Component Materials&Subject Matter Consideration

I have considered using playing cards to apply into my artworks as a metaphor of rich and poor; King&Queen cards as a metaphor of higher social class, the rest lower numbered cards as a metaphor of middle class and lower class in social class devision. 

Before doing it, I had to read and get to know about the cards.

Playing Cards

A complete set of cards is called a pack (UK English), deck (US English), or set(Universal), and the subset of cards held at one time by a player during a game is commonly called a hand. A pack of cards may be used for playing a variety of card games, with varying elements of skill and chance, some of which are played for money. Playing cards are also used for illusions, cardistry, building card structures, cartomancy and memory sport.

Playing cards were invented in Imperial China. They were found in China as early as the 9th century during the Tang Dynasty (618–907). By the 11th century, playing cards were spread throughout the Asian continent and later came into Egypt and Europe.

Playing cards first entered Europe in the early 14th century, probably from Mamluk Egypt, with suits (sets of cards with matching designs) very similar to the tarot suits of Swords, Staves, Cups and Coins (also known as disks or pentacles), and which are still used in traditional Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese decks.

^{In the late 14th century, the use of playing cards spread rapidly throughout Europe. Documents mentioning cards date from 1371 in Spain, 1377 in Switzerland, and 1380 in many locations including Florence and Paris.}

^{The four suits now used in most of the world — spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs — originated in France in about 1480.} 

The King

 is a playing card with a picture of a king on it. The usual rank of a king is as if it were a 13 (or 14); that is, above the queen. In some games, the king is the highest-ranked card; in others, the ace is higher. In pinochle, schnapsen, and many other European games, both the ace and the 10 rank higher than the king.

The king of hearts is sometimes called the "suicide king" because he appears to be sticking his sword into his head. However, it is debated whether or not the sword and hand holding it actually belong to the king, due to a different design pattern that could indicate someone else stabbed him. The king of hearts is the only one of the kings without a mustache, whereas the king of diamonds is the only king not depicted carrying a sword, wielding an axe instead giving him the card playing nickname "the man with the axe." Additionally, the king of spades is the only king looking to the right, and the king of clubs is the only one with his weapon's tip on the ground.

^{In many card games, when all four kings are acquired by a single player, they are commonly called "the four horsemen".}

A Jack

also Knave, is a playing card which, in traditional American and English decks, pictures a man in the traditional or historic aristocratic dress generally associated with Europe of the 16th or 17th century. The usual rank of a Jack, within its suit, plays as if it were an 11 (that is, between the 10 and the Queen). As the lowest face (or "court") card, the Jack often represents a minimum standard — for example, many poker games require a minimum hand of a pair of Jacks ("Jacks or better") in order to continue play. 

As early as the mid-16th century the card was known in England as the Knave (meaning a male servant of royalty). Although "Jack" was in common usage to designate the "Knave," the term became more entrenched when, in 1864, English cardmaker Samuel Hart published a deck using "J" instead of "Kn" to designate the lowest-ranking court card. The Knave card had been called a Jack as part of the terminology of the game All-Fours since the 17th century, but this usage was considered common or low class. However, because the card abbreviation for Knave was so close to that of the King ("Kn" versus "K"), the two were easily confused.

In early games the kings were always the highest card in their suit. However, as early as the late 14th century special significance began to be placed on the nominally lowest card, now called the Ace, so that it sometimes became the highest card and the Two, or Deuce, the lowest. 

Historically, the ace had the lowest value and this still holds in many popular European games (in fact most European decks, including the French Tarot Nouveau, do not use the "A" index, instead keeping the numeral "1"). However, in most games popular in the English-speaking world, aces have the highest value of all cards in a suit. Many games, such as poker and blackjack, allow the player to choose whether the ace is used as a high or low card.

The United States introduced the joker into the deck. The stylings of the joker and its function are almost identical to the Fool from the original French Tarot deck, which had been removed in the transformation to the standard 52-card French pack.

The Joker came to be represented as a clown or court jester by the 1880s, due to its assumed name and also probably borrowing from The Fool in tarot cards (predecessors to the French Tarot Nouveau, which depict The Fool as a lute-playing jester, were becoming popular in Europe around the same time).

Besides the choice of applying playing cards as a component of the contents of my artwork, I have also considered a few other materials to involve into the project. Such as food wrap, mask, dead flowers, jewelries and etc. 

The reason I want to apply food wrap into the project as a component is because the food wrap is used to contain food freshness and prevent food getting spoiled or "corrupted" as if the objects or subjects indicate the meaning of corruption, decay and rots with the hope of saving and conserving to be sustainable. 

