OUGD501- The Gaze and the Media Lecture Notes

according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’
(Berger 1972)

Berger was saying that women have internalised themselves

Hans Memling ‘Vanity’
(1485)

Triptych of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (front) (c.1485)
Oil on oak panel, 22 x 15 cm (each wing) Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg

Because she holds a mirror in her hand its ok for us to look at her.

Mirror is a recurring theme.
Aloud and encouraged by the position of the body to gaze at the woman.

The hand held on her brow covers her gaze encouraging us to look at her. Invited by the artist and woman to look.

Sophie Dahl for Opium

Deemed to be to sexual when first published due to the hand on the breast.

To get it published they turned it on its side to emphasise the face.

Titus's Venus of Urbino, 1538

Looks out the side of her eyes in a flirty manner to entice the viewer. The position of her left hand appears to cover herself in a sexual manner.

MAnet- Olympia 1863

Again the hand position stops the view of the body.

Celebrating the powerful female figure.

Ingres Le Grand Odalisque 1814

Gorilla girls.

Displayed on buses. 

Manet- Bar at the Folies Bergeres 1882

Self portrait 
warped perspective 
look of exclusion 
highlights the superficiality of paris of the time

Jeff Wall Picture For Women 1979
repeats vacant inactive look

the photographer separates himself from the woman
complex use of space 

The action of the camera replicates the male gaze
figures behind take no notice get on with their day
model wears sunglasses which prevents her gaze being seen

Eva Herzigova 1994
Normalisation of the female body unclothed 

R Coward 1984

results in a detachment of women as real people

become objects form of voyeurism

Male body is used as well and objectified
hes sleeping which conveys spying 

The male gaze always looks back at the viewer 
nothing passive 

Marilyn: William Travillas dress from the Seven Year Itch 1955
she looks at the way bodies are chopped up by the camera
sexual scene certain parts of the body are close up
females are never the leader of the narrative 

darken room invites people to fantasise 
sexually charged environment 

Artemisia Gentileschi
females show aggressive active roles which is unusual 
wants to reposition the role of woman in art history

Pollock, G 1981

•Women ‘marginalised within the masculine discourses of art history’
•This marginalisation supports the ‘hegemony of men in cultural practice, in art’

•Women not only marginalised but supposed to be marginalised

Cindy Sherman
1977 -79
Her work challenges the gaze
she appears to be lost in moment in though
awkwardness of the hand position 

Barbara Kruger 
1981
challenges the idea of why can't we look at human body 

Sarah Lucas 1990
eating a banana 
refers to the sexual 

She uses food to describe  

Tracey Emin 2001
Money photo
challenging critism 

Caroline Lucas MP in June 2013
was asked to remove the t-shirt 



Lucy-Ann Holmes, who founded a campaign to end the publication of topless "Page 3 Girls" in The Sun newspaper last year, told the BBC that while she had also received death threats, she had not been subject to the level of "sustained attack" experienced by Ms Criado-Perez.

"I'd say it's a constant undercurrent, when women write about feminist issues or are exposed in a lot of media for speaking out about sexism they tend to get a barrage of abuse and threats," she said. (www.bbc.co.uk)

Elizabeth (Betsy) Fry (21 May 1780 – 12 October 1845), née Gurney, was an English prison reformer, social reformer and, as a Quaker, a Christian philanthropist. She has sometimes been referred to as the "angel of prisons".

Fry was a major driving force behind new legislation to make the treatment of prisoners more humane, and she was supported in her efforts by the reigning monarch. Since 2001, she has been depicted on the Bank of England £5 note.

She received up to 50 threats a day via Twitter including threats to rape and murder.

Although she reported the abuse police lost evidence and she was forced to delete her account

Lucy-Ann Holmes, who founded a campaign to end the publication of topless "Page 3 Girls" in The Sun newspaper last year, told the BBC that while she had also received death threats, she had not been subject to the level of "sustained attack" experienced by Ms Criado-Perez.

"I'd say it's a constant undercurrent, when women write about feminist issues or are exposed in a lot of media for speaking out about sexism they tend to get a barrage of abuse and threats," she said. (www.bbc.co.uk) 

Ignores the fact that a female won the title before 

Social networking takes advantage of the vulnerable. 
perpetuate the male gaze 

Paparazzi shot of Princess Diana 

The Truman Show 1988 dir Peter Weir
Fantasy extension of big brother 

Should be using the power to vote for politicians instead of demoting celebrities 

Bigbrother 2011

making voyerism in everyday activity 

the fantasy is they can't see us but we can see everything they do

'Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of 'just looking'. Victor Burgin 1982

OUGD504- Type Research

KERNING

The term kerning refers to adjusting the space between two letters. 

If letters in a typeface are spaced too uniformly, they make a pattern that doesn’t look uniform enough. 

