Category: Positions-Triangulating

4 Oct 2022

Building My Work System

It’s all started with blind-shot reference reading: 100 Years of Magazine Covers,

(I think maybe it will relate to my practice, somehow.)

Eventhough, I do not really want to be glued with magazine covers.  At this point I did not know the term of thing(s) that make(s) me fascinated to examine deeper. Forget about this moment, I tried to understand this book by its pattern or by how they decided to cataloguing the covers.

I thought it will be all about design-grid-typography-standardization context, but I did not expect I found other things from this book, 

that is how they cataloguing the covers based on some themes which relate to current event when the covers are designed.

Source: 1 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/392881272813

Source: 2 https://www.rsbcn.com/100-years

It is like reading how the world turns through cover design. (Very interesting to me!)

Then I tried to focus on how they write the narrative in each section.

They go back and forth from one reference to other references, seeing how this relates to that, and that relates to those.

To make myself keep focusing on one thing, I tried to build my own system to work. I decided to imitate what they did in my starting point of this project by:

1. Making a list of prompt about unpleasant events/phrases/ideologies in my childhood that relate to identity, 
2. Cataloguing them by broader themes. 
3. Building narratives from the prompt keywords/sentences and refer to academic references

That is a tremendous amount of things that bothered me, since almost two decades ago, and some of those things keep bothering until now in more discreet-but-I-can-feel way. But, in the initial project, I tried to focus on how hair advertisements in print media affected my 10 years old self in understanding the world.

‘Why print media?’ maybe you will ask.

It is simply because that was the only access that I could have, since Internet was not a common thing back then in Indonesia in mid 2000s. (That thing is only for ‘working males’ I guessed.) In other words: Print media surrounded me. 

I got a kid magazine subscription (and that was enough to entertain a primary school student—me for once a week). Besides, when I accompanied my Mom to the beauty salon in the neighborhood, a pile of women magazines were the only things to keep me busy for hours of waiting my Mom’s hair to be done. 

The print media really influenced my early years in a way it constantly constructs my ideology towards standardization. It keeps repeating same notions which I accepted it as reality or maybe, how the world really works. It also resonates until the time I reached adulthood stage of life, the time I can step out of it, and look at it to see how it shapes my sense of being. 

Img desc: 1 Prompt I use as outlines

Img desc: 2 Some of the drafts for the story

(In the middle of connecting and making the stories for each point in the prompt, I found interesting contents on Instagram, a funny way to translate academic research into something that easily relates to common people and how they communicate it in a series of comics.)

Source: 3 https://www.instagram.com/vulgadrawings/

Crit Notes:

Replicate something and changing small part to see how its changed

Gathering stuffs > compress > spread > compress > spread 

Shrinking rather than do the whole things

When Matthew said about the gathering stuffs, the dialogues w maya ober helps me alot in that process

She kinda help me to broaden my pov so I dont feel trapped anymore, and then she tried to narrow it down again, and I found the interesting echoes from playing with the newspaper.