy and B finds A sexy too, very human.
A – C – B A likes B because of what B has/is wearing etc.
Knowing that you are constantly being scrutinised means you adapt your behaviour (panopticism)
Normalising – what you class to be ‘right’ is right.
Men act, women appear, men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at (Berger 1972)
Imbalance of power, power relation
Hans Memling – Vanity (1485) implies she enjoys looking at herself and enjoys being looked at.
Double power game
The nude becomes a genre of painting
Venus – goddess of love
Produced by men for the consumption of men
Ingres ‘le grand odalisque’ (1814) a western perspective on the east, weird and wonderful women to perve on.
The gaze that meets you is not a powerful one, usually a weak one
Doe eyed, look up as opposed to down, look of innocence or youth
Manet – Olympia (1863) a gaze that meets your gaze, more powerful, not in fantasy land, fantasy born out of reality
Manet – Bar at the folies bergeres (1883)viewing it in the first person, power, real.
Erotic appeal of paintings is it’s a one way gaze.
Jeff Wall ‘picture for women’ (1979) 1st person is the camera – we are seeing what the camera sees, an updating of the gaze critique.
Susan Sontag (1979) ‘on photography’ book
Image making is always about power, trying to show someone in a certain way.
Photography judges and aims to be judged.
Mechanical extension of the male gaze.
Images are produced in a male way, even if they are produced by men or women.
Commodity fetishism
A – B A finds B sexy and B finds A sexy too, very human.
A – C – B A likes B because of what B has/is wearing etc.
Knowing that you are constantly being scrutinised means you adapt your behaviour (panopticism)
Normalising – what you class to be ‘right’ is right.
lecture notes 25.11.10
The information or cybernetic theory of communication
Useful for – researching how as a designer your work makes effective communication
Main limitation is that it is a linear process and is not concerned with
Level 1 – technical accuracy, systems of decoding and encoding, compatibility of systems/need for specialist equipment or knowledge.
Level 2 – semantic precision of language, how much the message can be lost without meaning being lost.
Level 3 – effectiveness does the message effect behaviour the way we want it to? What can be done if the required effect fails to happen?
Systems theory
BARB – broadcasters audience research board
Audience catagories – individuals, adults, men, women, children, housewives – further subdivided by
age and social class.
Audience sub-categories, sub-demographic
Semiotics – three basic concepts
Semantics
Syntactics
Pragmatics
The phenomenological tradition – the process of knowing through direct experience, it is the way in
which humans came to understand the world.
Rhetoric
Hyperbole
Irony
Personification
Metaphor
Sociopsychological tradition – study of the individual as a social being.
Useful for – researching how as a designer your work makes effective communication
Main limitation is that it is a linear process and is not concerned with
Level 1 – technical accuracy, systems of decoding and encoding, compatibility of systems/need for specialist equipment or knowledge.
Level 2 – semantic precision of language, how much the message can be lost without meaning being lost.
Level 3 – effectiveness does the message effect behaviour the way we want it to? What can be done if the required effect fails to happen?
Systems theory
BARB – broadcasters audience research board
Audience catagories – individuals, adults, men, women, children, housewives – further subdivided by
age and social class.
Audience sub-categories, sub-demographic
Semiotics – three basic concepts
Semantics
Syntactics
Pragmatics
The phenomenological tradition – the process of knowing through direct experience, it is the way in
which humans came to understand the world.
Rhetoric
Hyperbole
Irony
Personification
Metaphor
Sociopsychological tradition – study of the individual as a social being.
lecture notes 11.11.10
Critical positions on the media and popular culture
Critically define ‘popular culture’
Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular’ culture and ‘mass culture’
Introduce cultural studies and critical theory
Define ideology
Interrogate the social function of the mass media and the extent to which the media constitutes us to society.
What is culture?
General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time.
