Unit 13: Persuasion / Overview & Assignment
Unit 13 / Narrative persuasion / Hammett Nurosi
Questions
- How can design be persuasive?
- How does time, timing, framing, and sequence operate when making a visual argument or persuasive message?
- Can designers develop new messages (visual narratives / experiences / memes) by mining existing works of visual art/design?
Unit Summary
In this Unit we are asking you to consider your visual world: one filled with clickable, interactive, time based, and temporal digital information, stories, opinions, and persuasions.
Students will begin to see possibilities in their own work as they practice being persuasive and effective communicators and manipulators of visual language.
Learning Objectives
- To study the basic elements of visual narrative especially in film: framing, image, transition, timing, sequence, point of view (pov), and type of shot (long, medium, close-up).
- To become familiar with mise-en-scène (a term used in film, painting, architecture, etc. which refers to the considered placement and arrangements of elements of a visual composition).
- To explore the tools of rhetoric and persuasion using visual, verbal, and time-based means.
- To consider time, sequence, and editing techniques when framing visual arguments.
- To look at the role of symbol, icon, sign in creating visual/verbal messages
Protocol / Schedule
[Week 1]
Work in groups of 3 (ideally). Work together, and through discussion and analysis develop an understanding of the formal and thematic language of Adam Curtis’s film HyperNormalisation and present your point of view to the whole class in 212 in one week.
DUE OCT 31 MONDAY
Using the film as provocation and/or inspiration, each team will create a five-minute screen-based viewing experience to share with the whole class that establishes an argument and point-of-view (pov) around a particular issue drawn out of the film. (you may use video, keynote, pdf, browser/html etc.)
Consider how your presentation is a provocation — and how your team might employ such techniques as seen in the film, framing, collage, mise-en-scène, sequence, juxtaposition, timing and sound, etc., in order to persuade your audience (us) around a particular issue that you want to address?
Key questions:
- How does HyperNormalisation relate to current social, political and economic conditions?
- How does the author of HyperNormalisation frame the work (is it positioned as documentary? Art? Combination? How is it perceived by its audience and why?)
- What are the techniques and design considerations that are employed in this film; how does it attempt to influence its audience? Consider how information and ideas have been condensed; look at choices of image, music, typography and text, editing, narration, montage, film-clips, silence (“gaps”), advertisements, products, political language (i.e., freedom, democracy, perception management), etc.
- Consider how sequence and order of events works to highlight point-of-view.
Deliverable: Each team will have exactly five minutes to perform their presentations. Among other approaches, we encourage you to consider using screen-based media. Present to the entire class in 212 on Monday, October 31 at 1:10pm.
Persuade [Week 2-3]
Phase Two
Begin Monday Oct 31
Due Monday Nov 14 Nov.
Final project: 2 min (max) screen-based narrative.
The team activity was essentially a group effort of analyzing and comprehending the context: in this case Adam Curtis’s film.
The design from here shifts to students working individually to develop their own content stemming from phase one.
— Consider HyperNormalisation as a system of sign and symbols
Where those elements can be adapted to your ideas and concepts or
Even your design can be built and constructed around sign and symbols.
— Consider at the very basic level HyperNormalisation’s questions while at the same time pointing out the systematic relation between economic, politics and technology.
—Consider the idea of the film’s plot (events in the narrative) and the point of view and style in which the story is told, prior to proceeding with your concepts.
— Start by identifying different elements of group finding and where your own personal interest is and how can interact with it or not.
— Writ, sketch and storyboard your concepts, ideas and study can go further with the notion of screen based media (even as the simplest form of the slides presentations where images follows successively each other with a beginning and ending in real time.
— If you chose to combine or add sound to your image(s) consider the influence and role that (sound) can play and add to the overall impact of your design and movie,
— Consider the fundamental difference of 2D design (print media) with 3D and the presence of movement (even with slides presentation).
— Consider in your design is there a need to use Type and typography, with images and how they can work with each other?
— Your individual project can take a small component from the film (such as a series of sequential still shots, a brief clip, or a collection of curated shots) and create a new “content” and new work that tells a story and express your own point of view and narrative. Also with the ”Hypernormalisation” experience it could
move to a new and different direction that has less relevance to it.
— Your final projects should illustrate a personal point of view. Create a narrative that is more appropriate to your interpretation.
ResourcesFilm
HyperNormalistion (MP4 file)
Reviews of HyperNormalisation
- Adam Curtis: Another Manager of Perceptions
- Hypernormalisation: Adam Curtis plots a path from Syria to Drumpf, via Jane Fonda
The films of Errol Morris
- The Thin Blue Line (full film)
Reading
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Novel by Scott McCloud
Visible Signs (Second Edition): An Introduction to Semiotics
in the Visual Arts by David Crow
Additional Inspiration / References
Michael Wallin, 1988 Decodings
Real Fantasy, Prada, Fall 2012
Perception Management (wikipedia)
Dennis Cooper blog deleted by Google story
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue
The Sprawl (Metahaven)
Holly Herndon, Home (Metahaven)
