500 Words on Unit 2 project

Speakers' Chair

Whilst looking into modern day rituals I became interested in the steps taken by a public speaker in order to deliver a speech and captivate an audience. I was inspired by Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London where many people go to voice their opinions on matters’ they feel passionately about. Within this project my aim has been to create a portable chair which makes the life of a public speaker easier and more effective. I achieved this through adding simple components to the chair, inspired by ‘soapboxes’ that are used by the speakers to elevate them, giving them more authority and be able to make their presence known, whilst voicing their opinions in public places clearly. 

To start the process of making the chair I began by looking at an abstract painting ‘Composition’ where I decided to take some of the elements it presented such as the components slotting together and use them as influence in my chair. I began by making multiple 1:5 models adding different components on them to generate ideas for my 1:1 model and test which ones worked or not. I wanted my chair to include a sound elevation to attract viewers, so I researched different types of sound elevation devices such as ‘sound mirrors’ which were huge devices to detect sound. After we decided to make a component in a similar shape to the mirrors I looked into pet cone’s and the slotting device some use to connect it together, which we then continued to work on to produce our final 1:1 cone element on the final product. 

Transportability was a key element to the chair so the speaker could easily move to different public spaces therefore we decided to add wheels. After some of our 1:5 models became quite busy we decided that in actual fact a minimalistic design would be better suited as we didn’t want the components on the chair to take away from the speaker using it. Therefore we decided to make the wheels out of wood in a subtle way.

I used the Cad throughout the project to keep check of my measurements and the alterations taking place on the chair. An issue we encountered was that the step component once we fitted it was too short when it was pulled out from under the chair and therefore was not sturdy to stand on. To overcome this issue we referred back to our abstract models as influence which consisted of the step dramatically extending from the back, looking a bit strange and as if it is piecing through the chair just like our models of the paintings’ pierced through the different components.

We decided to keep our chair simple, made out of wood and unpainted due to the nature of the chair. It is a speakers’ chair designed for everyone not just a specific person with one particular style. This enabled us to also project slogans and quotes that may be used whilst making a public speech onto the chair as a canvas which looked effective and clear. I am pleased with the end result of my chair as it has all the elements I imagined it to have as well as looking stylish and being functional. 

'Composition' by Felix Del Male

Composition 1948 by Felix Del Marle is the painting my group and I have decided to explore further. The abstract piece in the style of constructivism intrigued me due to the different geometric shapes the piece presents; there are a lot of elements to it. The half circles against the various sided lines look effective and the colours compliment the patterns. We aim to create 3D versions of this piece and use its key elements within our chair project.

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Review of 'The Design Culture Reader' 9/10/19

Review of 'The Design Culture Reader' 9/10/19

In this extract there is a strong focus in the way, as individuals, we feel comfortable and safe in the clothing we wear and the spaces we inhabit. In addition there is a focus on how we feel uncomfortable in the clothing and spaces we inhabit due to judgement “we might invest individual objects with all sorts of personal emotional significance” suggesting that what we wear reflects our personalities and our emotions. Just like our homes, what we wear is a way for people to judge us as the extract states “people getting treated with suspicions, abused, beaten up or killed for the clothes they wear”. This mirrors problems society face with homelessness and refugees and the abuse they face daily. Presenting the issue that our homes and clothes, which are supposed to be a space to make us feel comfortable and safe, actually become a place of fear, judgment and danger.

The extract continues to focus on the concept of the hallway in a space and what it really means, especially in different contexts’ and cultures’. “In Western domestic architecture the hall was originally designed to be the main room of the house and the show case of the residents’ wealth” proposing that it’s purpose was to represent status rather than its actual function. The hall also has a function to separate rooms as well as creating a privacy zone for residents “the hall became the intermediate zone to protect the privacy of the residents”.

Furthermore, the extract expresses the contact a visitor has when going into the residents home and how the hallway is a big part of this interaction as it is “a way to prevent or ease transition from the public to the private world” as the hallway is where the polite small talk takes place. Simple questions like ‘Hello’, ‘How are you?’ suggesting in this context the hallway becomes a neutral ground between the host and visitor due to the hallway usually having neural wallpaper, shoes, coats and perhaps some photographs; nothing too personal to the residents. 

