Vis Com Week 2

In our second week of vis com we started our third project: Audience. Over the weekend we had to come up with a few ideas of messages we could send to somebody or something. We could also send these messages on behalf of somebody/something else.

I started by thinking about more personal messages, things that I'd always wanted to say to specific people. For example, when I was younger my sister and I always tried to get my mum to quit smoking. So I thought about some original ways to send this message.

Here are some pages from my sketchbook. I looked at communicating through each component of a cigarette, eg. matches, lighter, rizla, filters. Then i looked at manipulating the health warnings on cigarette packets to display my message,  I swapped the pictures of lungs and black teeth for family photos,  then I thought about speaking on behalf of the cigarettes- ie. we have feelings too, stop burning our heads off.

I didnt really want to develop this idea though because I thought it had been looked at so many times before and I wanted to do something more original and maybe something a bit less sombre and a bit more silly.

I then looked at sending a message to my friend who looses everything to get her to hold on to her possesions a bit more.



This picture above was an idea I tried out when thinking of ways to make my friend more organised. It shows how she can prioritise the contents of her handbag. Number 1 (her purse) is something she should be extra careful not to loose, but number 8 (the tissues) wouldn't really matter.



My final idea came about when I was thinking about the different ways in which animals can communicate with one another. I thought of those small frogs that can be bright red or blue- these colours being a message to say 'Don't eat me' to predators. I thought this would be useful in the human world. Food could communicate with humans in order to dictate their diet. I used the traffic light colours- A burger could be bright red ("I'm bad for you, don't eat me"), cheese or meat could be orange ("Eat me if you want, but go easy") and fruit could be green ("Go ahead"). It sort of became a green cross code diet plan.

I then extended the idea to include objects. I like the way you could sawp colours around. For example tomatoes and strawberries could go from red to green. But I couldn't think of anything green which was unhealthy and could therefore become red. So I coloured in this dollar bill, playing with the idea that "money is the root of all evil".

I decided to carry on developing  the message to my friend who always looses things. On monday I covered the contents of my bag in gold foil. I was trying to show how everyday things are precious and shouldn't be taken for granted.

I like these outlines of the objects. It suggests absence and loss to me. It also reminds me of the outlines of bodies after a murder (bit dramatic sorry). Anyway these outlines I wanted to develop.

I can't go to the crit on Friday because I'm going to The Glasgow school of Art and ECA open days. Above is a short film I made to develop my "oulines of missing objects". I won't write much about it because I want people to interpret it themselves and generate their own ideas around it. (Plus the Vis Com tutors talk about how a piece of work should be able to communicate with its audience without a long explanation or discussion, so, enjoy.)