#visual essay

It asks: how does the production of image generators intersect with copyright, and what are the lenses these image generators view labor under?

Read it here

A few pages from it:

Although candid photography is considered lame and overdone by some, there is something incredibly beautiful about being able to show my friends themselves in their natural state. Completely unposed, caught off guard, yet always breathtakingly beautiful.

I struggle very much with my own self image. I find myself unable to look at photos of myself unless I am wearing makeup , posed and sucking in my gut. Yet, I exist in front of others as I am, unposed and unprotected. The dichotomy between our natural selves and our artificial presentation is fascinating, and also terrifying.

I can only hope my friends see the beauty in me the same way I do them 🦉💭

Anyway …here are some fire photos I have taken of my friends :3 I love them all so much!!!

Before you scroll… listen to this.

PART 4 ~ FINAL PIECE

CLICK HERE FOR FULL SKETCHBOOK AS GOOGLE SLIDES DOC

After pitching my idea , I decided I could push it further. I wanted an element of "exposing" the truth in my work. I wanted to spread the message that we should look past distractions and focus on the real issue , which is the class divide. I took my previous idea and I built on it by turning it into two separate poster designs. The concept behind these posters was that one was a funny and silly conspiracy poster and the other was an important political message. The conspiracy poster would be pasted on top of the political poster , to try and distract you from it and that you'd have to rip it down to expose the truth beneath the distraction. These posters were designed to be put in public and interacted with. I have shown the development of the designs for this piece below

I then printed out my designs and put my idea into action on a public wall. I have included a video of me preforming the interactive part of this work below and in my google slides sketchbook.

EVALUATION

In my visual essay “Conspiracy theories as distractions” I explored the concept of brief 2 and took several internet journeys using the “what was I looking for again” method. This led me to the subject of conspiracy theories. At first, I was just interested in monsters like bigfoot, aliens and the Loch Ness monster as well as the communities that believed in these theories, but after some research I began to find stranger and stranger conspiracy theories. I noticed in my research that some conspiracy theories played a role in politics so I decided to also use conspiracies to spread my own political message about the class divide. My idea was to use a form of public art to take advantage of people's innate fascination with conspiracies and the supernatural and divert their attention to the real political issues. I explored this idea through a series of sketches and research. My final piece was an interactive public poster in which the viewer is intrigued by the funny conspiracy image, only for it to be ripped away to reveal a shocking fact about the 1%. This was a comment on how conspiracies can be used as a distraction against important issues, it also helped me spread my own views on the 1%. Overall I feel happy about my final outcome, but if I were to improve it I would try and have my two poster designs feel more connected visually and thematically. Further, I'd like to find a way to make the poster more obvious that it is an interactive piece of art. I would have also liked to have made more and put them in different locations. In my project as a whole, I think it could be improved by more specific research into the psychology behind conspiracy and by finding more examples of when conspiracy affected politics which I could have done if not for the time limit and my trouble with procrastination. Procrastination is a common issue for me but I found this project especially challenging due to the encouragement of the social aspect of the briefs due to my social anxiety, but in the end I found a way around it by changing the brief I was working on. In the end , I enjoyed this project and learnt a lot about online research and the creation of a visual essay.

PART 3 ~ PITCH PRESENTATION

CLICK HERE FOR FULL SKETCHBOOK AS GOOGLE SLIDES DOC

The idea I liked the most was to create stickers using my designs from ideas 9 and 8 and to display them around Bristol. I created this pitch presentation explaining my idea. My idea was to use the interest people have in conspiracy theories as an attention grabber to spreads awareness that the 1% are bad people. I was encouraging people to look past the distraction of conspiracy and focus on the real problems. I did this though funny political parodies of conspiracy images.

Although after pitching my idea I decided to try and push it further and expand upon it.