INFORMED PRACTICE

Utopia: Introduction

Fantastic Planet: ’73 animated film from a different planet

Metropia: ’09 film about marketing in a dystopia

Love, Death and Robots: three robots

World of Tomorrow

Brave New World

Metropolis

Aldous Huxley Interview

A clockwork Orange (anthony burgess)

Station 11

Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood)

Voltaire

Vox

Human Form Doyeon Noh

The Machine Stops 

The Last Night of The World

The speculative narrative: the what if?

• Sources of real fears and possibilities 

Anthropocene

Dystopias urging us to look at our own world

• Contextualising 
• Critically analysing 

Assessment Structure:

• Essay (1600 words)
• 11/05/2023 3:00PM (BST)
• Focused on the prompts on Moodle

Interim Presentation 1

• Short film with dystopian theme
• 13/04/2023
• Last night with the world

Interim Presentation 2

• Following visit week

Source Texts

What is dystopia

• A reflection of society
• What we could lead to 
• Social issues being led to extremes
• Are real dystopias accurate to imagined ones? 
  • A melting pot of social issues
  • Everything collapsing at once
  • Which issue is going to end us

Dystopia

• Aesthetics
• Tone
• Mood
• Ideology
• Meanings

6 Elements of Dystopia 

• World Building 
  • Tied to its past
  • Exposition of 1984
• False Utopia
  • A world that seems perfect on the outside, but is dysfunctional
  • Brave New World
• The Event
  • What happened?
• The Totalitarian State
• The Resistance
• End Game
  • Not all dystopian fiction needs a happy ending

Reminder of the importance of personal freedom, and the value of the individual

Conversely, perpetuates negative stereotypes

Do dystopian narratives reinforce negative stereotypes and issues

Dan Harmon’s Story Circle Structure 

*heroine’s journey

Education 

• Who controls educations
• Classist 
• Limited knowledge 
• What does our education lead to 
• Education as a tool 
• Maintaining the class (Tower of Babel)

Women in Dystopia 

HW: Watch Metropolis (1927) 

HW: Watch Paths to Utopia 

• How is this constructed? 

The Bank^TM

Feminine Sentences: Women being inferior but still exploitable (colonizable) 

Princess Mononoke

John Whyndam The Chrysalids (1955)

Yevgeny Zamyatin We (1924)

We (2021)

Jane Austen Northhanger Abbey

Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre

Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman 

Brave New World 

Kate Wilheim Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang

Joyce Carol Oates Hazards of Time Travel

Christina Dalcher Vox

Naomi Alderman The Power

What is at stake for your characters? 

• People are what happens to them
• Character (layered? Plot point?)

Representation

• Who is allowed to have agency/make things happen/act in a story?
• Diversification in film
• Camera and choreography 

The Essay:

• Why should I care?
• Quotes and openers 
• Titles

• Opening a discussion around the subject
• Critical questions about context (historical, social, economic)
• Characterisation
• Representation

• Consequences and rules of this world
• What are the characters there to do
• What do they do
• Who has a voice (meaningful dialogue)
• Are the roles active, pro active
• Who is allowed to win, fight, survive on their terms
• What makes the protagonist, why are they different
• Dominating scenes, taking down characters
• Are they allowed to be aggressive?

• Meaning
• Subtext
• Context
• Theory
• Psychology
• There’s more I just couldn’t write it down in time

What is an author/director/designer communicating?

• What’s more to the story?
• What’re they focusing on?
• Subtext? 

What techniques do those in power employ to keep others below them?

