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save-the-spiral · 3 years

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PLS PLS LIST THE SWAPS!! TELL ME ABOUT THE SIBLINGS AND ALSO HIFUMI BECAUSE I LOVE HIM (IF YOU WANT!) I will also send more questions in the morning too, excited to see what you’ve been working on!!

OK OK OK !!!!! AHH! So, before assigning talents, I swapped the pools, so for the first game, I use the talents from the second game, and vis versa! For some i listed gender, sexuality, or neurodivergencies, though this isn’t all of them, and I haven’t developed them all to the same level!

This is SO long. I didn’t even bother mentioning things like my plans for the killing games. (I have DR1 planned out in full, but only parts of DR2 and the v3 anime)

THANK YOU FOR THE ASK MY HEART SKIPPED A BEAT IN HAPPINESS WHEN I SAW I HAD NEW ASK NOTIFS!!

LIST:

Trigger Happy Havoc (first game)

Kyoko Kirigiri- Ultimate Luckster- Mastermind (: Sometimes lesbians can be evil okay! was trained as a detective like everyone in her family and didn’t get the ultimate :) she’s definitely not mad about that :) her luck cycle depends on how far she plans things ahead. her good luck is when she’s spontaneous! She hates when ‘normal’ people are accepted by ultimates.

Makoto Naegi- Photographer (Mostly wildlife and nature photography, with Sayaka helping him for some animal photography (: trans and bi <3 One of sayaka’s birds nests in his hair like all the time)

Kiyotaka Ishimaru- Ultimate Swordsman (AUTISTIC ICON, has trained in kendo since he was a kid, then was essentially given away to the Fujisaki clan by his very stressed dad. Semiverbal, rarely speaks.)

Chihiro Fujisaki- Ultimate Yakuza (Taka is her bodyguard! His family is in debt to hers, the Fujisaki clan is the most powerful in Japan. trans icon, of course, dates Sayaka! Very direct, though she’s far more delicate and polite when talking to taka, her best friend)

Sakura Oogami- Ultimate Nurse (Works as an EMT- her clan still is in martial arts, so she’s still very buff, she assists in injuries at the family dojo. Autistic Icon)

Asahina Aoi- Ultimate Gamer (ULTIMATE ADHD. streams and has a ton of fun, will ramble while breaking records, demigirl who loves her girlfriend sakura :)

Mukuro Ikusaba- Ultimate Chef (Works best with ‘cheap’ food, and making them taste good. a byproduct of growing up on the streets with junko, and junko being bored of the same old food they dug out of the trash. now works closely with junko for her teams’ nutritional needs! autistic and sapphic.)

Junko Enoshima- Ultimate Team Manager (there are SO many sports she can never get bored, and the professional scene is always changing! prefers coaching womens’ teams, because being an ultimate brings them more publicity and usually higher pay :)

Mondo Oowada- Ultimate Prince (OH MY BOY. trans adhd icon. now the crown prince of Novoselic, with a reagent in his place until he comes of age. His service dog Chuck is a maltese and an absolute sweetheart. Chihiro takes him under her wing to teach leadership. also dates taka later OF COURSE, though they’re poly and I may add more ppl to their relationship later.)

Celestia Ludenburg- Ultimate Musician (specializes in violin, most strings, though she can play any instrument. grew up poor, dedicated herself to an instrument and persona to cope)

Byakuya Togami- Ultimate Musician (Yep. two musicians. two catty trans gay icons about to throw down. they HATE each other and grew up as rivals. specialize in classical, they literally tore a professional orchestra full of grown adults apart trying to make them side with who was the best musician. they’re so good that they’re matched, and Hope’s Peak accepts them as one student and combined ultimate. they room together. they fight. Literally if one of them gets expelled, the other does too, so they’re STUCK. eventually they become literally inseparable and insufferable together like the WORST siblings. I love them.)

Sayaka Maizono- Breeder (animal handler) (Specializes in birds!!!!!! has songbirds on her shoulders all the time. will give unsettling animal facts without realizing they’re unsettling. sends her songbirds to serenade chihiro when they start dating <3)

Yasuhiro Hagakure- Gymnast (you see this tall goof who acts like an older brother to everyone and wonder HOW he’s a gymnast. he’s completely different in competitions, though still lighthearted. becomes a big brother figure to mukuro and junko especially <3 also trans bc i say so.)

Leon Kuwata- Traditional Dancer (he just. kinda hates it. it takes SO much work and effort but he takes to it naturally. his cousin kanon is NOT like in canon, instead she’s helpful. he’d literally rather be doing anything else. doesn’t know how to do anything like... basic either. can’t cook. cant do his own laundry. everything was dedicated to traditional japanese dancing before he attended HPA.)

Toko Fukawa- Engineer (writes schematics and is very good at it. gets VERY upset when her plans go wrong. her notes are orderly and perfect. host for their system!)

Syo- Mechanic (a factive of genocider syo, NOT an actual killer. she’s a protector mainly, and also is more adept at hands on skills when it comes to fixing things, her hands are less shaky. Her notes are a disaster and she does it to spite Toko.)

Hifumi Yamada- (???) (reserve course) Protagonist! My BOY. HIFUMI IS GOOD OKAY. He’s autistic and loves anime and gaming! he’s not particularly ultimate-leveled at them, or anything else! Attending Hope’s Peak as a reserve course student! At one point he joins the student council as a reserve course representative even if he’s only a freshman :) He’s also a moderator in Hina’s livestream chat, under the username of JusticeHammer, fastest ban hammer this side of the internet. He's internet friends with hina and sakura, and doesn’t realize Oh We Go To the same SCHOOL until he bumps into them. and realizes hina doesnt know what he looks like. but sakura does. its hilarious. he’s aroace, and during the year they’re locked in HPA, is in a queer platonic partnership with Hina and Sakura, while they’re dating each other. it’s great.)

Goodbye Despair! (second game)

Peko Pekoyama- Lucky student (ohohoh. her luck relies on her conviction. if she has doubts her bad luck strikes HARD. trans!, was taken in by Fuyuhiko’s family when she was a baby, grew up as just another kid in the family. They all expected Fuyu to go off to HPA on his own and then BOOM acceptance letter)

Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu- Programmer (He. gets so angry while coding. He has an array of rubber ducks to talk to and work through his coding issues with. trans of course. Very protective of Peko when people say she doesn’t have a ‘real’ ultimate. ADHD and Autistic)

Sonia Nevermind- Writer (Literary Girl) (Her family immigrated to Japan when she was young! She writes a lot of serial killer novels, murder mysteries and horror and all that! Trans and bi :)

Gundham Tanaka- Detective (YEAH my guy is a detective. still talks Like That. Trans and bi and he and Sonia were kinda-dating (t4t autistic power couple in the making) when things started happening. He spends some time with his cool older sister who he looks up to a LOT. He and Sonia talk through things together a lot, they both have those red string walls, one for murder cases, another for a fictional plot lmao.)

Mahiru Koizumi- Moral Compass (my GIRL. autistic. Her morals rely a lot on people taking responsibility and being reliable, and she ends up having to work through some biases she didn’t realize she had when she arrived at HPA. Is still protective of Hiyoko, though that protectiveness is spread a bit thinner to extend to the rest of the class.)

Hiyoko Saionji- Clairvoyant!!! (HI YES I COULD TALK ABOUT HER FOR DAYS. Has actual visions in dreams and when she suddenly faints, but doesn’t really realize they’re uhh Real Visions for a WHILE. uses her status as an ultimate clairvoyant to trick and bully kids when in school for a LONG time, though her homelife wasn’t great with her grandmother trying to find ways to make her visions more consistent. SHES ALSO 12 WHEN SHE JOINS THE 77TH CLASS. she’s just so advanced in academics and her ultimate is so interesting hope’s peak cant HELP but scout her early. she has SO many issues guys no one appreciates hiyoko enough, autistic gifted kid hiyoko my beloved.)