The hallway is a key barrier in-between a residents personal life, belongings and how much they want to share with their guests “the hallway has a level of intimacy which allowing for the process of identification, neutralisation and purification.” Presenting the importance of a hallway due to it’s function in easing social encounters, creating privacy and safety; proving that a hallway is much more than a space between rooms. 

Jonathan Meades: Bunkers Brutalism and Bloodymindedness Concrete Poetry: Video Notes

Jonathan Meades: Bunkers Brutalism and Bloodymindedness Concrete Poetry: Notes

“Brutalism is an offensive dim to many ears but concrete poetry to mine” - Meades

What is it about brutalism that creates so much loathing?

It’s aggression? Its arrogance? Its sheer art?

Worthwhile architecture is ahead of popular taste. It may take decades for the public to appreciate the buildings of architects who were derided in their life.

Fashion:

We think of shifts and tastes as being entirely manipulated, relentlessly, regular. but our awareness of our ease to conform make us no more conformist.

We are persuaded of need when none exists, we are enjoined to prescribe to the new; new phone, clothes, cars cults, and of course new debt - hyper debt. 

Antecepents - “every writer creates his own precursors” J L Borges”

The same goes for architects, Brutalist architects make us look at the architects of the modern gothic and of the baroque in a new light. 

Stretches 1860s - Theatre, painting and fiction were out to disturb and shock.. 

Alice in wonderland, Paris opera.. the era of corbays the origin of the world.. Sazan’s horrifying painting, the murder, the woman in white… This is when victorian architecture was at its most quintessentially victoria. The world victorian was coined in the 1850s by the architect Thomas Harris. 

Modern gothic - modern yes, but not really anything to do with gothic.. 

Seaton Delaval Hall - Architect - Sir John Vanbrugh.  

A playwright John Vamber - prompted outrage and delight, as an arc hitch he prompted mostly outrage - ugly, clumsy, disgusting, impure, odious, barbaric.. words to describe his architecture. 

Venim Paris? was described as a venom of stone with no taste.. so what? 

It isn’t polite it is dramatic, agressive.. but its meant to be.. 

Galley - style/ monstrous scale, sinister, barbaric.. entirely classical but gothic in mood. Fit for giants.

 Gino Gopody - designed a number of outrageous buildings. Heavily rusticated, animal figures everywhere.. they insult the eye.. 

Moiving on to housing projects… Not a matter of style but of mood.. 

Course, absurd, uncouth, excessive, violent, ugly

“Its the first time in the history of art that crudity has been directly laboriously sought out”” - According to trade newspaper, The Architect

Victorian Montrosity - they called it this as it was normal, what had been dome.. they didn’t look or question.. they just accepted the idea, the un challenged cleshae.

Victoria era clashes:

  • moral and social squaller
  • Inhumain working conditions/ the working house 
  • Exploitation of children - like little tom the chimney sweep
  • Disease 

On the other hand:

  • bourgeois pomposity 
  • Spectacular facilistism 
  • Money grabbing smiles line - Samuel smiles (advicant of self help)

1900 century - 

The public were beginning to think for themselves, appreciating new architecture and creativeness. And particularly beginning to catch on to the imaginative invention of long dead and dismissed artists. 

There was a now a century gap between the buildings design and when people were beginning to appreciate them.. dismissing the taste of their parents and grandparents. 

The generation had seen an age of destruction of buildings which when they stood had over looked or taken for granted

John Betcherman, Harry goodhart wrenfall had been regarded by their generation as public provocateurs, not quite serious.. 

A new enemy - Hevner believed modernism should be white like the victorian - he did not agree with the 60s architecture. 

The age of concrete - for the first time since the 1860s there was architecture with attack, guts, with what the Victorian’s would call go 

We don’t expect films, or novels or paintings to be pretty so why should we expect buildings to be pretty? There are other qualities we seek. Nightmares are more captivating than sweet dreams. More memorable too, they stick around longer. 

