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Early on during our brainstorming meet up, we came across Jonas De Ro a digital artist who makes concept art, designs and illustrations. Although some of his work concerned a different type of future to what we wanted to explore, as I looked back through his work I noticed it did inspire us to some extent. This artwork expresses how we imagined our future to look like; rocky, harsh, dry, bare and barren.

This led me to think of other landscapes that replicate our imagined environment. The first that came to mind was ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’. The film was set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, although used both African and Australian landscapes, and was exemplified by digital effects in post -production, enabling it to portray a distinct graphic style. I can see a lot of similarities from this film to our imagined future, in not just the landscape but also the characters. Furiosa in particular embodies the strong minded and capable woman that would be present in our future.

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Here is our final publication! It is in the form of a magazine titled ‘dew’ and is set in an apocalyptic future- some 100 years from now. Our imagined future is a landscape that is dry and bare and where women are the leaders and majority of the population. Therefore our magazine speaks to this strong female audience and hopefully brings some joy to a desolate environment.

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In order to fully utilise the pdf medium and to take advantage of the internet, our magazine features a page full of qr codes neatly organised in a grid. From a design perspective, the codes themselves create a nice pattern on the page. However the qr codes lead to the biographies or official websites of significant female historical figures. Our magazine, being a publication supporting feminism, puts a focus on those women who have struggled through hardship such as Malala Yousafzai, Anne Frank, and Boudicca. Such women are relevant as opposed to women who have gained financial success because in our dystopic future, money is not as valued as action.

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Support Structures – Céline Condorelli A co-production with Support Structure: Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, and James Langdon

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Cofa1002, you guys are so lucky! Here is a little sneak peek of the absolutely beautiful book of Mitch Cairns, ‘the Readers Voice’, coming out in couple of weeks in conjunction with his show at Heide in Melbourne. It’s published by Gang Atelier. It is a wonderful example of the interplay between text and image.

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Studio exercise

Interruption of a signal- the teacher talking

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find a signal and interrupt it

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COLLABORATION

Studio activity 

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Group meeting #1

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RAINSTORMS AND BRAINSTORMS ⚡️💦

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They’re just eyes - Concept statement

What does it mean to be a human? I have asked many of my friends this very question and most of their replies lie within the realm of physicality. To be a human is to have reproductive organs and a face. I do not disagree but are we not much more than the fleshy vessels in which we live. I believe to be a human is to have experiences and emotions. As philosopher Descartes stated, “cogito, ergo sum”; “I think therefore I am”.

Assessment 1 was primarily inspired by Ridley Scott’s 1989 film Blade Runner, wherein I used the faces of the Replicants and recontextualised them by compositing them in order to make their ‘average’ face, symbolising their marginalisation within that society. Subsequently this stimulated me into exploring the notion of social differentiation and even delving into the science of taxonomies, and the effects it has on perceptions of being a human. I considered the work of photographer James Mollison, who frequently explores typologies. I mainly looked at his James & Other Apes series, and I was struck at how soulful and expressive the eyes of the different apes were, similar to ours. My first experiment thus had me re-drawing their eyes in an attempt to recontextualise them and find new meaning from the new medium. I was reminded of natural science drawings and wanted to take a more scientific approach to my final work.

For my second experiment I purchased some polyfoam balls because I wanted to try my hand at making eyeballs. I wanted to be consistent and still focus on the eyes being a fundamental part of our physicality and emotionality. However it was my paint palette which swayed my approach. I always admire the randomness and the marble texture of a paint palette and I was drawn the intricacies within the natural design. I found that is similar to the design of our irises which are like our fingerprints, in that they are unique.

My final artwork is thus more expressionist, as I wanted to highlight this uniqueness by doing a pastiche of the traditional abstract expressionist style. I honed in the patterns found within the irises and used bolder coloured paint to almost evoke explosions, or the sea, or other memories which are only seen through our eyes. It is also conceptual because I wanted to explore the idea of every eye being different, and then imagining the amount of people which have existed up until the present. Then consequently thinking of all the different irises which have ever existed, for example, what would Shakespeare’s irises have looked like and what have they seen?

Additionally, my use of acetate paper allowed for light to pass through the paintings and create interesting shadows. This is also significant as it is a representation of the physical function of the eye but the multiple shadows are a result of the multiple light sources in the room I was working in. It was an accident yet it seems to describe perfectly how we see the world as humans; we see numerous things at once and must process them at once. 

They’re just eyes aims to explore how , at a certain point, a rudimentary thing such as our eyes can represent that we are more than just a bunch of matter.

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Final artwork

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Final artwork

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Experimentation Capturing the texture of the iris using paint on acetate paper.

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Experimentation

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Experimentation Trying to capture the textures within our irises

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The average human face

As I have highlighted in a previous post, the use of composite photography (layering different images together to create one) has allowed us to determine the ‘average’ face. Such a method has been used in criminology whereby it was thought that compositioning the faces of criminals would produce the ‘average’ face of a criminal. It did not work but the fact that this logic existed interests me.

Nowadays, facial averageness is a field which is still relevant (I think). Studies have shown that people find ‘average’ faces to be the most attractive. There is an evolutionary theory called Koinophilia which offers an explanation into people’s sexual partners. In a nutshell/I will try my best to explain it concisely, people choose those with a minimum or no ‘unusual’ features and by natural selection, those with ‘unusual’ features are eliminated and so those ‘usual’ features become the norm and hence people like those who are average. Please, wikipedia it if you do not understand. 

This research is an effort to understand our habit of labelling or categorising things, and the effect it has on our society. Most of the time it is for scientific purposes or to create sense in our world’s chaos, and is supposed to be objective. However don’t you find that these typologies often foster negativity and prejudice? That the science removes the individuality of everyone? We can get the ‘average’ face but can we get the average human? Which also brings the question of what is a human? I have now come full circle.