Akane Owari- Gambler (started gambling to help out her family and Got Good at it. is very very conscious of money and food like all the time. Runs the hope’s peak betting pools once she arrives. these ultimates bet on a lot of things. she ALWAYS wins. until she doesnt!!!)

Mikan Tsumiki- Martial Artist (ohhhh Mikan. Still anxious and clumsy (though not like THAT in canon) and literally no one looks at her and thinks Oh The ULTIMATE martial artist?? it isn’t until you see her in the ring that you understand. She started learning self defense as a kid because her (bad) parents essentially said she had to rely on and protect herself and no one else would help.)

Kazuichi Souda- Pop Idol (OH TRANS ICON? he’s nervous and paranoid about Everything still, though now it’s like. oh the entire world is always watching my every move this is Okay (: has the brightest neon album eras. he literally keeps up a like. weird chad persona when interacting with people because he’s masking how hard he’s constantly just internally screaming.)

Nagito Komaeda- Soldier (AHAHAH my mans got issues problems disorder he’s a messssss, this trans guy, this absolute gay. this boy leveled a city of thousands of people with his own hands and some bombs. Still has medical issues, but most of his like. treatments and medicine is hold hostage as long as he stays in line. believes the ends justify the means and anyone who dies to him is obviously weak, because look at him! he’s weak, but that doesn’t matter because he doesn’t have to be the strongest, he just has to be stronger than the weakest scum.)

Chiaki Nanami- Heir (OOF. Agender, uses any pronouns. Doesn’t really. enjoy being the heir. grew up with Byakuya in the same circles. she treats the economy and stock market and stuff like games. enjoys gaming but isn’t good at them. collects so many things. has halls full of collections. Her parents stopped controlling her once she was able to prove she had more money than them and could literally bankrupt them if she wanted.)

Hajime Hinata- Baseball Star (Chiaki’s best friend, his family was upper middle class until he hit it BIG as a baseball star. wants to do BIG things and wants to attend hope’s peak more than anything!! Doesn’t really think of baseball as his THING, just a means to an end! trans :)

Teruteru Hanamura- Biker Gang Leader (started with shaking down some jerks who didn’t pay their food and drink tabs at his mama’s restaurant. now he RUNS their tiny town. His siblings are essentially gang mascots, he works hard to keep them out of trouble (while bringing them to like. meetings where he ends up beating a dude almost to death. its fine). most of what he does it to get more money to keep the restaurant afloat and care for his mama with her health conditions.)

Nekomaru Nidai- Fashionista (the drama. the CHAOS. most people are like ohhh we can never understand this artistic genius when he’s literally just. vibing and has ADHD and a love for coffee. Works a lot on accessible clothing lines for disabled people! Also he and Kazuichi work together sometimes, Nekomaru is good at calming Kaz down and seeing like, the root of whatever problem and making it better. ALSO A TRANS ICON and just flaunts it.)

Imposter- In the hope’s peak days they are impersonating Ryota Mitarai, as a part of the 77th class. In the Killing Game they impersonate Mondo Oowada as the Ultimate Prince. They’re doin’ their best.

Ibuki Mioda- (???) (Izuru Kamakura) Protagonist! Gundham Tanaka’s older sister (though they’re in the same school year). Nonbinary and using just. an array of pronouns alongside she/her, and jokingly fights with gundham for neopronouns like MOM said it’s MY TURN on the rawrself pronouns. She attends the reserve course to stay at her brother’s side. She dresses loudly and acts even louder because !!! she wants to stand out!! in the middle of this drab reserve course hell!! but when things go down, she wants to be someone, to be worthy of being her amazing brother’s big sister. so she accepts some offers.

NON-KILLING GAME:

Ryota Mitarai- Ultimate Analyst (stays in his room. He’s terrified of the outside world but fascinated by it. watches hope’s peak academy through security feeds, picking up on little details. he just wants to understand things but never looks at the big picture.)

Chisa Yukizome- Ultimate Boxer (Homeroom teacher!! She’s working really hard and believes in everyone! Some are intimidated by talent, but she’s never hurt anyone outside of the ring! Dating Kyosuke)

Juzo Sakakura- Ultimate Student Council President (Has anger issues, though his work at reigning them in assisted in becoming an Ultimate. Was responsible for security and the Hope’s Peak student council. Dating Kyosuke)

Kyosuke Munakata- Ultimate Housekeeper (Meticulous, works himself to the BONE even if he’s good enough to not have to do that. Is working on establishing another Hope’s Peak! Dating Chisa and Jozu!!!)

Seiko Kimura- Ultimate Blacksmith (GIVE MY GIRL KNIVES!! She’s an anxious gal, always wearing a facemask that filters the air in her forge because she has some respiratory problems. she prefers making more decorative pieces like an artist, but sometimes can create utilitarian pieces or tools to fit specific needs. Still a doormat)

Ruruka Ando- Ultimate Pharmacist (She constantly asks Seiko for new tools for her developments in medicine, saying its all for the advancement of humanity, so Seiko denying any request is SELFISH, though she never thinks to make anything for seiko’s health issues. Dating Izayoi. Specializes in medicine for mental health. Not Doing Great :)

Sonosuke Izayoi- Ultimate Confectioner (He loves sweets. LOVES them. Creates things that look plain, ordinary. but taste so GOOD you CRY and maybe ascend for a little bit. sometimes Ando makes cool new drugs to put in the sweets, who knows! It’s a mystery! He always has like. a huge refrigerated case of fresh cakes, and constantly has a lollipop in his own specialty recipe in his mouth.)

#ask #former-champion #danganronpa #danganronpa trigger happy havoc #super danganronpa 2 #I could tag every character but consider this: ITS 3 AM IT TOOK ME OVER AN HOUR TO WRITE THIS #not wizzy #dangan ronpa

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the-black-birb · 4 years

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Love in Time Analysis

I wrote this instead of writing an English essay. Enjoy!

Tsukishima and the Reader Character are Foils for One Another – and how that affects their love life

In writing, a foil refers to when one-character shows contrasting qualities of another in order to highlight said qualities. Most often this is between a major and minor character or a protagonist and antagonist, but in this case, we see it between the two major characters.

Love in Time revolves around the contrast between Tsukishima and the Reader’s character traits. In the beginning it is fairly straightforward: the Reader stands up for their friends while Tsukishima constantly puts them down. This is further exemplified in their first meeting: the Reader is helping out Yachi because she is Kenma’s friend and Tsukishima dreads even being with her. This begins the first conflict between the Reader and Tsukishima, in which their differences clash with one another. However, it also highlights a surprising similarity. Both of them appear unafraid of confrontation. This is seen repetitively with Tsukishima’s character: he makes snide remarks on his friend’s posts and is not afraid to tell them what he thinks. But the first time we see this with the Reader is when they first meet Tsukishima in person at their apartment and she calls him out for being generally rude to her friends. In this way, both Tsukishima and the Reader are different from their friends. While they’ve created a whole chat dedicated to keeping an eye on Tsukishima, none of his friends have approached him about his destructive behavior. Similarly, Kenma and Kuroo despite knowing there are problems with Y/N’s situation, never ask them about it. In this, we see Tsukishima and the Reader are set apart from the people around them.

The ‘meet cute’ with the Reader and Tsukishima at his apartment is what truly sets the story in motion. One could argue ‘wasn’t it the first meeting in the art class?’ because that’s when their interactions first began. However, it’s the Reader’s actions at this point that cause Tsukishima to change. Before that, their interactions were coincidences of little consequence, but it is this moment that Tsukishima finally gets his head out of his ass. But why is that?

It’s later established that Tsukishima struggles deeply with insecurities about his college major and path in life, and because of that he shut his friends out. But this wasn’t a decision he made consciously. As he was eaten up by insecurities, he thought that surely everyone around him must be happier than him and chose to put them down. His issues don’t excuse his actions, and the Reader is the one who makes him aware of this in pointing it out to him. The Reader was simply the first person who had the guts to say something to him about it, because all of his friends before that were too consumed with worry that mentioning it might set him off. Because the Reader had only known him since he’d started college, they were able to see him from a broader perspective. And from that perspective, he was a dick.