George Buck said that art’s job is to trouble us, while science’s job is to reassure us. There are too many artist that want to be scientists. 

The architecture of the 1960s and 1860s are remarkably akin. In mood, aspiration, in-purity, in a reason, in offending in dismal of characteristics; common sense. They have both been habitually regarded as transgressive as they show the architect not as a serval technitional worker but as a maker, an artist.

An artist creates what he regards as necessary, he creates in order to achieve something which did not previously exist. What an artist does is not pander to his clients taste rather he flatters the client to believe that he, the client is the creator of the scheme which the architect has proposed. ‘We think’, ‘We do’ ‘We achieve’ (relates to the glass room) Second guessing doesn’t come into it..

Focus groups.. even in the 1960s were small groups.. focused on what had been not on what was yet to come. If an audience were asked which housing development style should take place they would be shown style A or style B, not shown something new, yet uninvented. 

The architecture of both eras 

Why should architects have to suffer at the opinion of ‘oh I don’t know much about architecture but I know what I like’

Such distaste should be taken as a backhanded compliment. However it is these people who have access to the demolition companies, wrecking balls.. explosives 

‘Concrete monstrosity’  

The promote many social issues - Addiction, family breakdown, sexual violence. They are responsible for shop lifting, peado’s, unemployment, arson and fantasied, disease, benefits, fraud, pre teen pregnancies, incest - and concrete if being nothing but versatile, canabalism 

 War:

Necessity is merely the adoptive mother of invention. War is the birth mother. 

Canabillism is one of wars unspoken enormities, snacking between battles. A by product. War is addictive, creates a lot in the future.. it is also technologically predictive. 

War is the mother of invention: airplanes, war substitutes, fabrics, Bailey vridge, food substitutes other than human flesh, space travel, road technology, tele communication system, remote controls, servallence systems, computers, weapons. We are all victims and also benefit from this. 

Playful architecture mimics defensive structures. Country houses and their lodges were liberarchy with the abundant turrets, and elations called draw bridges

The inspiration for schools, hospitals, universities, apartments, was the recent past. The national socialist past that had happened 

Whilst the concrete architecture of the third quarter of the 20th century adopts  the mood of the 1860s, it steals the forms and the shapes of the defences made by the horrendous acts of slave labour. 

Nazi Germany built thousands of fortifications, bunkers, observation posts, aircraft posts, boat pens, flat towers, there were all together about 60 types. The were mostly built by the Todd organisation. They were mostly designed by the Architect Frederick Tames? He described them as cathedrals of artillery - to shelter is to pray. True monuments to God and the eternity to the German people. Certainly hard to get rid off. 

Building was a fundamental part of war as fighting, the creation was as essential as bombing. 

Germany’s less trusted artists fled while they could :The optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.”

Art and architecture were propaganda’s instruments

These were the most influential pieces of architecture in the 12 years of the national socialist imperium - Accidental art, art waiting to happen.. 

 

Tames “The monumental should have no practical use, the practical use stands in the way of appreciation of pure form” 

The monumental should promote both wonder and ore.”

 Cyclopian structures 

  • Structures are held up by gravitational force. By the sheer weight of stone upon stone. 
  • Large uncut boulders 
  • Nothing delicate about them but nothing corse about the thought about them 

“Architects are artists, at least they are if they possess the talent, and can master the confidence- and the bloodymindedness.” 

Le Cozbusies - includes cars against buildings to emphasise that buildings too are machines. 

International modernism a time where concrete was so modern it was like watching the future arrive. 

Jean Dubuffet presented other associations with Brultaism:

Dubuffet was drawn to the work of psychiatric patients or mentally fraud which was often disturbing. No doubt someone somewhere would consider this exploitation. Dubuffet collected this work and called it ‘L’art Brut’. Brut meaning rough, raw, crude.. 

The work is made without any reference to the cultural norms of the society that its makers t inhabit so there is an unwitting internationalism about this stuff 

Brutalism had a link to raw concrete, the stuff of bunkers a material which would be considered harsh and un accommodating by a public which craved the solaces of thatched roofs, bogas beams, sandstone and prettiness, not beauty. 