For example, I wrap the king, queen and jack playing cards to denote a meaning that the upper class such as government being corrupted and apparently they intend to conserve the sustainability of their reputations but still wealthy.

The reason why I apply masks into the project is because a mask disguises a person and it represents dishonesty when corrupted people intend to hide the real side of themselves, the mask indicates hypocrites in my project.    

Reference

1. ^a b Wilkinson, W.H. (1895). "Chinese Origin of Playing Cards". American Anthropologist VIII (1): 61–78. doi:10.1525/aa.1895.8.1.02a00070.
2. ^ ^a b c Needham 2004, p. 132
3. ^ ^a b c Lo (2000), p. 390.
4. ^ Needham 2004, pp. 131–132
5. ^ Needham 2004, p. 328 "it is also now rather well-established that dominoes and playing-cards were originally Chinese developments from dice."
6. ^ Needham 2004, p. 334 "Numbered dice, anciently widespread, were on a related line of development which gave rise to dominoes and playing-cards (+9th-century China)."
7.  ^a b c Needham, Joseph and Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin. (1985). Science and Civilization in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing. Cambridge University Press., reprinted Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd.(1986)
8.  Donald Laycock in Skeptical—a Handbook of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, ed Donald Laycock, David Vernon, Colin Groves, Simon Brown, Imagecraft, Canberra, 1989, ISBN 0-7316-5794-2, p. 67
9.  Trionfi - Tarot and its history
10. ^ Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society, p. 290, Rodney P. Carlisle - Sage Publications INC 2009 ISBN 1-4129-6670-1
11.  "A Brief History of Playing Cards". US Playing Card Co. Archived from the original on 2007-08-26.
12. "International Playing Card Society - The Bourgeois Tarot". I-p-c-s.org. 2010-09-09. Retrieved 2012-03-31.

Project Proposal

Project Proposal: Corruption 

Statement of the Problem

After reviewing and reading many articles and literatures and personally experiencing and feeling different situations when corruption occurs and when people seem to give up everything and stop caring what chaos will cause to others because of money. I want to start up a project that will address this problem by creating artworks that will ask the viewers questions in a way to build visualisations and visual communications with the viewers: the artworks will ask questions and the viewers will answer the questions by their own consciousness and realisation. I want to create a book that will sequently showcase the content and the concept of the artworks by experimenting using different medias and mediums to create the content; such as photography, photo manipulation, analogue mediums etc. I also want to create an artistic and experimental film that will be uploaded on the internet, the links of the film will be encoded into a QR code and attached in the content of the book. 

What is wealth? It is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. The modern concept of wealth is of significance in all areas of economics, it is quite all about an important word in our lives, it’s called “money”. An individual who is considered wealthy, affluent, or rich is someone who has accumulated substantial wealth relative to others in their society or reference group, in fact the more accumulation we have the wealthier we are. Defining wealth can be a normative process with various ethical implications, Modern philosophers like Nietzsche criticized the fixation on measurable wealth: “Our ‘rich people’ – those are the poorest! The real purpose of all wealth has been forgotten!” (Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bänden) 

Wealth is a restrictive agent for people of different classes because some hobbies can only be participated in by the affluent. Partly as a result of different economic conditions of life, members of different social classes often have different value systems and view the world in different ways. As such, there exist different "conceptions of social reality, different aspirations and hopes and fears, different conceptions of the desirable.” As someone becomes wealthier, their demand for cheap fast food is likely to decrease, and their demand for more expensive steak may increase.

On the other hand, there is opposite side of wealth when poverty occurs. Poverty is general scarcity or dearth, or the state of one who lacks a certain amount of material possessions or money. (Poverty: merriam-webster 18 November 2013) Absolute poverty or destitution refers to the deprivation of basic human needs, which commonly includes food,water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care and education. United Nations defines Poverty as it is the inability of getting choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and clothe a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living in marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation. (United Nations. Retrieved 27 May 2011) Every year nearly 11 million children living in poverty die before their fifth birthday. 1.02 billion people go to bed hungry every night. (fao.org. 19 June 2009) Additionally, poor children are much more likely to suffer from hunger, fatigue, irritability, headaches, ear infections, flu, and colds. (Solley, Bobbie A. 2005) These illnesses could potentially restrict a child or student's focus and concentration. In Zimbabwe, a number of girls are turning to sex in return for food to survive because of the increasing poverty. (Thomson, Mike 12 June 2009) 67% of children from disadvantaged inner cities said they had witnessed a serious assault, and 33% reported witnessing a homicide. (Atkins, M. S., McKay, M., Talbott, E., & Arvantis, P. 1996)

Our world unfairly contains wealth and poverty, one is at the north pole and the other is at the south pole, the contrast of them contains an enormous difference. As for the ordinary people who live in the middle class aren’t in the best situation either, for example: the burdens of debts and uncontrollable corruption schemes.