This obviously causes a greater conflict and disparity between Tsukishima and the Reader with no end in sight and that is where the Ginger incident solves things. In a moment of vulnerability, the Reader relies on Tsukishima for reasons out of their control. Although neither of them wanted to be with each other, they were forced to nonetheless. By being with one another in this moment of vulnerability, it is once again a catalyst for change. Unlike beforehand, where the Reader’s comments caused Tsukki to reflect on his own actions different, now they view each other in a different light. It doesn’t excuse their earlier conflicts, as we see they still don’t get along with each other entirely, but it is a pathway for greater change. That is why when Tsukishima tries to ‘apologize’ for his first comments to the Reader, the Reader believes his apology is sincere even if he doesn’t really say “sorry.”

From here on out, the initial conflict between Tsukishima and the Reader is solved. They don’t really have issues with one another, but they’re still unfamiliar and that makes them awkward. They gain a semblance of friendship; Tsukishima goes with the other guys to visit the Reader while they’re in the art studio and it’s hinted that they have other conversations we aren’t privy to. However, it’s at this point that Tsukishima’s inner conflict with himself comes to light and the use of these two characters, the Reader and Tsukishima, as a foil for one another really begins to make sense.

At the root of Tsukishima’s problems is his fear of having a career that makes him miserable. To Tsukishima, this means he wants to play it safe and take a job where he knows he will make money. He’s always been condescending and of high intellect so he expects it of himself to be better than those around him. However, when he hit college that was proven wrong. Many of his friends are more successful than him, not only in terms of their career but in other ambitions as well. Tadashi and Yachi live together, and no one has any doubt that they will get married. His best friend has managed to find a partner for life and it’s mentioned that he also has a new job. Akaashi is incredibly successful as a writer and his articles are shown to go viral. Finally, Hinata (who Tsukishima always made fun of and looked down on for his ambitions) is living his dream as a professional volleyball player. Compared to them, Tsukishima feels that he has accounted to nothing. Even if he may have a high-paying job in the future, none of that amounts to success.

Enter the Reader. Aside from the conflict with Tsukishima, the Reader hasn’t been shown to have too many personal problems. They go to college and live with friends and generally have a happy-go-lucky attitude. However, the same night that Tsukishima leaves in a fit of anger, it’s revealed that the Reader has been lying about their situation. In truth, they do not have a place to stay or the same success that their friends have been granted. Many of the Reader’s quirks, taking on weird jobs like nude modeling and being overly happy for free food, are explained in a different light.

The Reader’s conflict is different from Tsukishima’s. Almost the exactly opposite, actually, and that is what makes them a successful foil. It’s addressed that the Reader has a fear similar to Tsukishima’s; they don’t want to take on a career that makes them miserable either. However, the way they handle this fear characterizes them much differently from Tsukishima.

The Reader, despite their mother’s wishes, chooses a career path that has very little money to its name. They take a risk, knowing they may become a starving artist, because to them success does not mean the career that is the most stable, but rather the career that makes you happiest. Tsukishima and the Reader’s conflicts are similar because they are both struggling to stay afloat while the people around them are comfortable. This makes it difficult for them to confide in their friends about their issues, and instead they find comfort in one another. This foundation of trust based in mutual struggle is also what makes their relationship successful. Although they are different, they trust one another to understand what they are going through.

Through their differences, the two of them inspire one another to change for the better. When the Reader sees Tsukishima, who has been mothered by his friends since he entered college, they learn to ask others for help willingly. This allows them to go to their mother and speak truthfully so they can achieve a mutual understanding and their mother can help support them. In Tsukishima’s case, seeing the Reader take on a major that doesn’t guarantee a stable income encourages him to pursue a career in something he enjoys, even if he won’t get the big bucks a lawyer does. Their differences inspire change in one another.

While the two work to improve their lives and be honest with themselves and their friends about their conflicts, they stay at one another’s side. Tsukishima is the Reader’s column; he is where they go for stability. Similarly, the Reader is the first person Tsukishima trusts himself to confide in. This allows their romance to be successful because they trust one another. However, this could bring up issues of dependence on one another. That is why the Reader’s apprenticeship is so incredibly important to the story.

The time that the Reader and Tsukishima spend away from each other is after they have worked through numerous conflicts together. This time apart proves that they are independent people who can be successful in their own right without someone constantly at their side. When the Reader left, neither of them were fully ready to be in a relationship because they were still trying to work on themselves. They weren’t ready yet to be fully in love and still trust themselves enough to allow a relationship to foster healthily. But when the Reader returns, the two of them have fought through conflicts both together and alone and are finally ready to be in one another’s company. They don’t need each other, because they are fully realized characters and people in their own right. But they are ready to want each other and be together. That is why it is only at the very end of the story, when they have learned from one another and gotten to a point where they are happy with their own selves, that they are finally ready to be in love.

#love in time

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randomnumbers751650 · 4 years

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So, a followup of my previous analysis of the Arknights because I finally got Sora from the shop! You might be thinking, what does an aidoru have to do with a private military company managed by a penguin rapper? I believe, for the people in Terra, the real question is “why not?”

Spells need chanting to activate, a common trope of fantasy works. This is why a lot of casters have “Tactical Chant” as the initial skill, though it’s more clear in 4-10, when FrostNova and FrostLeaf duel while singing/chanting their spells, and Lava’s profile wonders if her proficiency with magic exists due to her music lessons. So, if you’re good at singing, you’re good at magic.

Even non-combatants are good with arts. A bit of spoiler (but not relevant to the main story spoilers), but if you complete the second extra stage of the recent event, you get a cutscene with D.D.D. commenting with her manager that her Arts almost caused a blackout in a presentation - the implication is that the special effects and sound engineering rely a lot on Arts, on magic, another indication that a lot of their technology resembles ours in a superficial level only.

This really says a few things about the culture of Terra, and how it revolves around Arts and originum. In military issues, the arms race is related not only on ‘who produces the best weapons’ but also ‘who produces/trains the best Arts users’. A single powerful Arts user can decimate entire armies. That’s what makes Talulah so powerful of an antagonist.

And this means some bureaucrats decided that the best chance at producing better soldiers is to train them from the crib - Frostleaf says she learned how to use her halberd before learning how to read. And these bureaucrats must have said “Why stop there?”, and leading to development of engineered people, homunculii, and it’s implied to be Ifrit’s case (and a character that shows up in the CN server is confirmed to be one). And these bureaucrats probably said “Why stop there? If we infect 1000 people, at least 20 of them will be able to shoot magical beams!” (not confirmed it happened, but would it be surprising if it did?)

Given how easy artists and scientists can become soldiers and how there are a lot child soldiers amongst the operators (though some just look young because of the art style, Kroos, Beagle and Eyja must be in their mid-20s), war must be a normalized thing in the culture of Terra. Nobody bats an eye to RI’s pharmaceutical/military activities, they’re more concerned about the amount of Infected they’re housing. Mercenaries have social media profiles and nobody bats an eye when RI is taking vacations in Siesta.

If we take parallels with real life, the world of Terra seems to be both a world where the Age of Heroes never truly ended and its geopolitics has some similarly to the Early Modern Period (1500-1750AD), obviously tempered by other periods (like the French and the Soviet Revolutions, and the Cold War).

When I say Age of Heroes, I consider the focus of armies to be on a legion of commoners supporting one or a few “hero” units - they still have their Herculeses, Arjunas and Gilgameshes (obvious FGO reference) -, whose feats become legendary (in fact, one reason why RI must be treated with respect is the amount of 6 stars they have in ranks). But even this is ending, with the Knights of Kazimierz being just a fancy club for fancy titleholders and the “last of w(spoilers for CN)”.

Again, it should be noted that nation-states are something relatively new in Terra, as the introduction of Siesta showed - they used to be city-states that became nation-states. The Empire of Ursus may have achieved stability earlier than others and, if correct, this is what caused its expansion.

