Syllabus

Description

DP3004 Text & Image

Academic Year 2016/17

Elke Reinhuber elke@ntu.edu.sg ADM#04-17

Course Description:

Learning Objective

Providing students via practice-based learning an understanding of the way that text and the photographic image can be combined in a fine art context.

 

Content

From their use in advertising and newspaper editing to the practices of visual artists from all strands, the combination of text and photography in the same space has shown itself capable of producing significant and resonant results. This course will explore the way that these two languages can be united and the useful conflicts and engagements that they engender.

 

The role that developing technologies are starting to play in this field is examined and the students are encouraged to develop their own response to the topic using analogue and digital media.

 

 

Learning Outcome

The students will have acquired an overview of text usage as practiced within the photographic milieu. The students will have an introductory knowledge of the many technical and aesthetical skills needed to understand how to enhance and enrich their images by means of integrating text to their work.

Student Assessment

  1. Final Assessment: 40%
b. Continuous Assessment: 60% (of which at least 15% is participation)

Continuous assessment components may include:
Studio-based exercises and projects
Individual, group and team-based assignments

 

 

As this class is running for the first time, this is all open to your suggestion and optimization.

Assignments

Short term exercises:

  1. Describe an image which you didn’t take (and let someone else take it)
  2. Create an image and share it with someone in the group who will then interpret and write a story/ description
  3. Take an image with text in it
  4. Add text into your image
  5. Write a believable but contradictory story to an image which you took and find the best way to combine both

Outline

Course Outline

1 Introduction to the course

2 Text as Image – from Hieroglyphs to DaDa

3 Text as Narrative – do we read what we see?

4 Text and the message:
- Jim Goldberg, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Martha Rosler etc

5 Text as language:
- Art and Language

6 Mid Sem presentation of short-term assignments

7 Images and story-telling: from a single image to a series and the possibilities to combine them

8 The Image is Text – adventures in digital coding, glitch, interaction

9 The spoken word and the image – lecture performances and moving image

10 Titles are more than just a single word

11 Text to support the image: descriptions and catalogue texts

7 – 12 In the second part of the course, you will develop an independent concept and execute as final assignment.

12 + Final presentation of assignments

Readings

Textbooks/Artist References

  1. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin
  2. Roland Barthes: Rhetoric of the Image
  3. William Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, MIT Press
  4. Martin Lister, The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, Routledge
  5. Kate Linker, Love for Sale: the Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger, Harry N. Abrams
  6. Sophie Calle:
    • The address book
    • Voir la me
    • Sophie Calle, m’as-tu vue
    • Blind
    • Exquisite pain (TR642.C157)
    • True stories
  7. Lorna Simpson
  8. Barbara Kruger
  9. Duane Michaels
    • Raised by wolves
    • War is only half the story : the Aftermath Project
  10. Jim Goldberg
  11. Walker Evans
  12. Walid Raad : I might die before I get a rifle

 

 

Miscellaneous

Short presentations of artists:

Share with the class an artist or designer who worked with text:

Here are a few suggestions

Narrative: Duane Michals, Sophie Calle, Jim Goldberg, Walid Raad

Text and the message: Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Martha Rosler etc.

Text in the image: Daniele Buetti , Shirin Neshat, Ed Ruscha

Background and Cultural Context