This video is a really cool inspiration for our sound design brief due to how effortless and innovative it is. First of all, the video is completely on brand with COS through the classic elegance of it and how sophisticated the overall feel of it is. I really like the way they use everyday objects to become the sounds of the outfits for example: opening umbrellas when the lady popped her collar up and pressing bubblewrap when clicking on buttons. As a result, the video feels almost like ASMR, it is satisfying to hear and watch whilst also making the clothes seem very high quality and desirable. Overall, this is a unique, slightly comedic but altogether tasteful advertisement for COS.  

This will definitely help me with the sound design project as the video will be a reminder to me of thinking about using everyday noises as a mask for completely contrasting scenarios as a way to be creative and 'tongue 'n cheek'. 

Hito Steyerl is a German film-maker whose main focus is on the complexities of the digital world, capitalism, and art, alongside, questioning the way artificial intelligence impacts society. In her video 'How Not To Be Seen', Hito ponders upon how possible it actually is to be unseen in an age of over-visibility. She touches upon themes of surveillance, the way old places, such as a rubbled Californian desert where the US airforce would calibrate their surveillance cameras,  are replaced by newer and more advanced methods. Moreover, the combination of performances and already shot scenes of low quality provide a satirical atmosphere which, as a result, mocks the society we live in and how silly it all appears to be making an instruction video on how to be unseen. 

The DIY, satirical and sarcastic tone throughout the video through the Siri-like narrator, lighthearted music and basic typography makes this piece feel unique as the artist doesn't take herself so seriously, despite talking about topical subjects. I found it super weird the way in one scene, people with boxes on their heads were running around, replicating the image on the screen. Despite zoning out when watching the video, due to the monotonous tone of the narrator, it is still really fascinating watching the video and wondering what was going through Hito Steyerl's mind when she made it as it is so bizarre and niche. 

I found these posters in the book 'PLAKAT AFFICHE POSTERS'. 

The one on the left is a offset printing film poster made by Jan Tschichold in 1927 and the one on the left is a Lithography exhibition poster by Kurt Schwitters in 1930. I was really compelled by these posters due to the simplistic yet bold designs of them both. German graphic design has always intrigued me and these posters are an example of how tastefully innovative it can be through such a minimalist concept, abstract and almost architectural form. I feel like these posters may have been part of the start of a modern take to design and I love the conceptual detail of the woman's face appearing from the mathematical lines. The cinema poster feels very daring and exciting whilst the exhibition poster has connotations of mystery and a variety of shape. Even though these posters are from the late 1920s/early 1930s, I feel this style has remained timeless and is still appealing  and used with certain designs today for example: for album covers. 

Josef Suden was a Czech photographer known as the 'Poet of Prague' due to living there and dedicating his whole life and art to the city. He was known to approach his photography with pictorialism  and liked to focus on objects, the streets of Prague, mirrors and reflections, as well as this, he took a lot of inspiration from the soviet era in the 20th Century. 

In this photo, the different textures of the different glasses, the egg and the glossy surface add exquisite dimension to the final outcome providing a classic yet absurd feel to the photograph as they are two objects you wouldn't really put together. Sudek enjoyed simple objects and loved the way light could bring "dead objects to life" which is evident through the carefully placed composition of the objects are alongside the way the different glasses have different depths, for example the glass with the rectangle patterns has vivid visuals through the way the patterns create a repetitive reflection whereas the taller glass feels more softer and simple. 

Overall, I really like how simple the photo is whilst also projecting feelings of solidarity, abstractness and intimacy; I feel that with my dark/light image I tried to follow the same theme through focusing on light and combing different textures together in dynamic compositions. 

Chiharu Shiota is a Berlin based artist who uses string as a form of feeling through her art. "It is like a feeling. The string is tight or tangled or cut. It’s like a relationship from human to human. It’s a mirror of my feelings." 

Having experienced cancer at a young age, Chiharu placed a lot of emphasis surrounding this and focused a lot of her work around life and death. Her past work tended to involve a lot to do with black yarn, however, in this piece 'Dialogue with Absence' there is a noticeable where she mentions how the structure of her work went from life to death to now death to life. Shiota's decision to use such a bold red colour was to create connotations such as flesh and blood, being alive. 

I really like the use of string in Chiharu Shiota's work, there is this sense of intricacy and delicacy that still holds an element of rough texture to it. The colour is extremely striking and straight away gives the audience ideas of what the connotations of the piece are most likely to be about. I would like to use red string in my piece to represent period blood, additionally, I feel embroidering it into my piece also holds historical context; where embroidery was traditionally a skill marking a 'girl's path into womanhood', as well as, their social ranking in society in 18th Century England. It kind of feels like a way of reclaiming that sense of empowerment, using embroidery to create a feminist statement rather than submitting to expectations of what a woman once was judged upon. 

Francesca Woodman has always been a key influence of mine within photography. Her style and work fascinates me and inspires me to go down a similar eerie yet minimalist route. 