For during most of our Middle Ages, the states relied on mercenary armies, that was the destination of the treasury resources, and there was no such thing as a national and professional army (there were national militias, though). In Terra, organizations such as Blacksteel, Penguin Logistics and even RI itself are important parts of its economic and political landscape.

Still, Terra is living through interesting times, and this is reason why aidorus are a coveted career for private military contractors.

#arknights #more worldbuilding analysis #a bit diffuse #but it should work

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stream-of-distracted-thought · 5 years

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Young Artists! It’s OKAY to use reference!

It’s okay to use reference! It’s okay to use reference! It’s okay to use reference!

Reference is NOT tracing! Reference is NOT cheating! Reference is NOT bad!

No seriously. Professional artists use reference all of the time.

So today, in one of the art groups I follow on FB, a young artist went about asking for critique on some anatomy with is normally nothing super special. However, this person stressed that they did not want to use reference and that they “relied on reference too much”. (Which isn’t actually a thing. I’ll explain why in a second.) Since I went to college for art, it was drilled into my head by my professors to always use reference when drawing. And these guys were the working in the field and teaching on the side type of guys.

When I was a much younger Starteller, I do remember having this notion myself. That “good” artists didn’t need reference and could just draw whatever. This SIGNIFICANTLY hurt my growth as an artist and was just a wrong opinion on the subject, period. But living in a small town with little access (and little want to) to proper art classes, and growing up during the era of dial-up and low-speed internet, I didn’t really seek things out. I dare say I was too proud too. And my artwork, especially when it comes to human anatomy, suffered. I think a lot of this mentality comes from pride or the pressures of peers and expectations to be “the artist” in your class.

Toss that aside. Professional artists use reference.

While I am no longer working as an artist professionally, I am going to share a few examples of my own, demonstrating what it means to use reference, both from life and from other sources. I’ll start with what I’m most known for: My Wings of Fire Chibi dragons.

Above is my usual workspace that I set up, every time I make a new dragon.

I ALWAYS have the Joy Ang general body plans for each dragon tribe in my file to look at for scale reference and some body reference since both I, and much of the WOF community care about some accuracy to these designs. I also will have color references if I have access to them, be they my own color choices, or someone else’s. As in the case with Blister, I pulled a diamondback image from online to pull colors and her pattern from. I think of this use of reference as transferring one style, to another.

Sometimes, I’m trying to imitate a style exactly. An example like that is my Steven Universe OC. To be very close to the style of the show, I drew almost three pages worth of Pearl, to get her body shape right, as well as head shape. When working on my Black Pearl, I always have at least one of the Pearls (Yellow or Blue too) up in my file to make sure I’m recreating the style as accurately as possible. The same happened for Black Quartz.

References are not always styles or poses; they can be techniques, color palettes, or generalized lighting reference. And its not limited to just those!

I’ve recently found this wonderful little image that I have up a lot now when painting a bit more realistically, to help remind myself what colors to use to help make my shading have a bit more pop.

And I finally found this one too that will help me with painting the lighting on a human face.

Outside of my chibi dragons, (And yes, I do other stuff than dragons) I will use reference from life to help create.

When doing my usual style, I use a photo reference I find online or capture myself to help me transfer the simpler shapes into the lineart. An example of this would be Starteller below (who I use reference to capture a cat’s body shape), and the SkyWing wing shape, which I lifted from a Peregrine Falcon.

However, I use reference much more closely when working on my “uncanny valley” style that I like to use for my monster designs.

This here is a character of mine, the Entity of Fear. We’ll call him Fear for short. His references are: a caterpillar (Face and over-all body shape), an ant (legs) and a mosquito larvae (for the tail-end). I wanted him to look creepy, alien and parasitic so referencing creepy-crawlies to capture this effect.

When it comes to scenery you need both lighting and life reference. Below is the concept art I did for a college project called The Library. Using the chosen reference of our Director, I produced this library (which was used). I lifted some of the perspective from photos that I can’t locate at this time. (I did this project around 6-7 years ago)

This is the one that sold the director! ^

The Trinity Library in Dublin was what I looked at and you can see the inspiration in the concepts.

But wait, you may be saying. “This isn’t the type of referencing I’M talking about! I’m talking about leaning on pose references!”

Yea, pro-artists do this too!

I, for example, use a couple of ways. One is that I use (when doing cartoon humans) DesignDoll to create custom poses that might be hard to find online. I leaned heavily on this method for last year’s Inktober.

The other is looking at real-life reference, be that from photos or a live model. Below is an image of a painting I’ve put aside for a bit while developing my painting skills. The lineart however was referenced from a photo I found online, as well as a reference to Alphonse Mucha’s Art Deco Style. The other three are from a live model.

My workspace while producing the lineart ^

These three were done with a live model during college ^

And if all my examples aren’t convincing enough, below are some images of student and pro work-spaces. Seriously. EVERY PRO ARTIST USES REFERENCE.

The idea that you can lean too heavily on reference is a myth. Using reference actually makes your art better in the long run as well as giving you a stable idea of what you want when creating. How closely you replicate that reference is up to the needs of the project. Obviously, if you were doing a portrait of someone from a photo or life, you would want it to be exactly the way it appears there. If you are creating something that isn’t real, your references will be used more loosely.

References are not restricted to poses, photos or life. They include color schemes, styles and techniques too!

When something isn’t being used as a reference:

-Copying another person’s artwork to a T, or so closely that it is obviously plagiarism. POSES FROM LIFE OR STOCK IMAGES DO NOT COUNT!

#reference #art reference #we all use it #and its a good thing #stream of distracted thought #starteller794

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dominicesquire · 5 years

Note

Which mechanic(s) in the game are you most proud of?

Thanks for the question! I would say the aspect of the game, not necessarily a mechanic, that I’m most proud of is the fact that I am doing all the graphics myself. Everything in the game that the player gets to look at, from the battle animations to the menus, and even the font, is all custom. This is a big deal for me, because this was definitely not always the case. Consider:

HELLBOUND

My first game, HELLBOUND, used a mix of a bunch of different pre-generated sprite sets. I drew the Battlers and the face sprites, but that was it. I had to rely on whatever I could find for the buildings, characters on the overworld, the battle animations, and so on. If I couldn’t find a pre-generated sprite for it, I couldn’t put it in the game. This was an issue that came up a lot and there was a considerable amount of stuff that I had to cut from the game just cuz I couldn’t find a sprite for it.

Also, the stuff I drew was in no way similar to the pre-generated sprites that I was able to find. I have a completely different art style than the clean, stock RPG Maker style.

The names of the characters were also not above their names, so if you forgot someone’s name, you were kind of SOL.

In terms of the battles, I used the lousy pre-generated battle animations and didn’t use custom battlebacks for the most part.

Here’s a couple screenshots for reference:

SUPER MARIA RPG

Moving onto my second game, I used a similar mix of pre-generated sprites and my own stuff. This time, I used pre-generated sprites from the same couple sprite sets, so at least the graphics were more consistent. I am a lot happier with the pre-gen sprites I chose for this game, as the style is a lot better in my opinion. However, these sprites were even MORE limiting, since I was only drawing from a couple pre-gen sprite batches.

For the faces, I got even lazier and just used screen grabs from the title screen that I had commissioned.

For the battlers, I drew those, and I used battlebacks that I stole from the game Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest.

So I would say for this game it mostly graphically suffers because the graphics are so jumbled and inconsistent. At any given time, you could be looking at like, five different artists work. The artist that did the pre-gen sprites, my own stuff, the artist that I had do the title screen faces, and whoever did the shit in FF: Mystic Quest.

However, I did have some graphical improvements over Hellbound. I like the style more, as I already stated, and I was able to figure out how to get the names of the characters above the text box. At least you knew who was talking and what their name was. I also used a custom font and was able to get that to work, which was nice.

TRASH PLANET

Trash Planet is faaaar and away my most graphically advanced game. Even though my style is rudimentary and cartoony, compared to the other two games I’ve made, it looks a lot better.

