Where next?

I made a mind map of my ideas based on what I've looked at so far and how I have questioned it.

Though I initially considered the Internet detrimental to literature and education I have realised its visual potential as a study tool and need to explore this now through a series of practical experiments: time to get drawing!

Project Ideas... A fresh start

I misunderstood the brief when I came up with my 3 initial ideas, so I have scrapped those.


Apparently our project does not need to be ABOUT contemporary technologies, it simply has a be executed through a technological method. I can choose anything I am interested in as long as I use social media to my advantage, in a culturally considered way, to illustrate this idea. This makes things a lot harder!

I have decided to draw on the roots of my current illustration project to produce something harmonious to work on alongside it.
In that project am working around the idea of 'power' to develop a satirical comparison between decadent monarchs of the past and their current day equivalent: celebrity 'royalty'. This will consist of drawings done by hand using a wide range of historical and current resources, along with collages composed using the technology of Photoshop.

How can I adapt the ideas and images in this project? Which contemporary technologies will lend themselves to my aesthetic and how can I  use my chosen technologies to benefit/improve my work (and myself as an illustrator).

This is in the early stages, but it makes sense to create a website to display my work. Successful illustrators use blogs or websites to showcase their work to prospective clients, like an online gallery. Following their example, young illustrators use blogs in a similar way, hoping their work will be discovered or providing an overview of their skills once they have. It can be confusing to know which blog to have, there are so many different ones, Blogspot, Tumblr and Wordpress perhaps being the main 3 contenders.

My new idea is to upload the same work to all 3 and consider which one is the most effective, adopting this as my new blog and using it to apply for internships and jobs. I'm not being lazy and 'regurgitating' work from another module, instead I am using it for a completely different purpose. The images I choose to display are less important than HOW I display them (and why). I hope to use neutral visuals on each blog, not only to make them look as similar as possible, but to suggest that ANY work could be shown here; this is merely an example/experiment.

Week 2 - Project Introduction/ Ideas

We spent most of today thinking of ideas for our project, discussing them together at the end of the day.

The notes I made were pretty jumbled but here is a summary of my group's thoughts:

• Social media has powerful effects on society, the environment, the body, and perhaps most importantly, communication.
• How and what we communicate is being radically reformed by pre-formatted social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs like this one. This means everyone is equipped to create media for consumption. 
• Visual communicators (such as illustrators) need to critically approach these environments and question social media as a responsible and critical communicator.

We need to think: WHAT will I post? WHY?

What content could we take from these spaces and reconfigure? How many times? What will the future implications be?

"Choice of media/process must be carefully and conceptually considered."

Here are some possibilities I had for my actual project, in light of these ideas:

I could look at the way people no longer use write letters, buy CDs or shop in supermarkets. How photo albums, recipe books, TVs, libraries etc are becoming obsolete.
What is happening to all these endangered technologies? I am imagining a preservation society website (or even graveyard) for them, which could be quite humorous. It would be ironic to create and broadcast this concept online, as the internet is what has destroyed them.

I could investigate if 'social' media is in fact quashing our social abilities and turning us into lonely, awkward beings with no real-world interaction skills.
My starting point and tagline would be 'I love you... Tube', which lends itself to my outcome perhaps being film or animation.

My 3rd idea is to imagine if people in past eras had been able to use the internet, and how it would have affected them. This too, could be quite humorous. This idea comes partly from 'Horrible Histories' which has sketches in which past monarchs using online dating and creating their own software.

See also: Cleopatra and Marc Anthony

I'll think about these ideas in more depth and choose one to research and develop.