A particular way of life
Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance
Marx
All societies are based around forces of production – materials, tools, workers, skills etc
Relations of production – employer/employee, class, master/slave etc
Superstructure
Social institutions – legal, political, cultural
Forms of consciousness – ideology
Fundamentally antagonistic
Ideology – system of ideas or beliefs (eg beliefs of a political party)
Masking, distortion, or selection of ideas to reinforce power relations, through creation of false consciousness
‘popular’
Well liked by many people
Inferior kinds of work
Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
Culture actually made by the people themselves
(book) Raymond Williams (1983) keywords
Inferior or residual culture
Popular press v’s quality press
Popular cinema v’s art cinema
Graffiti – popular culture
Folk archive
Early modernity – mass working class
Clear lines of class division
Working class and bourgeois became separated
(books) Matthew Arnold (1867) culture and anarchy
Leavisism – F.R Leavis and Q.D Leavis
Mass civilisation and minority culture
Fiction and the reading public
Culture and environment
Frankfurt school – critical theory
Institute of social research, university of Frankfurt 1923-33
University of Columbia, new york, 1933-47
University of Frankfurt 1949-
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer reinterpreted Marx for the 20th century, era of late capitalism
Defined ‘the culture industry’
2 main products – homogeneity and predictability
All mass culture is identical, anti thinking device.
Walter Benjamin – the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction 1936 essay.
Critically define ‘popular culture’
Contrast ideas of ‘culture’ with ‘popular’ culture and ‘mass culture’
Introduce cultural studies and critical theory
Define ideology
Interrogate the social function of the mass media and the extent to which the media constitutes us to society.
What is culture?
General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society at a particular time.
A particular way of life
Works of intellectual and especially artistic significance
Marx
All societies are based around forces of production – materials, tools, workers, skills etc
Relations of production – employer/employee, class, master/slave etc
Superstructure
Social institutions – legal, political, cultural
Forms of consciousness – ideology
Fundamentally antagonistic
Ideology – system of ideas or beliefs (eg beliefs of a political party)
Masking, distortion, or selection of ideas to reinforce power relations, through creation of false consciousness
‘popular’
Well liked by many people
Inferior kinds of work
Work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
Culture actually made by the people themselves
(book) Raymond Williams (1983) keywords
Inferior or residual culture
Popular press v’s quality press
Popular cinema v’s art cinema
Graffiti – popular culture
Folk archive
Early modernity – mass working class
Clear lines of class division
Working class and bourgeois became separated
(books) Matthew Arnold (1867) culture and anarchy
Leavisism – F.R Leavis and Q.D Leavis
Mass civilisation and minority culture
Fiction and the reading public
Culture and environment
Frankfurt school – critical theory
Institute of social research, university of Frankfurt 1923-33
University of Columbia, new york, 1933-47
University of Frankfurt 1949-
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer reinterpreted Marx for the 20th century, era of late capitalism
Defined ‘the culture industry’
2 main products – homogeneity and predictability
All mass culture is identical, anti thinking device.
Walter Benjamin – the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction 1936 essay.
seminar notes 5.11.10
Panopticism – idea of constantly being observed (self regulation)
Foucauldian
Shift in society from physical to mental control
Discipline aims to make us useful for society
Humiliated and punished in front of people – people were frightened, scared to misbehave
Docile body – a person who will take instruction, behave, conform to society, easily controllable, controls self
Foucault calls it - disciplinary society
Institutional power
Power is a relationship
Write a few hundred (200) words on an institution which you feel is panoptic with reference to at least 5 quotes from the sheet (use key foucaudian language)
Specialist knowledge – power to define what is normal.
Panopticism in contemporary society
CCTV
Facebook/social networking
Lecture theatre
Schools
Prison
Colleges
Workplace
Bars
Exams
Art gallery
Swimming pool
CCTV
1) Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random can operate the machine.
2) The perversity of those who take pleasure in spying
3) It is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour.
4) He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
5) He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.
