#magcd

Methods of Contexualising was a collaborative project between a few of my peers and I, other staff from UAL.

We were briefed on the possible routes we could take, and I selected the path of creating a more visually engaging version of a climate document. We were encouraged, via the brief, to take a look at not just legislation from governments, but also from organisations and higher education institutes, such as UAL. 

Expecting to find an innovative and creative plan to address climate change, we were disappointed to find out that the climate action plan had little to no substance, and the substance that was in the document, was buried deep within.  The UAL Climate Action Plan unfortunately was a greenwashed document. It was filled up with stories that were seemingly unrelated to climate change, projects that didn’t reduce carbon, and overall had no sense of urgency or desire to act on hard-hitting measures that could mitigate CO2 expulsion. Instead of pivoting to a more positive document, we decided to be the proverbial change we wanted to seek with the UAL climate action plan. We thought that if we could raise awareness of what’s going on within this action plan, we could put pressure on the powers that be to enact a change.  The zine “UAL: CLIMATE (RE)ACTION PLAN” is the result. By isolating key phrases and words we emphasised how empty the language used in this document can be.  We included scraps from the swap shop and GCD’s scrap pile and created 6 unique versions of the zine, emphasising sustainability and evidencing re-usage and re-imagination of trash. We printed on scrap paper from CSM’s publications workshop and in black and white, again emphasising that design can be made interesting when considered in a low-carbon way.

How are positions most effectively developed and demonstrated? Discuss this in relation to a creative practice or text. Then explain how this has helped you think about developing your own emerging position.

At the beginning of this project, I was interested in the transmittable value of objects through different mediums. Therefore I was experimenting with a story and how the meaning of the story changes with the way it is presented and who is watching it. Through this project, my intention was to almost imitate and highlight the role of media with news and its implication on societies. My initial experiments strictly dealt with design manipulation in order to create visibly different results in the narrative. Here the focus was on what I wanted my audience to see as a designer. I took the frames from the video where I tried to explain the story and used to images to create the story without motion but still depending on surfaces for expression of essences. Here I realised how the sequence and placement of images strongly grasped control in storytelling. Each image was a part of the story, at the same time it was also a new way to experience the story.

Through these initial iterations, I realised that I am playing with the meaning of the story. Each manipulation was stirring the variable that kept the meaning together. This manipulation was only successful because of the lack of trust in images to speak for itself. When I wrote down the story using words, it tightens the gap that was created by the lack of commentary between images. I deliberately tried to avoid rewriting the story in different styles because my intention was to treat the story as facts. Therefore I used the change of size, word blocking, colours and fonts to create change in the way the story is presented.

My position in this project kept oscillating between an ‘encoder’ and a ‘decoder’ as I found it difficult to decipher whether I wanted to stray away from the meaning of trying to decode its secrets. I also believe my position involves translating ideas and experiences into amplified and specialised forms. To describe my position I would borrow Jan Van Toorn’s word “he is the filter through which the published information has gone”.

Since this project revolved around directing the idea of unity and contradiction, I found it useful to refer to Akira Kurosawa’s film ‘Rashomon. I drew the idea of the use of contradictory storytelling and use of recognisable gestures and expression into my iterations using comic strips. This offered me the chance to create dialogues using panels and visual iconography/gestures and sequence. The panels were like a window that offered a specific viewpoint. Each panel resembles a gesture pointing to one another. Gesture being something without words that communicate something else. The rectilinear panel of comic strip breaks the flow of the story thus still leave space for the reader’s imagination. Later I added words with images to the scale-up the commentary between each element and to find whether words create as effective or better commentary than images. Can images scale up interaction with words or would the meaning be lost? Perhaps it is worth losing one meaning contained in words in order to gain several possible meaning contained in a gesture (within the image).

While working on these iterations, several aspects drew my attention. I understood that is facts are objective but the truth is subjective. Storytelling will always have ambiguity as there is a difference between the perceived and the actual. The choice of the medium is important as it determines the scale of interaction with the viewers.

Reference

Rashomon. (1950). Japan: Daiei Film.