Bruitalism suggested brutality, physical threats and violence. 

Sandy Skoglund

Sandy Skoglund (born 1946) is an American photographer and installation artist. Skoglund often creates surrealist images by creating and staging sets which often takes months to complete. Skoglund then photographs her sets, which often have brightly coloured furniture and live models in. Skoglund is typically recognised for her uncomfortable pieces of using mince meat as a material to create her sets. 

'Spirituality in the Flesh' 1992 is one of Skolgund's most well known pieces. Which consists of a woman made out of mince meat. This piece can be seen as uncomfortable and using mince meat as a material is not a traditional method. 

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Mono-ha (School of Things)

Mono-ha (School of Things) was an art movement surfaced in the mid-1960s in Tokyo. The founding member Lee Ufan directed the movement focused on exploring new materials, their properties and new ideas, rejecting traditional methods of art due to the advance in technology. The name ‘Mono-ha’ was a thought of derogatorily by a journalist reacting to the lack of skill in the design of the work. Mono-ha was linked with Arte Povera, a radical art movement whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and materials.

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Relatum-Stage, Lee Ufan, 2018

Anreas Gursky

Anreas Gursky born 1955, is a German post-modernist artist who is widely know for his large scale colour photography of architecture and landscape; often taken from an unconventional, high point. Gursky’s often blurry and chaotic photos fascinate me as those aspects in photography are often seen as messy and un intentional but Gursky incorporates them into his photography as a effective feature rather than a mistake. 

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Chicago Board of Trade II, Anreas Gursky 1999. 

Barcelona Pavilion

The ‘Barcelona Pavilion’ was designed by architect’s Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. The building consisted of a simple form with spectacular materials used such as; marble, travertine and red onyx. The interior matched the extravagant exterior due to its furniture being specifically made for the pavilion; an example being the famous ‘Barcelona chair’. The pavilion was an important and inspiring building in the history of both modern architecture and minimalism. Barcelona pavilion.jpg

Barcelona Pavilion Interior

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Bauhaus

The ‘Bauhaus, was a German art school 1919-1933 founded by Walter Groupius in Weimar. Bauhaus was acknowledged for its famous approach to design which combined fine arts, crafts and a political new way thinking; which was taught and published. The Nazis’ shut it down in 1933 but the Bauhaus style lived on, being one of the largest influences in modern design. Developing: architecture, art, interior design, typography, graphic design etc.. 

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Text

‘The Penguin Donkey’ caught our attention as it is creative and unique as well as being functional for everyday use, breaking the usual placing and rectangular shape of a modern bookcase. We were drawn to the idea of the animalistic influences having been taken from the organic, curved, linear shape of a donkey carrying panniers in contrast to previous simplistic designer such as Mogens Koch (example of his work shown at the bottom). We agree that the design is a successful, adventurous design of a typically mundane object.

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The Penguin Donkey

Who made it? It was designed by Egon Riss and manufactured by Isokon Furniture company.

What is it? A bookcase.

What is it made out of? Natural birch ply wood.

Was it influenced by a previous design? There is no evidence of influence from previous design but there is evidence of influence from the curved, linear shape of a donkey carrying panniers.

The bookcase ‘The Penguin Donkey’ was designed by Egon Riss and manufactured by Isokon Furniture company in 1939. The product was made specifically to hold the penguin book collection in an unusual way, which can accommodate up to eighty books. This piece made of natural birch plywood fits into the modernist movement due to it’s combination of a stylish but functional design; as it was finished in a white acid catalyst enamel enabling a surface which is unaffected by liquids and hot objects.

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500 words on Unit 1 project

During this project my aim was to use this opportunity to experiment with different materials and techniques for making my door handle and therefore expand my model making skills. I started by using different types of foam as well as cardboard and felt to experiment with form and structure as well as generating ideas. I continued to use wire and therefore focus on non-functional handles as well functional ones.