Gaps occur, for example, around letters whose forms angle outward or frame an open space (W, Y, V, T, L).

TRACKING

Adjusting the overall spacing of a group of letters is called tracking or letterspacing. 

By expanding the tracking across a word, line, or entire block of text, the designer can create a more airy, open field. 

In blocks of text, tracking is usually applied in small increments, creating a subtle effect not noticeable to the casual reader. 

Occasionally, a single word or phrase is tracked for emphasis, especially when CAPS or small caps are used within a line. 

Negative tracking, rarely desirable in text sizes, can be used sparingly to help bring up a short line of text. 

White type on a black background is considered more legible when it is tracked.

LEADING

The distance from the baseline of one line of type to another is called line spacing.

It is also called leading, in reference to the strips of lead used to separate lines of metal type. 

The default setting in most layout and imaging software is 120 percent of the type size. 

Thus 10-pt type is set with 12 pts of line spacing. 

Designers play with line spacing in order to create distinctive typographic arrangements. 

Reducing the standard distance creates a denser typographic color, while risking collisions between ascenders and descenders. 

Expanding the line spacing creates a lighter, more open text block. As leading increases, lines of type become independent graphic elements rather than parts of an overall visual shape and texture.

READABILITY/LEGIBILITY 

Legibility 

-can be defined as the ability a human reader to read something without effort. It can depend on many things. Often, the size of font chosen restricts legibility. For our purposes though, legibility is discussed in light of typeface choice.

Readability 

-can be defined not on a letter by letter basis, but how he combination of letter are read within a larger body of text. In other words, readability is defined by the amount of effort one needs to make to read text, not single characters.

On the left we have what is called readable type, while on the right we have a legible type.

OUGD504- Colour Research

Subtractive colour works on the basis of reflected light. Rather than pushing more light out, the way a particular pigment reflects different wavelengths of light determines its apparent colour to the human eye.

Subtractive colour has three primary colours - Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (CMY)

The pigments we have available to use don't fully absorb light (preventing reflected colour wavelengths), so we have to add a fourth compensating pigment to account for this limitation.

We call this "Key", hence CMYK, but essentially it's black. Without this additional pigment, the closest to black we'd be able to render in print would be a muddy brown.

01. Hue
This is the position on the colour wheel, and represents the base colour itself.

02. Saturation

This is a representation of how saturated (or rich) a colour is. Low saturation results in less overall colour, eventually becoming a shade of grey when fully desaturated.

03. Brightness

This is how bright a colour is, typically expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100%. A yellow at 0% brightness will be black, while the same yellow hue and saturation at 100% brightness will be the full yellow colour.

Clashing/Complementary Colours

Two colours from different segments of the colour wheel arecontrasting colours. 

For example, red is from the warm half of the colour wheel and blue is from the cool half. They are contrasting colours.

You may also see these opposite colours referred to as complementary colours which generally refers to each of a pair of colours that are directly are almost directly opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as purple and yellow.
Colours that are directly opposite from one another are said to clash -- although this clashing or high contrast is not necessarily a bad thing

How to colour-match your print projects....

Spot colours

Basically, an ink colour is ready-mixed to produce a particular colour

The more spot colours used, the more film and plates are needed, hence the increased costs.

To keep costs down it's possible to create tints of a spot colour without needing extra film or plates.

Some spot colours lend themselves perfectly to being reproduced using the 4 colour process, whereas others can cause slight problems in that the match is not perfect.

PANTONE

In 1963, Lawrence Herbert, Pantone's founder, created an innovative system for identifying, matching and communicating colours to solve the problems associated with producing accurate colour matches in the graphic arts community. His insight that the spectrum is seen and interpreted differently by each individual led to the innovation of the:

PANTONE® MATCHING SYSTEM®, a book of standardised colour in fan format.

Today, the PANTONE Name is known worldwide as the standard language for accurate colour communication, from designer to manufacturer to retailer to customer, across a variety of industries.

Graphic Arts – Printing, Publishing & Packaging

The PANTONE PLUS SERIES for multimedia graphics – today’s version of the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM – is the definitive international reference for selecting, specifying, matching and controlling ink colours. 

The PANTONE FORMULA GUIDE, a two-guide set consisting of 1,677solid PANTONE Colours on coated and uncoated stock, shows corresponding printing ink formulas for each colour.

The digitally created PANTONE CMYK Guides provide a comprehensive palette of 2,868 colours achievable in four-colour process printing. 

The PANTONE COLOUR BRIDGE® GUIDES coated and uncoated compare solid PANTONE Colours to their closest possible match in CMYK four-colour process that can be achieved on a computer monitor, output device or printing press. 

Other PANTONE Colour Reference Guides for the graphic arts include METALLICS, PREMIUM METALLICS, PASTELS and NEONS.

OUGD501- Identity Lecture Notes