Banks and merchants have always been guilty of burying people in debts they can’t possibly pay off with the real intention of making them their slaves. Political slavery may not exist today, but economic slavery is rampant. If politicians are not trying to print up money, shave the gold coins, or other corruption schemes involving money, they’ve been guilty continual budget deficits, never having enough money, and war machines, with their imperialistic ambitions to take over the world.  Also, the human mind seems to never have enough, and is never satisfied. It wants the best society has to offer, and will often step on anyone to get to the top. (Jason Summers November 30, 2009)

Corruption seems to happen everywhere in our world, it is spiritual or moral impurity or deviation from an ideal. Specific acts of corruption include "bribery, extortion, and embezzlement" in a system where "corruption becomes the rule rather than the exception.” (Znoj, Heinzpeter 2009) Government revenue can be diverted away from basic services by corruption. Funds from aid and natural resources are often sent by government individuals for money laundering to overseas banks which insist on bank secrecy, instead of spending on the poor. (The Economist. 12 March 2009) Bribery is the improper use of gifts and favours in exchange for personal gain. The types of favours given are diverse and include money, gifts, sexual favours, company shares, entertainment, employment and political benefits. While bribery is the use of positive inducements for corrupt aims, extortion and blackmail centre around the use of threats. This can be the threat of violence or false imprisonment as well as exposure of an individual's secrets or prior crimes.

Humanity’s main problem is most of their time is dedicated not toward learning, but toward reproducing, eating, sleeping, working pointless jobs, and general existence. (Jason Summers November 30, 2009)

A lot of people agree with one of my opinions about most of private colleges: tons of private universities and colleges are no longer in concern of educating the students instead they “rip-off” students by all kinds of excuses, they seem to be more in concern of business rather than education. Another corrupted situation that happens to private universities and colleges is that some students are so wealthy that they can easily bribe off the lecturers on purpose to pass certain subjects or exams, some are more rampant as if they have tons of money, so they can easily buy a degree or diploma certificate. And that is the darkness of the private education nowadays.

Another personal opinion of mine is that working and jobs are somehow “pointless” which does not mean that I encourage everyone to stop working to make a living. Working is the most fundamental   thing in everyone’s life to make a living and feed on food and water by gaining money to exchange the must-needs in our life. But when working drives people to the goal of getting more and more money for accumulation to be wealthy isn’t the ideal of working anymore, instead it becomes a slave master that whips and yells; where’s the fun in that? In Russian, word “работа” means work, and this word origins from the word “раб” which means slave. When we are engaged with a work, we should find the balance of Yin Yang to work for fun and fundamental needs rather than an amount of number to chase after, when we lose the balance, we will lose our mind eventually. 

Unfortunately, the news profits from this psychological tendency, and exploits it in the worst possible way. Also, complex issues are not presented in proper light and instead are given in fifteen second “sound bites”, leaving people more confused than informed. Instead of educating and informing, they instead rile up emotions and mostly spread propaganda which benefits the big corporations. They also tend to incite party politics and left/right paradigms, instead of uniting people on issues. (Jason Summers November 30, 2009)

The other day I told a classmate of mine not to look for learning resources from newspapers because they are full of lies, sadly it’s somehow true. I have heard many stories of how wealthy companies and the powerful people bribe the media to hide the truth and cover up what’s really happening to the events in a way to benefit a reputation of themselves. World war is still on but it’s called Media War instead. A perfect example of media riling up emotions instead informing is the incident that happened months ago, Malaysia Airline MH370 disappearance. There were tons of explanations and assumptions from different medias but never addressed the truth. News channels were filled up with analysis interviews which only gave people more and more questions and confusions in mind.

The main problem I want to address through this project is what I have stated and referenced above, the corruption that’s happening in this unbalanced and unfair economic world. I plan to build a human consciousness through visual communication in a form of asking questions through my artworks. 

Objectives

This project is a final project that I will conduct in the period of my university life, it is also a very important step to my future study and career, therefore I plan to put a lot of efforts into the project as a professional practice and personal achievement. 

This project involves a book project, the book will contain the use of conceptual photography on purpose to improve and achieve my personal creative thinking skills and planning skills as well as photography techniques and editing techniques. This book project is also an achievement in creative layout and other knowledges related to explore different uses of medias and mediums to execute the project, in both analogue and digital methods. It is also an achievement and opportunity to practice the metaphor skills in choosing subject matter.