Why? Well, it’s more consistent. As I said, I made everything that you see on the screen. The faces, the backgrounds, the landscapes, everything on screen. There’s no clashing art styles, because I made everything myself. So even though I’m not as good of an artist as the people that did the pre-gen sprites, or the person from FF: Mystic Quest, my art is complimented by the fact that it’s surrounded by more of my art. There’s not that ugly juxtaposition.

Drawing my own sprites also gives the added, more hidden bonus of being able to put whatever the hell I want in the game. No having to edit for content based on what I can find from someone else’s sprite sets.

I brought back the chat box names from Super Maria, and am using a different custom font.

I’m also making my own battle animations, and further customized and simplified all of the menus so that they aren’t so cumbersome.

Lastly, I’ve zoomed in the screen slightly using a script so that the maps aren’t as obviously square and blocky. I’m not a professional map-maker by any stretch, but zooming in on them so they’re completely visible all at once makes them look a lot better when you’re walking around in the game.

Here’s a couple screen grabs for comparison:

Thanks for the question, I’ve been meaning to type up something like this and just haven’t got around to it!

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fangasmagorical · 6 years

Text

When women aren’t attractive to men, we call them disgusting: a primer on fujoshi discourse.

This is a very long post. Can I get a summary?

🏳️‍🌈 "Fujoshi" means "a woman that straight men don't find appealing because she is involved in fandom in a way straight men can’t exploit." That is all it means.

🏳️‍🌈 The use of fujoshi as a synonym for homophobe is a result of misogyny.

🏳️‍🌈 Fujoshi are actually less likely to be homophobic than their non-fandom peers.

🏳️‍🌈 Fujoshi are mostly (70% or more) queer women, not straight women.

🏳️‍🌈 While attacking your oppressors can be cathartic or empowering, queer women are generally not the oppressors you intend to attack when you say "fujoshi are all evil." Nonetheless, queer women are the people you are attacking.

🏳️‍🌈 If M/M content made by women is uncomfortable for you to see, for any reason, then you don't have to see it. Many tools for blacklisting content exist specifically to ensure your comfort and safety.

🏳️‍🌈 Using those tools is more effective than trying to silence women in fandom because those tools are more customizable, and because queer media can and should be available to all people who want it.

🏳️‍🌈 Criticism and hatred are not synonymous.

🏳️‍🌈 Women are capable of creating and consuming art just as well as their male peers.

🏳️‍🌈 Queer men are not a unanimous front, and do not universally feel that M/M content written by women should be banned.

🏳️‍🌈 Women's sexuality is reviled throughout western society. Some women choose to reclaim the vocabulary used to harm them.

🏳️‍🌈 Women make plenty of non-M/M fan content, which should not and cannot be ignored when discussing women's contributions to fandom and art.

🏳️‍🌈 You're not obligated to like these things, but you shouldn't use your dislike as an excuse to be hateful.

🏳️‍🌈 If you have more questions, you can ask me them, but I will not be kind to people who do not respect me when asking me things.

What is a fujoshi?

A woman whose engagement with fandom makes her unattractive to straight men. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Just a woman whose enjoyment of media makes straight men react negatively to her.

A “fake gamer girl,” of sorts, though the "fujoshi” applies primarily to animation fandoms.

Many women self-describe as fujoshi as a point of pride, because women don’t exist for male consumption anyway.

Why do people keep saying fujoshi are bad/evil/homophobic/etc?

Because hating women is a fundamental tenet of many modern societies, and the use of a non-English term allows misogynists to obfuscate their hatred of women, so that they can engage in misogyny while still looking openly progressive.

In particular, queer people who have been harmed by cisheteronormative society see women in fandom as an ideal target for harassment, because they have relatively little social power to fight back, but can be easily painted as violent and oppressive.

But I heard fujoshi exploit and sexually abuse real life gay men?

Those people are called “sexual harassers” and “homophobes,” and while they exist within fujoshi groups, they also exist everywhere else, and usually at a higher rate.

However, “fujoshi” doesn’t mean “sexual harasser.” It means “woman who is unappealing to straight men because of her fandom.”

Well, aren’t fujoshi all cis and straight? So, looking at queer stuff is inherently exploitative.

There’s two issues with that belief. First, queer media is not media that should be restricted.

By saying queer media should only be engaged with by people who are queer in the exact same was as depicted, you deny questioning people access to information, and deny actual cis/straight people important empathy building opportunities.

Because fictional characters aren’t real, and thus cannot be hurt by straight people, they make especially helpful teaching tools. If a straight person gets confused or upset and says something harmful about a fictional character, there is no direct, real world victim. This gives straight people to opportunity to learn and better themselves before interacting with real queer people.

Queer fiction keeps queer people safer by offering an introductory course in “how to not be a bigot” to straight people. And, as much as we might prefer that straight people just stop being bigots, that’s not going to happen without information, experience, and exposure.

Making queer media inaccessibly has always been a primary tool of open queerphobes, because it makes queer people feel inhuman to ourselves and others. Making queer media inaccessible means making sure that even cis/straight people who would otherwise ally with queer people don’t understand our needs, or even our existence at all, and those inadvertently support our oppression.

Second, most fujoshi are queer, whether by orientation or by gender. And by most, I mean roughly 3/4 fujoshi are queer in some way.

But I enjoy making fun of fujoshi! It makes me feel better about myself as a queer person who has been persecuted before!

You can simply replace “fujoshi” with “homophobes” in your posts and discussions, and it will be more accurate while still giving you the power trip of lashing out against an abusive system.

When you say fujoshi are responsible for hurting you, you’re actually saying “queer female artists are the reason I am oppressed.” It’s simply untrue, and it also discourages coalition building, which prevents queer people from building truly safe spaces and fighting effectively against cisheteronormativity. It is, in effect, the “divide” part of “divide and conquer.”

Also, you should also consider, where possible, seeking professional help in processing your feelings of powerlessness, as lashing out in this way is often a sign of trauma, and you deserve to be mentally healthy.

Obviously this isn’t possible for everyone, and as queer people, we are especially unlikely to have access to mental health resources. But, attacking other queer people is not an especially great way to assert our power over the social systems that have abused us.

But the stories and art that fujoshi make are uncomfortable for me to read! I don’t like seeing them!

I have an exercise for you. It will help you to exert power over your surroundings, reduce your stress levels, and ultimately allow you to lead a healthier and happier life.

Ignoring things you find uncomfortable is hard. It is often impossible, particularly if you are, as so many queer people are, dealing with trauma.

But avoiding them is very simple in most cases. Utilize blacklist functions on sites such as tumblr, and search removal functions on sites such as AO3.

For information on how to blacklist, go here.

For information on search result removal, go here.

Why should I have to do that? Shouldn’t fujoshi stop doing things that make me uncomfortable, instead?

If we buy into the idea that everyone should stop making any content that makes another person uncomfortable, there would be literally nothing made, ever again. Someone is always uncomfortable. I, personally, have a PTSD trigger related to a common household appliance that was used to physically abuse me: the oven.

If we banned all use of ovens in all media, almost nothing other than a small amount of news shows would exist, and only until there’s an oven manufacturing recall.

More importantly, racists, homophobes, transphobes, etc are made uncomfortable by the simple existence of queer people and people of color and other marginalized groups. The argument that all art and all content should be comfortable for all people means that anything which shows the existence of, say, a brown trans person such as myself cannot exist.

In contrast, if we make the individual responsible for their own comfort, that means the proliferation of tools such as blacklists that are infinitely customizable, leaving people such as myself able to block out all mention of ovens without needing to worry about disabled people who rely on baking their meals because they lack the muscle control to fry things on a stovetop being denied access to important information.

Isn’t being critical of media you engage with important though? For progessivism and leftism and stuff?

Being critical is important. Be aware of the flaws in media, understand its implications.

But being outright censorious is counterproductive.

Being “critical” should not mean “being hateful towards.” That is a misuse of criticism that is propagated by abusers to make their abuse of others seem acceptable.

In the same way that “gender critical” tends to mean “hateful of trans people” rather than “rightfully suspicious of the white, western gender binary and the ways it oppresses people,” “media critical” is often used as an excuse to engage in blatant hatred while pretending to be thoughtful.