• Ruling orthodoxy 
• Space
  • How is space repurposed as an extension of the authority?
  • Supervision etc
• Language, speech
  • Limited language 
  • Newspeak in 1984
• Thought
• Bodies
  • Handmaids Tale
  • Perfect citizens, others
  • Otherness seen as threatening
    • See: Frankenstein 
  • Marginalisation 
• Actions
• “If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticise” -George Orwell

A woman’s place

• Power is the patriarchy 
• Two stereotypes (antitheses)
  • Saint/sinner
  • Virgin/whore
  • Modest/revealing
  • Mother/stepmother
• Women as catalytic characters (often passive)

Female Gothic

• Fictional female characters as a glimpse into history
• Tropes that persist today 
• Classic idea of women
  • Passive, stereotypical presentation 
  • Stereotypes of the time
  • Childlike representations of women 
  • Diversion from the stereotypes serving as warnings
• Passivity 
• Always having the women return to their domestic nature at the end
• Difference between male and female roles

1984

• Sex as a tool
• Sexual frustration transforming into hysteria, war-fever
• Clothes, costumes as dangerous
• Love, happiness directed towards anyone other than the party, big brother

Early female protagonists

• Females step aside after fulfilling the catalyst roles 
• The manic pixie dream girl
  • A complex, layered character reduced to a couple of traits, serving only to compliment the man 

The Handmaid’s Tale

1. Roles and hierarchy 
2. Men still in power

Dialogue between Oppressed and Oppressors 

Mutate Britain

HW: Character design in the year 2525

• Mutants in the future 

The Bank^TM

2000AD

Industrial/ Post industrial music

Naturally Born Cyborgs Andy Clark (Thinking and Technology)

Eduardo Paolozzi 

Joe Rush (The Mutoid Waste Company)

• Industrial materials 
• Post 1984
• Transformation 
• Word play (towed//toad)

• Process based work 
• “Mutating“ things made for other purposes
• Settings and atmosphere 

Capitalism vs communism

• Capitalism to have won
• Berlin Wall (separation between east and west) coming down
  • Freedom to travel across 
  • Western, liberal societies
• Soviet Union collapse 

• Using sculptures out of old military hardware
• No man’s land between east and West Berlin 
• Setting

• Artists asking 
  • Where am I? 
  • What do I want?
• Intention 

What do I want?

Desiring Machines 

• Deleuze and Guattari 
• Paris
  • The youth believed that the society was moving backwards
  • The defeat of fascism 
  • Authoritarian society 
  • Protests led by students 
• The body without organs/organisation 
• Schizoanalysis? 
• Network of relations that bring art into being

Where am I?

• Where is my thought process
• Thinking extending out into the world
• Internalism vs Externalism 
  • Conflicts being within or without you 

Cognitive Externalism 

1. Enactedness 
   • How an organism acts with the world and how the world acts on us 
   • These ideas constitute mental processes
2. Embodiment 
   • Cognitive processes depend on and include bodily structure and processes
3. Embeddedness
   • Embedding things into other tools 
   • Something we embed into environmental practices 
4. Extendedness
   • Extending our cognition 
   • Part cognition part environment

Externalism within editing

Future Utopias and The Art of Noise 

Modern Art

• Creating a new space, forms
• Height of industrialism 
• Getting faster 

The Art of Noise 

• Luigi Russolo 
• New approach to musical instruments 
• Industrial sounds (reflecting environments)

Futurists 

• War as a form of world Hygiene 
• The weak would be exterminated 
• Fascism, glorifying aggressive actions 
• Fighting against modernism, feminism and cowardice
• The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe

Vorticism 

• London based modernist art movement 
• Jason Epstein (Rock Drill, 1913)
  • Celebration of masculine relationships with machines
  • Sexualising technology and man
  • Pneumatic drill penetrating a female form
  • Found objects
    • Art trends at the time
    • Duchamp’s Fountain and wheel
    • Questioning of art, without technical skill
  • Easier to read as an artwork 
• Torso in Metal from Rock Drill (1916)

London Post WWII

• New beginnings, Post-War dreams 
• This is Tomorrow 
• Breaking down hierarchies between “high” and “low” art
• Commercial items into art
• Happenings 
  • Breaking down artistic conventions 
  • Roles of artists and viewers

