The lecture covered design history starting with the Guttenberg Press which was established in 1456. How it impacted society and aided an illiterate population due to being capable of the mass production of the written word when prior to that, becoming literate was reserved for certain classes of society. This is when thought was put into the layout of pictures and words and how they interacted. It also went on to cover lithography and offset lithography that is used today.

An interesting part of the lecture for me was the impact of photography on painters. The question of whether photography was art or whether it had transformed the entire nature of art was raised, much like last week with cave paintings. It caused change and I think this change was good. It gave rise to so many new methods and approaches like abstract and surrealism that could incorporate meaning and emotion in completely different ways.

There arose a need to take a different approach to capturing a subject matter, such as capturing movement in paintings. The idea that it had freed them from representation and to have new perspectives. The Nude Descending Staircase by Marcel Duchamp was a great example of this. When I look at this painting I see more than just a staircase and I feel more than what I would when just looking at a painting of a staircase. Its feels chaotic, and almost as if it’s a metaphorical decent into something deeper than just to a lower level. The chaos gives me the sense of movement, and the questioning meaning behind it of how certain things could possibly be represented.

I also thought the point made about captions having become obligatory for use in aiding representation today interesting. In the past the title of a work was enough and was able to explain it entirely, but now we take subject matter out of context, to extreme extents at times with works that reference a number of social issues in abstract ways, that captioning is needed to explain the work outside of the title.

There was also a discussion on whether seeing a work of art in person is as good as or better than just seeing a picture of it. While the Mona Lisa was the topic of the discussion, and I don’t much care for it, it did get me to think about works that I am interested in. It certainly does create a different atmosphere when you are in the presence of a piece of work that you admire. Walter Benjamin brought forth the idea of an artwork having an aura, which really resonates with me. I will expand on this in my post that covers the reading.

One part of the tutorial I would like to highlight was the discussion on the relationship between major world events and design. My group spoke about how we feel they are correlated with one another and are constantly influencing one another as a kind of trigger-response scenario. Large world events seem to trigger a new outlook on design and the approaches used to capture the new world.