Even if you personally don’t mean “critical” as a disguise for abuse, the vast majority of the media-critical people who pass on this hatred of women in fandom do mean it as a disguise for abuse.

Being critical is important, but being critical and being hateful are not the same.

But since fujoshi are women, they can never understand what it’s like to be MLM ,and I don’t want them to ruin the concept!

This assumes that women are incapable of understanding the experiences of men. Remember, most fujoshi are queer, so “queerness” and even “same gender attraction” are already things they experience personally.

The only salient difference between a bi woman who writes about the main couple in Yuuri on Ice and a bi man who writes about the main couple in Yuuri on Ice is that the woman is a woman.

It also assumes that all genderqueer people have completely static genders, and no experiences that they could ever consider belonging to another gender.

As many trans people who realized they were trans later in life will tell you, this is fundamentally untrue. Some trans women are drawn to M/M content because they once considered themselves men, even after they recognize their womanhood. Some trans men are drawn to M/M content even before they realize they are men, because there is an appeal to relationships that don’t involve women, as they are not women. Some genderqueer people enjoy M/M content because they have dysphoria relating to female sexuality. Some nonbinary people enjoy MLM content because they prefer to see bodies like their own represented in erotic fiction.

To assume that fujoshi are incapable of understanding or engaging with M/M fiction is to assume that women are incapable of the emotional and intellectual abilities of men, and that trans people simply don’t exist.

Well, okay, but what about all the MLM who say fujoshi are bad?

What about all the MLM who say fujoshi are good?

The fact that there are queer men on both sides of this discussion suggests that other things need to be taken into consideration when making your decision on women in fandom.

But, sometimes fujoshi say things like, “being gay is a sin,” and that’s really horrible!

Actually, these women are saying that their own sexuality is considered a sin, which is an accurate statement. The prevailing powers in our societies hate female sexual expression with an immense passion. Female sexuality is opposed by many major religious groups, functionally all conservative governments, and anyone who has ever called a woman a slut/whore/prude/frigid bitch/etc because of the way she engages with her sexuality.

In playfully describing themselves as being sinful, these women are robbing bigots of the ability to hurt them by making the same claim genuinely.

Even if it were the case that these women are claiming being queer is a sin, as most of them are queer anyway, it would still be a reference to themselves, and thus an act of reclamation.

You may have heard people respond to being told to “go to hell” that if hell exists, it’ll be better than a heaven full of homophobic douchebags, or with phrases like “there’s a throne waiting for me,” or even simply saying “thank you.”

An extremely similar rhetorical mechanism is at play, where people reclaim the words that are being used to oppress them, and turn them into self empowerment.

In the comparatively rare cases when women in fandom are genuinely homophobic towards real men, other women in fandom tend to react negatively to that and re-educate those homophobes. This is because, again, fujoshi are primarily queer.

If fujoshi are all queer women or whatever, why don’t they make F/F content instead?

There’s a few answers to that.

The first is that they do actually make F/F content. Quite a lot of it. The majority of fic writers and fanartists in all major fandoms are (queer) women. This includes fandoms where the bulk of content is not M/M like My Little Pony, Sailor Moon, Madoka Magica, Steven Universe, and so on.

(Edit note: as absurd as this is about to sound, I forgot fimfiction exists. When factoring for specialized archives like it and eqd, the majority of mlp creators are indeed men)

The second is that, mathematically, there are simply more male characters with more canon content to draw off of as a basis for fan exploration than there are women. More characters and more screentime means more detailed characterization, and thus, more fan content.

The third is that many women, particularly those with dysphoria and those with sexual trauma, have difficulty engaging with female characters as sexual and romantic objects. While it can be beneficial to re-integrate one’s sexuality with one’s own body, everyone who would benefit from that kind of thing needs to approach it on their own time in on their own terms: being able to control the situation is what prevents self-harm. Trying to force these women to explore female sexuality can be anywhere from uncomfortable to lethal, depending on the severity of the trauma.

Well I don’t like it!

That’s alright. You don’t have to like it. You simply have to respect that women exist, and are allowed to enjoy fiction the same way men are allowed to do so.

If you don’t want to see it, then there are tools that will enable you to avoid it. Everyone has their likes, dislikes, and hardline rejections.

I have other questions you didn’t even start to address here!!!!!!!!

Well, alright, I’m willing to talk about this subject in more detail, as long as you’re willing to be polite about it.

My ask box is open to you.

However, if you are simply going to come and claim yell that I’m a homophobe who hates gay men and/or myself, then I’m just going to make fun of you, so please try to be nice.

#shipping #fujoshi #fandom #misogyny #transphobia #reclamation #self empowerment #discourse #long post

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dazwatford · 6 years

Photo

Daz has some tips for games art students Hi all, I know it's been a while since I've done a #DazArtSchool (or any) post, but I responded to a tweet about “tips for students” and then I kept thinking of more tips, so I decided to write them all down here. I've talked about tips for getting an industry job previously (and I'm gonna repeat a couple of 'em, but feel free to click that link and check out that one too) but here's some stuff to specifically focus on while you're in higher education.

You have time to make mistakes When you're working professionally, you're gonna have very little room to screw up, and you're gonna have to work pretty efficiently. Because of this you're likely to rely on the same tried and true techniques that you know will produce good work fast.

This is not a bad thing, but while you're studying, you're gonna have time. Obviously you're gonna want to produce good work, but it doesn't have to be ALL good. Allow yourself time to make mistakes, do pieces specifically to try out new things, experiment while you have the chance. *It also helps to set aside some “time to make mistakes” even while you're professional (the Rey art pictured was a “test piece” I did to try out some brushes and techniques, and it turned out well and ended up one of my most well received pieces)

But remember, not everything has to end up as a pretty picture, so do some stuff purely as learning exercises. And not everything has to be shown, so don't worry about a piece going completely wrong. Also, consider the work you've got, and be honest with yourself, you know where your gaps are. If you're doing all characters and no environments, do some environments. If you're always “hiding” feet out of frame because you're not very good at feet. Do some studies, and draw some damn feet! Fill those gaps. A strong portfolio is your priority Ideally you'll need 10-20 good pieces, but it's best to aim to have at least twice as many as you'll need by the end of your course. That way you'll have some room to manoeuvre and pick the ones that really sell you, rather than having to put the only art you've got in to your portfolio. Also, the “serial killer test”. Avoid too many freaky subjects (naked women with skull heads, foetuses) Ask yourself, “If someone who didn’t know me saw this piece, would they think I’m a serial killer?” If the answer is even “Maybe”, drop it from your portfolio. You are your Brand This is especially relevant if you plan to go freelance, but handy all round; start in with the social media/networking. Now honestly the social media landscape changes so rapidly it's not the same as when I was coming up (eg. Twitter is not the wonderland it was a few years ago) so I'm not a hundred percent on “best platforms” any more. But you have these tools so use them. Social media can allow you access to industry professionals, you can chat and ask advice (just don't get too “grabby”) and expos and networking events can give you opportunities to meet in person, I'd recommend both, but building an “online presence” takes time, so start early, even if you start small. And obviously be professional, also this Penny Arcade “Strip Search” episode is definitely worth a watch. An online portfolio site is fairly easy to build, so build one, and make sure you have an easy to understand email address (ideally your name at whatever) A good test is to try to get your dad or aunt or someone to send an email to that address, but you have to tell them the email address over the phone (this really highlights if there are any “it's an upper-case G, then a number 3, a lower-case l not a number 1” minefields you need to remove by making a new email address) (Optional) Make a game Now as an artist, this is not an essential, but I'm often asked by aspiring indie devs about best processes for how to make a game, and my response is always “make a game” I'd say start with something small, and plan smart to minimise the number of assets; but actually making a game will teach you more than anyone telling you about it ever could. Make something you can finish, it doesn't have to be your “dream game” (in fact it shouldn't be as you'll make mistakes first time out) you can always do the dream game for your next one, once you have some experience of the process. If you're hoping to get a studio job, you'll learn about working with others (and it'll still make for a strong addition to your portfolio) and if you’re planning on going indie, it could end up as your first game and even if it doesn't, you'll learn where problem areas are to watch for when making your next one.

