Group Presentations
Group presentations were this week, and they were very fun! Some of the most memorable ones to me were the live drawing, the filmmaking audio-based presentation, and some of the video presentations. I was surprised by how many of the presentations were video-based, and I cursed myself for not insisting to my group more to change from that concept.
The sound-based presentations were definitely some of the most unique. The live DJ set with drawing was effectively very simple yet articulated two different parts of the course at the same time through action: music and interpretive art (along the lines of the surrealists and cubists). They didn't explicitly say that was the point, but I don't think they had to. If the action wasn't about surrealist art processes, that's okay — because what they did was effectively performance art, and art is up to interpretation.
One of the professors of graphic design at Unimelb used to follow a similar creative process before retirement. John Warwicker would put on a record and draw based on it, ending only when the record ended, with no knowledge of how long the record was. He ran from 1994 the design group 'Tomato': a multidisciplinary design and art group that would be great to talk about in this course. It echoes a new kind of Bauhaus from the 90s.
The presentation on Frutiger Aero was very well done — definitely the best video-based presentation. It mixed Tomodachi Life and images, and gave bubbles out to the class to make it more interactive. What most interested me was how this aesthetic never really existed under the name 'Frutiger Aero'. It was called 'Windows Glossy' widely within design spaces, and the term 'Frutiger Aero' was co-opted by nostalgia accounts on social media that talked about a time where everything was like that — ignoring the scene, punk, grunge, industrial and standard styles of the 2004–2013 era. It's a fake nostalgia for a form of aesthetic that never existed at that time, spread by TikTok videos farming engagement from nostalgia bait. The two 'examples' for music from this time are a song from 2021 and the Wii theme from 2014 — outside of the described time period. A confusion of a hallucinated image of the past created from social media — echoing hyperreality once again. Even if this group didn't know this, they were making a much deeper comment than they may have thought, as far as my research reveals.
When it came to my group's presentation, I'm sad to say it didn't go well. The idea was that the class would have face tracking on one of the projectors, as they watch the presentation on the other one. At the same time, a website I set up would give prompts that would distract the class. The student film was an artsy depiction of falling into a pit of new propaganda on the internet, partially inspired by Lynch's earlier works. I had edited it with a heavy fever at home when I was unwell in Week 9, giving it to the rest of the group to edit. They didn't. I had also made the digital prompt application and the face-tracking — after finally my nagging had them accept that we shouldn't just do a student film. So it was rushed and done the day before. I should have probably done it sooner, or confronted the group about having everyone actually pull their weight before presentation day. On the day, the prompt-giving application didn't work, and I was shocked to find that they hadn't actually changed the video at all from its very rough first draft. I'm honestly really sorry our presentation was so bad, as I really love this class and wanted to make something as good as possible for it. I've learnt to plan my work better and not to rush things along with to double-check if it works before final presentations.
The pattern of people making videos instead of more interactive works is linked to the classroom we were presenting in — we couldn't move the tables or have many open spaces. This is a key example of what was talked about in Weeks 8 and 9: architecture can socially engineer behaviour, so people stuck to more rigid forms of presentation. Not the kind of social engineering that would be considered 'positive'. A shame, as all the interactive presentations were super fun. Two presentations fell into this: the one on a new kind of music notation had two people come to the front to draw, but they could have had everyone do it. The group that made the Twine game did a YouTube video playing through it, while Twine actually allows for online play — everyone could have been playing it instead.