The Institute of Contemporary Archaeology 

• Chaos and decay of 60’s London
• Finding artworks in bomb sites (Shepherds Bush)
• Free spaces
  • Literal and metaphorical 
  • More room for expressions
  • Abandoned areas and rubble 
• Different attitude to what art is 
  • Having a scene of artists
  • Inviting artists personally 
  • Influence of digital technology in today’s art scene 
• Innovative art
  • New artwork
  • Not commercial 
  • Disrupting what gallery spaces are
• Disrupting the role of a creator 
• Complete/incomplete artworks
• The audience becomes makers/curators when scavenging pieces for the exhibition

Cybernetic Serendipity 

Cyborg (Cybernetic organism)

• Computer art 
• Confusing the audience at the time 
• What type of art can you make with computers
• What kinds of worlds to computers create 
  • Relationships to the tools you use
  • Influence what you can produce 
• Focusing on possibilities 
  • Its not about a individual’s achievements
  • The possibilities that emerge from their art
• Feedback loops 
  • Communication control
• Responses to computer art 
  • Met with skepticism 
  • Art was a celebration of one’s ability to render human forms or the human experience 
  • “High arts” opera, pairing 
  • Lack of general skill in computer art

AI

• Idea of people being obsolete 
• Making non artists artists 
• Argument that marcel Duchamp also stole someones work for Fountain

Art Scenes

• Art as a part of an artist’s world 
• The Setting of an Artwork
• Art and its influence to cultures 

Destructive Art 

• Gustav Metzger 
  • Polish artist 
  • “British eccentricness
  • Subverting our ideas of the establishment
• Showing the absurdity of “order”
• The chaos of war, within what seems like a regimented society
  • 1984’s “perfectly functioning” society
• Found objects artwork 
  • Absurdist artwork 
• Symptoms of human destructive urges
• Auto creative art
  • Creating art while destroying artwork 
• Acid Paintings 
  • Spraying acid onto a canvas
  • Dissolving the canvas
• Vivienne Westwood’s Destroy 
• Dadaism

Radicalists as they get older

• What happens to the hippie ideal as they get older
• Is it the youth talking?

Temporary autonomy 

• Free society cannot exist
• Pockets of free society can pop up in different places 
• Self sustaibality 
• Self expression and freedom 
• “Pirate Utopia”
  • Undermining the total dependance on capitalism

Film and the Future 

The Bank^TM

Nosferatu the Vampire (1922)

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari 

Lotte Reniger

The Shape of Things to Come // Things to Come 

High Rise 

The Platform

Solaris 

Stalker 

Futurism in Metropolis 

• Influence in terms of sharp lines 
• Towers and city scapes
• Lang moving to New York 

The Machine 

• Feeding people to the machine 

Machine man 

• The temptress narrative 
• The motherly, nurturing role in Maria 

Tower of Babel 

• The exhibit at the Tate, influence from the movie 

Weimar Berlin 

• Interesting things in terms of art and culture 
• Art movements 
• Clubs and bars 
• German expressionism 
  • Shadowy and surreal 
  • Chiaroscuro 
  • Grotesque characters
  • Nightmarish 

Abduction scene 

• Abstract, cubist 
• Catlike movements 
• Being almost obscured by objects in the foreground
• Dark/white 
• Sound building up the tension 
• Predatory feel // woman framed as prey 

Words vs visuals 

• Influence of German expressionism on Alfred Hitchcock 
• High contrast, framing

“Space is not a reflection of society. It is society.”

• How has film turned these realities into spatial reality?

Where are we?

• The white man saviour complex 

The “vertical zoo”

• How spaces influence us 
• Our relationship with spaces 
• Hierarchy of society 

Natural spaces 

• Gender roles, our place in society 
• Built environments are never just geography 
• Saying something about the setting they live in 

Representation in dystopia 

Spaces and environments in dystopia