Woodman was best known for her black and white, enigmatic self portraits often at a really slow shutter speed capturing only the silhouette and frantic movement of her body. “Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner …?” quoted by Francesca Woodman. Most of Woodman's work was shown in exhibitions such as, Life in Motion: Egon Schiele/ Francesca Woodman in Liverpool Tate, after she committed suicide due to having a very troubling creative career and difficult relationship with photography. I personally think this may be due to the connection between such a dark and sombre life story reflecting through her haunting photographs.  Overall, her work proves and captivates the idea that less is more, in the photo above we simply see a black and white film photo of her moving across the room yet it has endless and open narratives that the audience could interpret. 

This installation caught my eye the most for the SAY IT LOUD workshop as I like how subtle yet impactful it is. It's not something that is forcefully in the viewer's face but it is inviting and has interesting composition. It was made by two graphic designers, Conor and David, who did it in dedication to the celebration of ampersands, '&' alongside etymology - the study of words and the way in which the meaning of them changes overtime in society. 

The mind map was the ultimate starting point to our research overall. We established with each other what graphic communication design meant to us and we heavily focused on the connotation of translating a message to an audience through visuals which led us to really question and build on this idea when creating the alphabet.

Barbara Kruger, advertiser, collagist and conceptual artist,  is an innovator in graphic communication due to her affirmative and loud captions combined with  distinctive typography; "Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text".(*1)  With the frequent use of personal pronouns (I, Me) Kruger creates direct statements targeting viewers to question themselves and also relate to her work.

Her art 'I shop therefore I am', as shown above in the photo,  is a play on off of French philosopher Descartes' 'I think therefore I am'; a quote that holds an enormous significance universally. Kruger replaces the word 'think' with 'shop' and so therefore shifting the whole message heavily on to the theme of consumption, making us question our indulgences in materialism and how we have become what we own. With the background of the text being quite subtle and dark, this allows the bold text to stay purely the focus of the artwork and speak for itself. The message was placed on top of bags, t-shirts and other products of consumption to tie in with the whole theme of consumerism. 

It is ironic how Supreme's typography is a replica of Kruger's famous style considering they themselves are an incredibly materialised clothing brand that is heavily logo based. Overall, from learning about Barbara Kruger's work, it has shown me how simplicity can be a bolder and more significant way to translate a message across to an audience than creating overly busy and loud artwork. 

1. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/barbara-kruger-1443, Tate, Barbara Kruger, Website

Carlos Amorales is an artist whose practices include animation, drawing, installation, video and performance. His work 'Life in the folds' presents an encrypted alphabet that Amorales uses to tell the story of an immigrant lynching in Mexico:

"It’s the story of a lynching – when a whole country encircles someone and lynches him – it is the story of a family of immigrants that arrive in a country and everyone starts speaking badly about them and they lynch them… This is an example of what I believe is happening here: it is a moment in which the State is becoming so weak that institutions are losing their role. This transformation that we are seeing, I don’t think it’s just a Mexican problem, it’s a global problem."*1

 Despite his work being incredibly cryptic, Amorales depicts a truly reflective, dark and personal story through themes of European and Mexican culture, censorship vs expression. 

When 'Life in the folds' was shown at the Venice Biennale, the overall installation not only included prints of the alphabet and physical sculpture but also video and sounds. I really like this fine art and immersive approach to such a simple concept like the alphabet and the thorough relations of  to the social and political climate in Mexico adds a whole new layer of depth that an ordinary person would never usually consider when coming across the English alphabet. If I was to ever develop the alphabet we constructed as a group, I would definitely consider more and feel very inspired by Amorales' intricate approach which pulls in so many different art forms into one minimalist design which, as a result, elevates a set of symbols into something a lot more culturally and conceptually important. 

1. http://myartguides.com/posts/interviews/life-in-the-folds-carlos-amorales-unveils-his-project-for-the-mexican-pavilion-at-the-venice-biennale/,  Life in the Folds: Carlos Amorales Unveils his Project for the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Mara Satore, 2017, online

Designer Yuliana Gorkorov has studied several alphabets including  Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic. She was particularly interested in the way they all share historical origin and the way they can be reunited into the same symbols when shifting/rotating the form of different letters in the different alphabets. Gorkorov created her own universal alphabet through world-wide symbols of different foods/objects/nouns where the names of them all route from similar sounds/form of lettering in order to become a common tool for multicultural communication.

Despite her alphabet seeming more on the commercial side than art/conceptual side, I really like the idea behind it and the process of tracing the alphabets back to layers and layers of history and origin, similar to Carlos Amorales' work. When creating our alphabet in groups, I thought back to this Ted Talk and the way Yuliana demonstrated rotating and subtly tweaking the letterings of different alphabets to form very similar shapes. This inspired me to input the idea of creating symbols that at first seem super different and foreign to the English alphabet, but when deeply analysed, has traces back to similarities of the lettering.

In the process of making our own alphabet, as mentioned above similar to Yuliana Gorkorov's and Carlos Amorales' work, our aim was to create something abstract and minimalist with subtle references to the English alphabet. It was definitely a trial and error procedure as we created loads of different options for each letters to see what suited best for each one but also what would make sense as a whole alphabet in a sense that each letters weren't too similar or too different to each other whilst also maintaining the same aesthetics. 

We went for circles and lines as it reminded us of a similar style to hieroglyphics or even moon readings; older ways of translating messages that have vast historical contexts.