This project also involves an artistic & experimental film, it is an achievement of cinematography, post production, creative thinking and metaphor practices. The main objective is to produce a project that triggers the audience and viewers thoughts and consciousness through the artworks of the project. Therefore the artworks involved should ask questions and make the viewers think.

Strategy & Target Audience

As this project is conceptual, artistic and metaphorical, firstly I will be doing research and reading to get to know the meaning of corruption and the contrast of wealth and poverty, therefore I will have evidences and materials to express in my artworks through metaphors and impress the viewers. 

As the main topic and issue of the project is corruption, when applying metaphor into my artworks, I will need to have enough evidences as a base and find the connections between the subject matters and evidences; which will involve creative thinking skills, enough experimentations, wide materials & subject matters exploitation. For example: the dictionary defines word “corruption” in many ways, although all of the definitions have a certain connection. The word corrupt when used as an adjective literally means "utterly broken". The word corrupt also have a lot of other meanings as an adjective: 1.guilty of dishonest practices, as bribery, lacking integrity, crooked; 2.debased in character, depraved, perverted, wicked, evil; 3.made inferior by errors or alterations, as a text; 4.infected and tainted; 5.decayed, putrid; when the word corrupt is used as a verb with objects it also has a definition that is to mar and spoil. (Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2010-12-06)

This project will trigger the viewers consciousness and ask questions to themselves from their visualisation of my artworks and also answer the questions by themselves through their own visual perceptions. The target audience of the project is aimed to most-everybody in our world: the wealthy ones, the impoverished ones and normal ordinary people who live their lives as corruption seems to happen everywhere.

Mood Board 

References

Jason Summers: Problems Of Humanity – A Quick Outline November 30, 2009 - http://www.jasonsummers.org/problems-of-humanity-a-quick-outline/

Nietzsche. Werke in drei Bänden. III, p. 419.

merriam-webster. Retrieved 18 November 2013

"Indicators of Poverty & Hunger". United Nations. Retrieved 27 May 2011.

Solley, Bobbie A. (2005). When Poverty's Children Write: Celebrating Strengths, Transforming Lives. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, Inc.

Thomson, Mike (12 June 2009). "Zimbabwean girls trade sex for food". BBC News. Retrieved 24 October 2010.

Atkins, M. S., McKay, M., Talbott, E., & Arvantis, P. (1996). "DSM-IV diagnosis of conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder: Implications and guidelines for school mental health teams," School Psychology Review, 25, 274–283. Citing: Bell, C. C., & Jenkins, E. J. (1991). "Traumatic stress and children," Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 2, 175–185.

Znoj, Heinzpeter (2009). "Deep Corruption in Indonesia: Discourses, Practices, Histories". In Monique Nuijten, Gerhard Anders. Corruption and the secret of law: a legal anthropological perspective. Ashgate. pp. 53–54. ISBN 978-0-7546-7682-9.

"Banks, graft and development". The Economist. 12 March 2009. Retrieved 21 June 2011.

"Corrupt | Define Corrupt at Dictionary.com". Dictionary.reference.com. Retrieved 2010-12-06.

Gestalt Principles

Gestalt Principles

Gestalt is a psychology term which means "unified whole". It refers to theories of visual perception developed by German psychologists in the 1920s. These theories attempt to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups or unified wholes when certain principles are applied. These principles are:

1. Similarity occurs when objects look similar to one another. People often perceive them as a group or pattern.
2. When similarity occurs, an object can be emphasised if it isdissimilar to the others. This is called anomaly.
3. Continuation occurs when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another object.
4. Closure occurs when an object is incomplete or a space is not completely enclosed. If enough of the shape is indicated, people percieve the whole by filling in the missing information.
5. Proximity occurs when elements are placed close together. They tend to be perceived as a group.

The eye differentiates an object form its surrounding area. a form, silhouette, or shape is naturrally perceived as figure (object), while the surrounding area is perceived asground (background). Balancing figure and ground can make the perceived image more clear. Using unusual figure/ground relationships can add interest and sublety to an image.

Example of Similarity

Example of Anomaly 

Example of Continuation

Example of Closure

Example of Proximity

 Figure

The word above is clearly perceived as figure with the surrounding white space ground.

Examples of Figure and Ground

An exercise sheet

References

1. The Gestalt Principles:http://graphicdesign.spokanefalls.edu/tutorials/process/gestaltprinciples/gestaltprinc.htm