Instructions

Procure a camera. I recommend a good quality, $3,000 DSLR—but, in lieu of that, anything that will take pictures :) You can check out decent cameras through ITS, use a cell phone camara, a disposable model, or a simple point-and-shoot.

Now create a single-page, photographic "self-portrait" and/or tell a photographic story of "a day of my life in a visual culture."

Create this portrait or story by identifying everything "visual" in your daily path or actions: from the moment you wake until the moment you go to sleep, make a note of what, in your environment, is meant to be seen or relies on sight.

  • What actions or interactions throughout the day are based on, or require, seeing?
  • What "wants" to be seen?
  • What demands to be seen, pushing its way into your line of sight?
  • What is there but is visually hidden?
  • What is visible but should be hidden?
  • What is looked at, looked into, looked around, looked down to or looked up to?
  • What hurts to look at?
  • What gives you pleasure to look at?

YOU WANT TO CREATE a work of graphic art which records the visible world as it appears to you every day, every hour, every minute.

TRY TO MAKE EVIDENT, implicitly or explicity, a thesis about your material—some central, over-arching point about the experience.

PUT IT ALL TOGETHER as a .pdf, Word, Photoshop, Power Point, or other document.

DESIGN IS FLEXIBLE; be imaginative while also observing the basic principles of visual design. Your piece can be linear, spacial, collaged, or other.

MAKE THIS PIECE VERBAL-VISUAL. That is, it should include both writing and images: aprx. 30% writing, 80% images.

POST A DRAFT AND A FINAL VERSION in our Bb Drop Box. Draft due: Jan. 19/20. Finish version due: Jan. 26/27

To get prepped for this project:

        1. read this piece on portraiture from the National Gallery of Art;
        2. explore this page and its many links from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery;
        3. read all current Power Point presentations;
        4. read all current textbook assignments.

 

Your aim is to

a) create a piece of art to be displayed in public,

and

b) make a statement about who you are in relation to the visual culture you live in and/or a statement about how "the torrent" of images in your daily world looks.


This is a very open project. Use your imagination.

 

Audience

This is for yourself as well as for anyone interested art, visual media, and self-portraiture. Imagine that your final product will be on display in the NDSU Union Gallery, or the Plains Art Museum downtown, or The Spectrum, or The High Plains Reader, or Nichole's (a great pastry shop in Fargo which displays local art), and so on. Your audience is intellectually curious, well-read, and well-aquainted with the fine arts. They may also have some background in media studies or rhetoric, and are very curious about the world generally. You'll need to create something original, illuminating, rich and moving to impress this audience.

Purpose of the Assignment

  • I want you to "slow down the media torrent" a bit by actually noticing it.
  • I want you to observe exactly how much of your world is visual (as opposed to aural, olifactory, tasted, or felt on the skin).
  • I want you to warm up your imagination, analytical skills, and powers of observation.
  • I want you to practice your design skills.
  • I want you to you gain some appreciation for the art of portraiture and its possibilities. (Note: it's interesting to consider that EVERYTHING in our increasingly visual culture might be a "self portrait"—images that collectively say something about who we are as a culture. At any rate, I do want you to learn something about one very specific kind of visual art: the portrait and the self-portrait.)
  • And, finally, I want you to practice in "verbal-visual writing"—something increasingly expected of people in just about all professions.

 

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