#l4practiceinaction

The Image Reproduced

 Author of On Photography, Susan Sontag claims that ‘photography has become almost as widely practiced an art as sex and dancing.’ We have reached the point where photography has overtaken the two ‘arts’ as mentioned. Photography is practiced as a social rite, as a defence against anxiety and as a tool of power, these are some of the motives for photography that Sontag writes about.

 Photos are used to justify, or provide evidence of something and can also be incriminating. Stonag stresses the effect photography has on our experiences of reality, we can see something before we experience it. Photography is a way of capturing reality, which is unattainable, by freezing it. You cannot hold reality but you can hold a printed photograph or one displayed on a phone.

 Happy Mondays

 The word ‘rave’ today is usually associated with a large dance party featuring performances by DJs. However in the 1980s the word ‘rave’ was used to describe the subculture that grew out of the acid house movement. Rave parties could last for hours, sometimes days with thousands of people participating. Acoording to Nav Haq, these parties were often illegal and took place in open air on common land or farmland in disused spaces, such as former factories, warehouse, squats or nightclubs. Rave is also used to describe the many genres of electronic music associated with the movement, including acid house, techno, hardcore and jungle. Rave culture wasn’t just about the music, it brought with it a whole new aesthetic that pushed boundaries between music and visual culture. Rave culture is largely overlooked academically, despite the fact that it has had such a lasting impact on art, design, fashion and the wider culture as a whole.

 Surrealism

 Surrealism is an artistic movement from the early 1900s. the movement still have a huge influence on visual art and culture today. There are 5 main aspects of surreal art: automatism, eroticism, the uncanny, metamorphosis and the surreal landscape. The word surreal is defined in the dictionary as having qualities of surrealism and bizarre and dreamlike. ‘Bizarre’ and ‘dreamlike’ are words used to describe both traditional and contemporary surrealist work.

 Surrealists were particularly influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, who used a variety of techniques, which he believed tapped into a person’s subconscious, bringing underlying truths to light.

 Throughout history, the human figure has always been a key centre of attention for artists, with particular interest in the female body, which is often depicted in a highly eroticised way.

 Cyberspace

 The word cyberspace was first used in 1982. The definition of cyberspace is ‘the notional environment in which communication over computer network occurs. The word ‘notional’ suggests that cyberspace is not a real or tangible thing. The internet is visualised as many different things. Some people see it as a series of wires or pipes, a 3D space-like network or a computer or phone screen. The internet is a particularly difficult thing to visualise because it is a strange combination of both physical and conceptual things. There is a physical structure the internet relies on, being the wires, cables, fibre optics and hardware, but these items do not make up the internet itself, they are more of a skeleton, which allows it to exist.

 Ruins

 ­­Ruins have been represented in paintings from the 16th century, they usually provide a backdrop for some religious or historical event taking place. By the 17th century, the fondness for ruins seemed to increase as they started to appear a lot within poetry, plays and literature and provided a backdrop for many plays including ones by Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster.

 It was in the 18th century when ruins came into the forefront of English culture, appearing not only within art and literature, but also within garden design and architecture, this is known as folly. Folly is a term for an artificial ruin, or a building made with no purpose other than decoration to be made to look older than it actually is.

 In the 20th century, particularly in the years that followed World War 2, there was a drive across Europe and America for urban regeneration, and many neighbourhoods were completely demolished to make way fro new, modernist buildings. The modernist structures and grand urban plans relied on the ruination of many historic buildings.

 The Portrait