Project 2 Crit

THE NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN

Critical reflective review

for the second project of the

Master of Arts Degree in Graphic Design

by Registered Project

Architectural representation of affluence in places where key examples exist.

Marcus Christian Cosker

13th June 2009

The first project focused on the Chinese social housing of the Special Administrative Regions of China.  Their 10ft x10ft x10ft living space and the unforgiving battery hen spatial style of their layout that is unique to China.   For the second project I wanted to focus on the opposite end of the spectrum of housing standards as a contrast to the first project.  My hope is that the work when displayed together will reflect the qualities of each standard of living to the viewer and allow them to consider the physical, emotional and spiritual costs and benefits of each way of life.

The west has a general desire for larger and larger abodes this is evident in the way that the media reinforces positivity in moving up the housing ladder into larger and larger houses, rather than a more sensible approach of buying what you need and can afford.  Since the acquisition of a home typically means becoming financially bound (literally in the UK as you cannot relinquish it as you can in the US) by a mortgage which brings money into the economy through the wonders of compound interest; it could be argued that the media is supporting the governments desires to bring more money into the system at personal cost of each of us.  While this is nothing new, it differs from more direct government income like Taxes in that many will be either not interested or unaware that their desires are being cultivated by the media.  Ultimately the government would curtail the media if it desired to and so it could be argued that the government uses the media to create the desire for debt in the population.  The current “bad debts” around the developed would are evidence that this has indeed taken place at the cost of individuals who have found themselves unable to fund the desires that they have been encouraged to have.

The contrast between the architecture of the first project and the second shows that the  human doesn’t need a lot to survive.  Many would say that they don’t just wish to survive they want to “live”.  This is where emotional and materialistic desires are born.  The BBC recently aired the programme Blood Sweat And Takeaways (27/6/2009, BBC Three Programmes – Blood, Sweat and Takeaways) which brought a small group of six British food lovers into contact with the people who harvest and prepare a range of the foods that we consume in the west from East Asia.  While the food preparation was a startling revelation to the six Brits, the core cultural difference that they experienced was the living conditions of the people that they met.  Many of the people that they met could not afford the journey home to see their family on a regular basis.  One woman explained that she sees her children once a year if she can manage to save up the money for the journey.  Clearly it was evident from this programme that we take so much for granted in the west.  Just being able to be around family is taken as an unchallenged basic freedom that everyone right down to the poorest can experience in the west.

In the west we have large physical freedoms catering for most peoples desires if you meet specific border control and immigration standards, we have our basic emotions catered for in our societal belief systems and we have financial affluence that allows us to explore our perception of “living” rather than “merely surviving”.  These systemic elements are reflected in the architecture of our lands.  In this second project I have identified a wide range of tropes that we use to indicate our affluence and success to one another at every level of society.  The mere presence of these signals of wealth contrast sharply with their absence in the architecture of the first project.   The imagery that I collected as evidence of the range of tropes was from a range of Real Estate Agencies from around the world.  I accessed these from the internet as globetrotting around the world for this project would have been too costly.  The images I found have provided clear evidence of the tropes that I had considered and helped me to identify further trope groups and a wide range of indicators of affluence.  It could be argued that the fact that the photographs are from real estate agents will have influenced the end result, in that the images look like real estate imagery.  However I think that this is very easy to say and in fact it is very difficult to argue that they do not take this appearance.  However, it was not my intention to create real estate imagery.  Frustratingly I cannot prove this.  My intention was to to create a house that contained as many of the tropes of affluence as possible, to make  antithesis imagery of the work of the first project by showing the trappings of an affluent lifestyle and to show the viewer the elements so that they themselves can consider them and disseminate the tropes that their home displays.  Thus showing how far away we are in the west from the lifestyle of the 10ft x 10ft x 10ft home.

This project was a mixture of symbolism and realism.  The symbolism was explored in the tropes and indicators of affluence that appear in the trope groups.  The realism was explored through the display of the tropes in the imagery produced.  The aim of the work was to display realistic results and in many areas of the work this has been achieved.  However some points that could be improved upon include the scale of some of the items in the scene needs adjusting, for example the picket fence is far too big and the rocks that line the driveway could be considered unrealistically large for their purpose.

I need to develop the attitude of considering who I am behind the lens when I work.  This will allow the development of the message that the audience will read from the work produced.  For example it was important to try and raise in the viewers consciousness the stereotypes of affluence that we see around us in the west.  I wanted to include so many tropes as to satirise the building so that the audience would consider the point to the work.  On its own I don’t think this comes across very well.  If the work was presented with the work from the first project I think this would be clearer.  During the presentation I was asked “What do I mean by represent”?  The key for of representation for me is visual representation of the subject in this case through the use of 3D modelling software.  On a deeper level the work has to show something, make a point, describe, rather than just be there for its own sake of looking good at this point in technological development.  This links back to developing an attitude behind the camera and getting the work to display this attitude.

The animation was described as very stop-start, I purposefully made it full of “jolts” (2000, Lasn. K.) so that the viewer could get through the information without becoming distracted.  The carrot and donkey effect caused kept the audiences attention during the presentation and kept mine throughout the several hours during its arrangement and continuity testing. However, I could have overlaid the words into the scene itself and used the scene more to make the points.  I found myself without the time to do this part of the project very well.  In my effort to get across the details about the tropes and the indicators of affluence that I have identified and modelled, the political Marxist slant that I had described in the earlier essay and the points raised earlier in this analysis were lost.  While I was putting the animations together into a sequence I realised how far apart the model and the political viewpoint was.  I have to admit that this was disappointing.

27/6/2009, BBC Three Programmes – Blood, Sweat and Takeaways, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kpd2z

2000, Lasn. K., “Culture Jam – How To Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge – And Why We Must.”, HarperCollins, New York.