Foucauldian
Shift in society from physical to mental control
Discipline aims to make us useful for society
Humiliated and punished in front of people – people were frightened, scared to misbehave
Docile body – a person who will take instruction, behave, conform to society, easily controllable, controls self
Foucault calls it - disciplinary society
Institutional power
Power is a relationship
Write a few hundred (200) words on an institution which you feel is panoptic with reference to at least 5 quotes from the sheet (use key foucaudian language)
Specialist knowledge – power to define what is normal.
Panopticism in contemporary society
CCTV
Facebook/social networking
Lecture theatre
Schools
Prison
Colleges
Workplace
Bars
Exams
Art gallery
Swimming pool
CCTV
1) Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random can operate the machine.
2) The perversity of those who take pleasure in spying
3) It is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour.
4) He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
5) He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.
lecture notes 4.11.10
Panoptisism
Punishment
Prisons
Deviant/normal
The panoptican – building (school, army, hospital)
Michael Foucault 1926-1984
Madness and civilisation
Discipline and punish – the birth of the prison
The great confinement (late 1600’s)
Houses of correction to curb unemployment and idleness
All people deemed to be socially useless – mad, tramps, criminals, unmarried pregnant women, drunks, unemployed – locked away in confinement.
Made to be useful – put to work, teaching them how to be a ‘normal’ person in society, repress devients.
Operated for a long time then seen as a gross error
Started to corrupt each other
Legislation to segregate them
Asylum – disciplinary techniques were different, if good were rewarded
New forms of knowledge emerge.
Specialists have super human powers to decide fate of people
The pillary – put in front of the people to have stuff thrown at them etc
Disciplinary society and disciplinary power
Panopticon – a round building, illuminated by windows, going to be a prison
Each prisoner shut away separately, everyone constantly visible – always being watched, self- regulate behaviour.
Panopticism
Allows scrutiny
Allows supervisor to experiment on subjects
Aims to make them productive
Reforms prisoners, helps treat patients
Open plan areas – easy to control, keep an eye on people, people constantly watched.
Google street
Everyone everywhere under surveillance and scrutiny
CCTV – classic example of panoptic gaze
Always stay in line cos you know your being watched
Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls – docile bodies
Self- monitoring, self- correcting, obedient bodies.
TV – classic way of creating docility
Bruce Nauman – video corridor pieces (late 1960’s)
Michel Foucault
Panopticism as a form of discipline
Techniques of the body
Docile bodies
Punishment
Prisons
Deviant/normal
The panoptican – building (school, army, hospital)
Michael Foucault 1926-1984
Madness and civilisation
Discipline and punish – the birth of the prison
The great confinement (late 1600’s)
Houses of correction to curb unemployment and idleness
All people deemed to be socially useless – mad, tramps, criminals, unmarried pregnant women, drunks, unemployed – locked away in confinement.
Made to be useful – put to work, teaching them how to be a ‘normal’ person in society, repress devients.
Operated for a long time then seen as a gross error
Started to corrupt each other
Legislation to segregate them
Asylum – disciplinary techniques were different, if good were rewarded
New forms of knowledge emerge.
Specialists have super human powers to decide fate of people
The pillary – put in front of the people to have stuff thrown at them etc
Disciplinary society and disciplinary power
Panopticon – a round building, illuminated by windows, going to be a prison
Each prisoner shut away separately, everyone constantly visible – always being watched, self- regulate behaviour.
Panopticism
Allows scrutiny
Allows supervisor to experiment on subjects
Aims to make them productive
Reforms prisoners, helps treat patients
Open plan areas – easy to control, keep an eye on people, people constantly watched.
Google street
Everyone everywhere under surveillance and scrutiny
CCTV – classic example of panoptic gaze
Always stay in line cos you know your being watched
Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls – docile bodies
Self- monitoring, self- correcting, obedient bodies.
TV – classic way of creating docility
Bruce Nauman – video corridor pieces (late 1960’s)
Michel Foucault
Panopticism as a form of discipline
Techniques of the body
Docile bodies
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