#art #art theory #concept art #how to #video games #video games industry #DazArtSchool

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

THE POOLED-ORIENTED

I asked her what specific things she remembered speakers always saying, she mentioned: that the way to succeed was to launch something fast, listen to users, and then you realize the window has closed. But we didn't invent that idea: it's just a slightly more concentrated form of existing Valley culture. So if you want to make it look like a group photo. But the rise of startups. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse was at that moment remember!1 Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well. If a startup fails, it will probably fail quickly enough that you can stop judging them and yourself by superficial measures, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same time, as their next door neighbors. One reason so many good ideas come from the tradition of rapid prototyping. In addition to the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be stupid to use anyone else's software.2 If you could get the right ten thousand people to move there. He did the research that won him the Nobel Prize at Bell Labs, but when he started his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company.3

The problem with this article is not just that it originated in a PR firm $16,000 a month.4 For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. You can't just tinker. Are there good universities nearby?5 If you tried now to create a startup hub, because it's followed immediately by less hackable tests.6 But that's a weaker statement than the idea I began with, that it doesn't matter much; it will change anyway. Insiders who daren't walk through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to the expensive models made for professionals.7 So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they can consume a whole day sitting on a park bench.8 There's an imbalance between encouragement and discouragement like that between gaining and losing money.

If investors can no longer rely on their herd instincts, they'll have to think more about each startup before investing.9 They increased from about 2% of the population in 1900 to about 25% in 2000. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. I think we can already declare the old way dead, because those few are the best startups it produced would be sucked away to existing startup hubs. Computers are responsible for the problem. Now that we know what we're looking for in metaphors.10 Obviously they were smart, but they are. If you wanted to create a search site that didn't suck. Boston Globe. It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use and we hosted the site.11 It's the same all over Silicon Valley.

This is ridiculous, really.12 Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning, the last 9 months have been a prudent choice. Surely a field like math or physics all you need are the people who are not like you want from technology?13 Though some startups go straight from YC to VC, the most valuable things the big companies paid their best people less than market price.14 If they shake your hand on a promise, they'll keep it. So the deals take longer, dilute you more, and impose more onerous conditions. This is particularly true of young people who have it are not readily hireable.15 And while this was happening, the acquirers used the delay as an excuse to welch on the deal. But as startup investors they'd have to overcome, they might build things that get used for pornography, or file-sharing, or the painter who can't afford to have any illusions about the predictors of success. Investors will probably find they have to be really good at tricking you.

You can see this most clearly in New York, and Boston. Boston is a tech center because it's the only real way to learn, but copy the right things. So for the better technology companies, the patent pledge does fix may be more serious than the problem of patent trolls. Civil liberties? What nerds like is the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. Why? The exciting thing is, all you need is a handful of executives, politicians, regulators, and labor leaders.

And if you like certain kinds of excitement, New York is incomparable. What's really happening is that startup-controlled rounds. And the bigger you are, it's hard not to be cool and maybe make money.16 Being able to take risks is hugely valuable. Which inevitably, if unions had been doing their job tended to be lower. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these.17 When they got some money was to rent office space. And yet is this not at each point a day, a week, a month I thought I'd already put in so much time into it that this must be the idea. But even those they use no more than superficial changes. At the time IBM completely dominated the computer industry.

How hard is that? Service rates for men born in the Carribbean and died all over France Pissarro was born in the early 1920s approached 80%. Startups don't seem to have had any effect on the number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found practically nothing. In fact there is no way I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, one of the motives on the FBI's list. We also thought we'd be able to refuse such an offer if they had. Startups hate this as well, partly because they're more a social than a technical phenomenon, and partly because it tends to be open source. If there are tensions between cofounders we help sort them out. People who didn't care much for religion felt less pressure to go to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any illusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums.

Notes

But politicians know the electoral vote decides the election, so problems they face are probably not quite as harmless as we are not the original version of everything was called the option pool. As Paul Buchheit points out that it's no longer a precondition. I can hear them in advance that you're talking to a partner, which have remained more or less, is a way in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. Strictly speaking it's impossible without a time of its workforce in 1938, thereby gaining organized labor as a general term might be a distraction.

This is why they tend to focus on at Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by hackers. As Anthony Badger wrote, for example. We currently advise startups mostly to ignore competitors.

Unless you're very smooth founder who used to retrieve orders, view statistics, and some just want that first few million. Another advantage of having one founder is always room for something new if the potential magnitude of the ingredients in our own, like wages and productivity, but it's always better to get elected with a product company. So if you're a loser or possibly a winner, they were taken back in July 1997 was 1. One possible answer: outsource any job that's not true.

To a kid and as we are at selling it. In fact, we should worry, not because it's a book from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. You've gone from guest to servant.

A rolling close usually prevents this.

There's a good problem to fit your solution. Angels and super-angels tend not to make people richer. As far as I know what they made more margin loans.

Once someone has said fail, no matter how good they are. Since people sometimes call a few additional sources on their own company.

S P 500 CEOs in 2002 was 3. Most expect founders to walk in with a company in Germany told me: One way to find the right thing to do this are companies smart enough to do it mostly on your product, and we don't have to say that it is. 5 more I didn't care about, like a headset or router.

He had such a valuable technique that any company that could be mistaken, and b not allow them to private schools that in three months, a torture device so called because it was.

The reason I even mention the possibility is that Digg is derived from the formula. And starting an outdoor portal. An Operational Definition. Some translators use calm instead of hiring them.

Some translators use calm instead of just doing things, you can imagine cases where you read them as promising to invest in so many had been raised religious and then stopped believing, so we should find it's most popular with groups that are up-front capital intensive to founders. Of course, that you should avoid. And you can use to calibrate the weighting of the words out of the things we focus on the side of the biggest winners, from the truth about the size of the world barely affects me.

That's why the series AA terms and write them a microcomputer, and I bicycled to University Ave in Palo Alto, but one way in which income is doled out by John Sculley in a non-broken form, that must mean you suck. Most unusual ambitions fail, unless it was.

In sufficiently disordered times, even if we just implemented it ourselves, so that's what you're doing. And then of course. Ed.

Which explains the astonished stories one always hears about VC while working on that? I'm not saying option pools themselves will go away, and why it's next to impossible to succeed or fail. As Paul Buchheit adds: Paul Buchheit adds: I switch person. Jones, A P supermarket chain because it has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's shocking how much they liked the iPhone too, and made more margin loans.

If they're dealing with YC companies that an artist or writer has to give them sufficient activation energy required to notice them. Apple's products but their policies.

Which in turn the most successful startups, but in practice money raised as convertible debt is a bad idea the way and run the programs on the fly is that they don't have to spend, see what new ideas you're presenting.

In grad school, secretly write your thoughts down in the technology business. And when they decide you're a YC startup you have to spend a lot better to read stories. Jones, A P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its completion in 1969 the largest household refrigerators, weighs 656 pounds. Startups are businesses; the point of a safe will be, unchanging, but that's a pyramid scheme.

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tstonetheatre-blog · 4 years

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I <3 Art

On Teatr Brama

Seeing my beautiful Polish friends was such a reprieve from the monotony of everyday life under quarantine. It was startling to interact with them though more so for the purpose of harboring a discussion about the effect of the global pandemic on the arts, particularly in our sector of performing arts. It doubled the fear of this situation in general, though, in that it provided a glimpse at the scope of this pandemic not only in terms of the alteration of the performing arts scenes, but its general effect on all aspects of life. I haven’t found it easy to operate in a creative capacity during all of this, but being in conversation with Teatr Brama about their intentions of how to move forward during this time was comforting in one way and inspiring of action in another.

It makes me feel less alone to hear about others’ everyday struggles during the pandemic and the general sense of frustration of not being able to live life in a normal way for such a long period of time. It also is overwhelming for someone with as much capacity for empathy as I do to get a gauge of the negative emotions and feelings which are being experienced almost universally right now.