I proceeded to think about the meaning behind a door handle and the journey’s it can lead you to. Relating to myself I thought about how important my home and family are to me and how the touch of a door handle is the first step to entering my house and seeing my family. I continued to think about bees and how they share similar values to me as they are protective of their hive and each other, just like I am protective of my family and my home. I looked at artist Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíy who creates moulds from bees wax to create his desired shapes as inspiration as he uses unusual methods to create his artwork. Furthermore, after visiting Tim Walker’s exhibition ‘Wonderful things’ I was fascinated how he creates extravagant staging, with qualities that feel like a fantastical world. Inspired by both artists I decided I wanted to create a door handle inspired by a fairytale and created by a unusual and non-functional material. 

I progressed to look at fairytales and in particular ‘The Chronicals of Narnia’ caught my attention as it was one of my childhood favourites. Whilst thinking about the fairytale and what I could remember from it, the ice kingdom and the mythical creatures that live there came to my attention as it was based through the wardrobe and played a large part in my memory. The idea of creating a door handle out of ice excited me as it is a completely non-functional material to use as a door handle and was a key theme in one of my favourite fairytales.  

If I were to hypothetically use the door handle I would have to wear gloves due to the coldness of the ice, as well as only getting the handle out of the freezer for certain amounts of time and then putting it back in the freezer before it begins to melt and lose it’s form.

Making a door handle out of ice was challenging as the moulds often leaked water out therefore I had some failed attempts which slowed up the process. However, overall I felt I progressed with each attempt, finally resulting in my final ice door handle which I enjoyed making. If I were to do the project again or had more time I would have liked to have sculpted into the ice relating to the fairytale ‘Narnia’ more, adding more detail to the design and making it more specific.  

Digital Justice Video - Notes

How is technology changing the way we see? 

The artist James Bridle reimagines John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for the digital age and asks if we can make machines without prejudice.

Digital Justice - Notes 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0004mc4

  • “If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power.” (John Berger).
  • In 1972, Berger’s seminal TV series and book changed perceptions of art and set out to reveal the language of images.
  • Of course, that was before the internet, smartphones, and social media took hold.

Can you actually use the software yourself? Would happen so much, clear example of when you collaborate with a male, people assume what and how it is. We have to try and take over this space and turn it around. 

  • In 2015, Louis Selbee went for a workout in her local gym in Cambridge, but when she tried to swipe to go into the changing room, her membership card was denied. It turned out that the gyms computer system thought she was a man because of her title ‘Dr’, so it denied her access to the woman’s changing rooms. When she complained to staff she was told she would only be able to get in if she dropped her title.

 John Burger:

  • 1972 - ‘Ways of seeing’, the writer and critique John Burger described how women were represented in European paintings as a male gaze. When looking in these paintings, one could see the way they were regarded. They are there to feed an appetite, not to have one of there own. These paintings reproduced and then reinforced social dominant attitudes of the time. Burges guests hoped that with new forms of representation, new attitudes might develop. “I cannot take them seriously, I cannot identify with them.”
  • He put forward a new way of seeing in order to change our relationship with the world ‘If the new language of images were used differently it would through its use, refer a new kind of power. 

 New technologies: 

  • New technologies have fundamentally changed our relationship with images and thus with power, but new ways of seeing haven’t always kept up, especially as it disappears behind screens and in codes.. Attitudes and prejudices become harder to question unless we re think our relationships with machines. 
  • “Theres a world of machines and digitalia coming and we need to prepare for it so we can work with it rather than fear it. What is it we want? How do we want the world to look? How do we want the world to look? How do we want to be in it? Right now the people are saying the machines are taking our jobs, what are we going to do? We won’t have work, we won’t have any meaning, instead of pushing those questions can we push the questions of, well what does it mean? It’s possibility, that’s what excites me about it. - Stephane Dinkins, she’s an artist, researcher and teacher who works with new technologies to try and understand there effects on different communities. 

What does it mean that algorithms are coming out way? These things that decide:

  • If we get a mortgage
  • If we get a longer or shorter jail sentence
  • Weather we pay higher prices for things we see in a catalog
  • How do we recognise them? How do we know if they are being made by a digital machine?

