Marketing Project

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Journal #10: Flash Tutorial

I followed an online tutorial to learn how to add filters (such as the blur used here) to enhance my flash projects. Here is my final result, it came out pretty close to how the tutorial's did!

Journal #9: Lyrics in a Photo

I used photoshop to combine a the image of a photograph I took in NYC with lyrics to a song that I felt went along with the feeling of the picture. Independently, each item has its own meaning, but by putting them together I felt that a stronger message was achieved. From music videos to album art, music and visual images are constantly combined for a greater meaning.

The song is "There Could Be Nothing After This" by Underoath, and the lyrics can be read here. This is the original picture:

Journal #8: Pick the Perp, they All Look The Same, don't they?

As terrible as it may sound, many people make their first impressions based on looks. We pass judgments based on how a person dresses, the color of their skin, and even their facial features. We are all guilty of it, whether it is conscious or not. Chapter 9, Scientific Looking, Looking at Science, went into detail about how a person’s appearance is used to categorize them. Genetic mapping has been used by institutions such as insurance companies to discriminate against a certain groups of people (p 376). However, we should not be so quick to judge people.

Pick the Perp is a website to prove that you can’t always judge a book by its cover. The website shows you five mug shots and it is your job to determine who did the specified crime. While each picture is a mug shot (meaning that the person pictured has been arrested for something), it is very hard to figure out who did the crime just based on how they looked. I tried to “pick the perp” a few times and I was surprised by how poorly I did. I managed to pick the correct perp twice out of the ten times I tried, giving me an accuracy of 20%. Since each round gives you five choices, I could have done about the same by simply guessing instead of attempting to judge the people in the picture.

The people in the pictures have all different genetic make ups and come from all sorts of demographic. Black or white, old or young, male or female, anyone is capable of doing a crime. This website may open people's eyes to see that even the people we least expect to do a crime may be guilty. A person's likelihood to commit a crime is based on what goes on inside their head, not how it looks from the outside.

I also tried another website that had been mentioned in Practices of Looking called All Look Same, where you are given a picture of an Asian person and then asked to identify if they are Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. I honestly could not distinguish the difference between the races and ended up with a score of 5/18, or 27%. Considering a lucky guess would have a 30% chance of being right this was a failure. What makes this interesting is the idea that when I see someone who is Asian, I might call them Chinese or Japanese without actually knowing what they really are. This exercise proved to me that even though we might think someone is of a certain race, we should not jump to conclusions based solely on what we see.

Journal #7: Text Effects

Here are two text effects I created to enhance text in photoshop with the help of a tutorial.
Text effects can be useful because they provide a visual message that can be received in addition to the actual word.

Journal #6: The Laptop as an Instrument?

Chapter 8 of the Practices of Looking focused on Postmodernism, where the new is blended with the old to make something fresh. The chapter states, “…the rise of remix culture is the result of shifting postmodern sensibilities coupled with the emergence of a set of technological practices enabled by the web and digital media.” (p 315) While the chapter mainly talks about visual pastiche, the same concepts exist in the music world as well. DJs around the world create mash-ups songs (sometimes known as “bootlegs” or “bastard songs”) to give new life to songs that we may not even consider “cool” anymore by mixing them up with current hits.

Perhaps the most well-known of mash-up artists is DJ Danger Mouse, who created “The Grey Album”, a mash-up of The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. However, the owners of the Beatles’ copyrights, EMI, were not too thrilled with this creation and issued cease and desist orders. Is it fair to keep Danger Mouse, also known as Brian Burton, from expressing himself creatively through these mash-ups? With laws and rights it would be illegal for him to profit off of the Beatles’ work, but what if he didn’t? Burton gave copies of his creation to family and friends, and did not receive payment, but I personally believe a person should be allowed to remix and mash-up music all they want to express themselves creatively.

Siva Vaidhyanthan, author of “Copyrights and Copywrongs” says, "It's about demolishing the myth that there has to be a special class of creators, and flattening out the creative curve so we can all contribute to our creative environment." This flattening of the creative curve would allow people who aren’t even “musicians” to create music. Some DJs put together hour-long albums with hundreds of samples. However, their requests for sampling rights are often denied, even from artists who use samples themselves.

Even if some people do not consider the laptop to be a musical instrument, it can at least be considered a social instrument. We know it is used for computer-mediated communication and as a source for information, but it is also a tool that can be used to create new sounds that get people excited about music—even if they’ve already heard it before.
Listening to mash-up music has introduced me to new artists that I might not have considered listening to before. Many songs include elements of songs that have been outplayed over the years, but with a new sound mixed it, the songs are given new life.

Here are my top 5 mash-up artists:
1) Girl Talk (photo at top)
2) team9
3) DJ Danger Mouse
4) DJ Earworm
5) The Legion of Doom

Ch 9 Synopsis

Chapter 9 of Practices of Looking investigates how science and looking are interconnected. Previous chapters have already concluded that looking is a very important aspect of culture and media, but its association with science is a little bit different. The chapter states, “Because scientific imagery often comes to us with confident authority behind it, in the form of images made by experts, we may assume these images are objective representations of knowledge, whether we view them through the popular media or through professional publications.” (p 347) Many people tend to believe that all science is based entirely on fact, which may or may not be true, making it a strong tool in convincing people to believe certain things.
The earliest reference the chapter makes to the connection of art and science is DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man (1487). This work that come to be a symbol of medicine and health shows how geometry can be used to depict ideal human proportions. The chapter also mentions how anatomy theaters came into existence in the late 16th Century. Here, people would gather to watch bodies being dissected. This practice led to another famous piece of art, “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632) by Rembrandt van Rijn, which shows the members of the high class watching a member of the lowest class being cut open, creating a portrait of the social relations that existed. Meanwhile another portrait, “Portrait of Dr, Samuel D. Gross” (1875) by Thomas Eakins, shows “our simultaneous revulsion and fascination with the body” (p 353). Current exhibitions, such as the Body Worlds exhibit, show similar fascinations, as they put the hidden insides of the human body on display. For some reason, people are extremely interested in seeing what usually goes unseen. However, there are often moral conflicts that go along with this fascination. For example, some of the bodies of the Body Worlds exhibit may have victims of torture in China.
Photography is also a major part of the relationship between the science and visual worlds. In a positivist view, the camera is considered “as a useful tool for mechanically observing, measuring, and studying the real world in a manner that could check, balance, or correct the errors introduced by subjective human perception.” (p 355). Photographs are considered to be much more reliable than hand-rendered representations and have been used to record science visually since their inception.
With all of these forms of visually recording the appearance of the human body, it is almost impossible to avoid using them to classify people. Images of people have been used to classify people based on their race, mental development, and even the likelihood of being a criminal. However, these interpretations of photographs are more based on society’s perception of the given physical characteristics rather than hard evidence. Physiognomy is defined as “interpreting the outward appearance and configuration of the body, and the face in particular” (p 359). However, the text agrees that these practices did not produce facts about human life, but rather spread myths. More myths are created when images are altered. For example an anti-abortion campaign altered sonogram images to make it appear that the fetus was reacting to the thought of abortion.
The chapter finishes up with another interesting topic—how pharmaceutical companies use pictures to convey a message. What makes this interesting is that the advertisements rarely actually show the medicine, rather an image of someone enjoying life. This implies that by buying the medicine the consumer is also buying a happier lifestyle. Meanwhile, the terrible side effects are listed in small print, out of view.
Overall, this chapter outlines the relationship that science has with the visual world. From the earliest drawings to modern day virtual representations of it, people have always been fascinating by looking at the human body. Science adds another angle for us to experience culture from, in addition to creating its own culture.