UNIT 2. XY Sign Up Elective Workshop. Ways of Seeing. Anoushka Kaladwana.
We took notes on Anoushka’s lecture about ways of seeing. I was particularly interested about how seeing is ‘constructed’. Anoushka cited John Berger and how seeing is part perception which was directly connected to my project, and how it becomes a way of being, which was interesting as I am interested in values and being value led and I felt this played into that, which was a new discovery in academia for me. What we see as neutral is actually political.
I was then enlightened by the Enlightenment where Anoushka explained how the church and state separated and what was value led become scientific, logic and financially led spearheaded by men. This was so insightful to me who had been struggling to get my thoughts and practice into a coherent, linear essay that very week. Its not a natural way to explain how things came to be as they are. Anoushka encouraged us to look at other cultures for other ways of storytelling which have been sidelined over the years via the enlightenment. This resonated with me, and for the first time I questioned why magazine design was in columns, fit to a page, bound by boundaries, physically and psychically. This opened up a whole new aspect to my work and where I want to go next. It also tied in with the eco-feminist readings of the last brief and women’s natural connection to nature and how this is disregarded by society, because its built on a male agenda. I then started to notice this agenda in everything, everyday, which reminded me of Sara Ahmed Everyday Feminism. She asked “how would a woman design it” which has really stuck with me as I realised I have been conditioned and constructed by a white male bias education and environment (which tied in directly to my exploration of affordance in this current brief). Which creates a cycle, which is a recurring theme in my work, and makes me think about time and human v machine (technology) and nature and shape and desire lines all of which I want to explore further within magazine design.
We wrote a poem based on something we found interesting from the lecture. I wrote a poem about how my daughter see compared to how I see. She has not yet had curiosity drilled out of her through school, she is still inquisitive and sees things I don’t. My eyes are old and ‘taught’ or ‘constructed’ hers are free and alive. Like the stars. Like nature. Like a natural desire line. Which starts to tie in with Ryan Ganders Loose Associations lecture.
We then wrote our poem as a map or writing system that visually communicates our themes. So I made an eye of stars to summise stars as eyes and eyes as stars. My eyeballs look down. My daughters look in all directions. In doing this I realised how much more she sees than I do everyday. Then my eyeballs break out as I am learning to see in new ways through this course and this workshop. The starts and eyes create desire lines and mapping of a life and a younger life and how we see.
After the workshop I placed the words back into the visual map to see how the poem looks in a written form from the visual mapping and created this. Which is an interesting starting point to start to develop investigations and interrogations into how a woman might design it.