Advanced Algorithms:

  • Advanced algorithms in the UK are now being used to decide which areas to patrol, who to take into custody. In the U.S similar programs are used by judges to decide on prison sentences, based on the likelihood of convicted criminals re offending. When independent investigators tested this software, they found it was systematically biased against people of colour, recommending them for longer sentences; even when they were less likely to re offend than white people. The software behaved that way because it was based of years of bad data. Data produced by racist policing and discriminationary sentencing. This is all it knew and shows how generations of bigotry become infested in new technology. Currently publicly repudiating them. 
  • Stephanie Jenkins is creating her own artificial intelligence. It learns about the world from a very different set of stories. Ttrying code it out and build it mostly by people of colour. Specifically Jenkins personal family, and three generations of women in her family. She has been sitting down with her mother and grandmother, talking about their family history and then using the information as data for their own network, a deep learning algorithm. Then letting the algorithm take that information, and tell her story from its own view. 

 Artificial Intelligence: 

  • Alexa from amazon, Siri from apple - artificial intelligence. They don’t just answer your questions, they learn from you by doing so, in order to get better in serving you. 
  • Amazon were receiving a lot of job applications, and therefore developed a software which would scan the applications and decide which the best ones were. The holy grail would read hundreds of cvs by comparing all of the cvs.. then picking out the best. Then they realised their program was systematically downgrading female applicants. ‘Women only collages, or women soccer teams caused the cv to be marked down. Because Amazon had hired more men, the system believed that men were better for the job.
  • Even when amazon realised what was happening they couldn’t fix it, and eventually the program was scrapped. 
  • The biggest automation company in the world, still couldn’t automate equality. 

How do you get your loyal to questions a technology/algorithms biased attitude? 

  • Technology systems are informed by human thinking. The only way to insure these technologies don’t make the same biased mistakes is by involving people who were not part of the initial decision making. 
  • By increasing the diversity of people who build the technologies, increases learning about how society itself works.

 Sexism: 

  • In the 1950s and 60s women made up most of the computer programmers, like typing and book keeping. This was considered to be ‘women’s work’ presenting stereotypes about women’s skills in painstaking in repetitive tasks.
  • As a result women contributed much of the code to projects like IBM’s main frames and NASA’s space missions. 
  • Women’s predominance held true until the 1980’s where men began to overtake women in professional employment.
  • Men also were more likely to enrol in computer science degrees. 
  • The rise of computer games, aimed mostly at boys put girls at a further disadvantage. 
  • Women in games and ‘black girls code’ are changing this.. but they still have a long way to go. 
  • Googles recent figures show that only 20% of its employees are female. And only 1% are black. Technology has a power to it.

Digital Colonialism:  

  • Like sexism and racism, colonialism can be presented in technology. It is should which could be called digital colonialism.
  • Digital colonialism is the idea of how certain technologies have been used by certain countries, cultures, demographics, as a way to colonise other cultures, other demographics, other countries. 
  • Technology shapes our imagination and our way of seeing the world. But when we use these tools without thinking we are looking through a very old lens. Much older than the tool itself. 
  • Gendered/ heterosexual objects… plug sockets and plugs. Queer sockets.

 Longing for a difference: 

  • Longing.. not what we usually associate with technology. We usually long for something new.. the new update.. or the latest phone rather than the desire for something different. This is the radical possibility that still exists within our technologies. 
  • They don’t have to reinforce existing power in the present. They may also allow us to remake it in a more just and equitable form. 
  • To do some requires us to see, not just these technologies, but our whole society through a very different lens. 
  • Technology has the power to control and constrain us. But when it meets the real world, real people and real bodies it can reveal what we have previously refused to see. The incredible efflorescence of ideas and identity which have in reality been here all along.

 Gender identities: 

  • It used to be that you could only identify as male or female when you joined a social network. 
  • A few years ago google plus added the option of other. That pleased some people but it still didn’t feel very welcoming. 
  • Under pressure, in 2014 facebook released a list of 51 gender identities that users could select from. Later that year, after consultation they increased it to more than 70. And a year later they gave in and allowed anyone to type in their own identity for themselves. 
  • It seems the more we try to control and categorise the would, sectioning things in boxes and lines in databases, the more of life spills out. 

Evidently comes down to our desire to build not better machines, but a better world. An important step in world building. 

David Hockney

David Hockney, (born July 1937) is an English painter, printmaker, draftsman, stage designer, and photographer. Hockney is one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century, particularly an important influence in the 1960s pop art movement.

Hockney's works where he uses collage effectively to distort images:

'Portrait of Mother III' 1985 is an image taken in Yorkshire, of Hockney's mother that he has rearranged to show different sides of her face and to capture the essence of her personality. 

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'Pearblosson Highway' 1986, by David Hockney depicts a view of an American Highway. It is a collage, made from over 700 separate photographs; which many of were taken on the notorious route 138, Antelope Valley. Presenting how collage can be used to create a whole new setting and in this case a highway. I find collage an enjoyable and effective way to express my thoughts, especially when my ideas do not exist. 

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Hockney has created this photo montage where he forms a new version and viewpoint of an existing object, a chair. Hockney effectively distorts the shape of the chair but only to the extent where it is still recognisable, just in a new form. 

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Roy Lichtenstein

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The Interiors, Roy Lichtenstein 

Bedroom at Arles

Whilst in Amsterdam I visited the Banksey exhibition where a life size recreation of Roy Litchenstein's 'Bedroom at Arles' was presented. It was amazing to see the work human scale and to be able to physically interact with it. 

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Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein 1923 -1997 was an American pop artist during the 1960s. Lichtenstein became a leading figure in the modernist art movement and his work inspired by comic strip marked his work as pop art through parody. His work was influenced by everyday pop culture life, particularly advertising.  He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". 

Bedroom at Arles,1992, is an oil and Magna on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein based on the Bedroom in Arles series of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh.  This interior painting creates an fun and exciting picture of the home in a pop art style which contrasts to traditional paintings of the home which are often colourless and have a sense of a seriousness and a emptiness to them. 

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Mona Hatoum

Mona Hatoum’s artwork focuses on the intensity of the body. Hatoum uses a range of medium’s such as sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Hatoum’s sculptures focus on different emotions we feel such as desire, fascination and fear.

When talking about the body Hatoum exclaimed "I see furniture as being very much about the body. It is usually about giving it support and comfort. I made a series of furniture pieces which are more hostile than comforting." (Quoted in Mona Hatoum 1997, p 20.).

Hatoum often takes objects which are typically seen as domestic, everyday objects and transforms their form into dangerous objects, completely changing their purpose. An example of this is 'Homebound' (2000) which is household furniture assembled and  wired up with an active electric current transforming the furniture’s purpose of comfort and practicality into dangerous and threatening objects.

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Video of 'Homebound' by Mona Hatoum

Untitled (wheelchair II) 1999

Image result for untitled wheelchair ii 1999

Medium: stainless steel and rubber

37 1/4 x 19 x 25 in. (94.5 x 48.5 x 63.5 cm)

The Seagram Building

The Seagram building is a New York skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who was a director of the Bauhaus in Berlin. Where he initiated the earliest modernist principles of architecture, until the Nazis shut it down in 1933. Mies travelled to the U.S. along with his radical and new ideas about architecture. The Seagram building was completed in 1958 with Mies’ view that ‘less is more’. The Seagram building was an important part in modernism due to it’s unique and simple structure influencing an era of minimalism; consisting of simple skyscrapers made out of metal and glass rather than their original forms of brick and stone.

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Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is an English artist and art collector. Hirst’s artwork can be seen as socially shocking due to death being a main theme in his artwork. Hirst uses dead, preserved and often dissected animals such as sheep, a cow and a shark to create his works. Hirst is a key artist in the modernist art movement. 

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William Morris

‘The Strawberry Thief' by William Morris was one of his most famous pieces, made from indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton. Intended to be draped around walls and used for curtains. This piece influenced a huge part of the arts and crafts movement due to it’s detail. 

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