One thing which struck me from my conversation with Brama was the mention of their communications with other international ensemble theatres and the brewing plan for them to initiate a campaign to collaboratively work collaboratively across the globe on a collective performance piece, or even just to establish channels of communication to simply discuss and share reflections on being an artist in this unprecedented time.

I left our conversation feeling grim but uplifted, with added hope for the future after feeling the motivating fire burning underneath another arts organization, pushing them to create despite the current circumstances. It’s hard to be doing what I’m doing right now, but seeing others forcing themselves to do just that makes it easier to imagine myself following through on it.

On Kristina Wong

My biggest takeaway here is that artists truly can be the most selfless subset of people in existence. Learning about how Kristina Wong functions as an artist, as many independent performance artists do, and how the current crisis literally doesn’t allow for her to tour a show that has been in development for the past year to two years to finally, actually make money on it, only permitting her to perform twice before the onslaught of widespread closures of non-essential businesses, which obviously includes every type of performance space imaginable. To hear that, in the face of despair and true distress, her chosen path of action was to assemble a team of mask-makers to distribute to those in need, was just...wild.

Anyway, on a less serious note, I was kind of geeking out about getting to meet Kristina, even if it was through a Zoom call between us in Bethlehem and her in Los Angeles. Her work was so expansive when I was sifting through it prior to our conversation, and her style has been so honed in and is so evidently consistent across her multitude of original productions.

Kristina seems to have a unique advantage though in the current situation, one which I inquired about, which is her evident ability to produce content across mediums, while still relying on live performance as the primary mode of delivery. It was especially helpful to discuss her digital content in a time when I’m being forced to transition every project I’ve begun work on into a digital medium when it was originally slated for a live, in-person performance with a real-life audience.

Kristina Wong is just fucking cool and it seems like everything she’s been doing, and what she has to do now, is geared toward helping make progress toward a common problem. I’m grateful for our conversation and for learning about the work of someone doing this type of thing, especially at a time like the current one.

- Adam

Brama

Getting to catch up with Teatra Brama during a global pandemic was a great opportunity. It was especially nice to hear some of the frustration and pressure I have been feeling to produce theatre, echoed from the management there. Daniel told me while visiting Bethlehem that he thinks people (audiences) are going to become very “romantic” over the next decade. I think by saying romantic he, in part, meant nostalgic but also that people will start to find more joy in the more analog art forms of days gone by. Having to create content online doesn’t necessarily serve this, but perhaps when the time has come for all of us to get to back to the world and decide on how it needs to change there will be a resurgence of classic theatre, poetry, ballet and opera. Perhaps there will be a resurgence of humanity, of empathy, of compassion..and to understand those ideals in a more intimate way one needs look no further than to the theatre.

Kristina Wong

Meeting and being able to chat with Kristina for the first time in this way, online - at home had an interesting dichotomy considering how artists that don’t know each other usually meet. We meet at festivals, at workshops, or at auditions. We ask who knows who, where you’re from, where you’ve been. Artists can story-circle for hours, days with all that they have seen and experienced. Having an hour or two with such a seasoned performer and focusing a conversation around how they are adapting to the new way of things isn’t ideal when you’re first getting to know one another, but it’s literally why we’re connecting to them in the first place so it was a half and half for me. Talking with Kristina inspired me to look into some questions I had about how individual artists can serve their community in a time of crisis. Nothing stops us from volunteering our time or shifting our projects to better serve the needs of the community...but artists are unessential in that we don’t fit into a response plan. Artists will never be called up to handle hospital administrative duties, we will never be asked to go and handle trauma counseling, we won’t be asked to sew masks and to build shelters for displaced homeless...we can, we should in some cases...but no one is going to ask us. We have to fight for our place, show our worth, and with a nation of professionals telling us that “they have everything under control” it has to be our job to ask “You sure?”

Irondale

It was so nice chatting with Terry from Irondale. Experience like that is always appreciated and the stories about current projects made me hopeful and excited to REALLY get back to work. The in person, visceral, carnal work that is theatre. I also appreciated his instagram live workshop although it has its limitations not being able to see the faces of the people you’re working with. Talking with Terry was fantastic because I got to hear about the project with the local police and it reminded me of all the functions that theatre can serve, but also that there are needs out there that are still not being met.

-SPC

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makingmediameta · 6 years

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VRA: Adidas is Calling all Creators

youtube

Introduction

The majority of arguments rely on the same building blocks; however, in every argument those blocks are differently sized and interact in different ways. They are differently sized because arguments rely on different strategies in different measures and that fact causes those blocks to interact differently. Think of building, the biggest blocks have to go on the bottom to support the weight of the overarching structure, this means that if one strategy is used more than another it goes to the bottom to support the overall weight of the argument. This is a basic point of the following demonstration, which contrasts two different advertisements for the same Adidas campaign.

Background

Before delving into the advertisements, some background is necessary for a complete picture. The contexts of the advertisements vary to some degree. Advertisement 1 (AD1) aired during a commercial break between segments of the television show Better Call Saul on the broadcast channel AMC. Advertisement 2 (AD2) aired on ESPN between segments of the Jaguars Patriots NFL game. Both advertisements were officially published during the last quarter of 2017 with AD1 airing for the first time on December 20, 2017 and AD2 airing for the first time on November 23, 2017.

Intended Audience

Determining the intended audience for each advertisement requires some degree of deduction from the context of the airing and content of the advertisements.

AD1 was aired during the course of a television drama and includes footage of music artists and athletes. The advertisement features a roundtable discussion on the topic of artistic creation and the various forms it can take. Based on this information it is reasonable to surmise that AD1 is directed at artists.

AD2 was aired during the football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New England Patriots on ESPN. The advertisement features action shots of various athletic activities as well as prominent athletes. Based on this information it is reasonable to surmise that AD2 is heavily directed at athletes.

Quality

The quality of the advertisements fits with other background factors especially since the quality of each ad in the campaign is easily comparable. The content of each advertisement fits the context of its airing clearly and there is a clear focus to each with a minimal amount of extraneous details.

AD1’s content is heavily centered around a particularized mythos of the creative “type.” The esoteric, roundtable discussion on what constitutes creativity and the creative process between prominent figures in the creative industry fits the demographic of the group who would be watching a cinematography heavy television drama like a glove. Furthermore, there is an elegant efficiency of detail, each piece of the commercial is geared towards attracting that particular audience and the argument refrains from straying into other territories. Solid support for this claim is that although the advertisement features prominent athletes in the discussion, even those athletes comments are geared towards the creative process and the creation of art.

AD2’s content is heavily centered around an emerging mythos of athletic excellence. The interplay of scenes featuring athletes strenuously exercising and excelling in actual competitions plays to the idea that athletic success is earned common among aspiring athletes. The feature of athletes who have already achieved their dream discussing the power of hard work plays to the audience in the same way. This content is perfectly designed for the context – it is geared towards aspiring athletes and featured on a channel commonly watched by just those people. This commercial also features an efficiency of detail. Its focus starts with athletic excellence and every part of the argument solidifies the issue. It manages to keep from becoming too busy, or straying into other issues – this means that the full force of the argument is directed at the targeted audience.

Both advertisements are obviously aesthetically appealing – they were professionally produced by an enormous company – Adidas – however, it is their ability to target one audience and only that audience that truly makes them quality advertisements. The advertisement is designed to sell a product (in this case Adidas shoes) to a particular group, both of these arguments manage to maintain the entirety of their focus on their particular group and that group alone meaning that the full force of the argument is hitting the intended demographic resulting in the greatest possible effect.

Analysis of Strategies

The rhetorical strategies of the advertisements function similarly to a projector. The bulb (strategies) shines through a lens (ethos or pathos, for AD1 or AD2 respectively) to manifest a picture (the purpose), on a wall (or audience). Therefore, following the picture back through the process of its creation – all the way back to the bulb – can provide insight into the interactions of the rhetorical strategies and the overall creation of the argument.

The primary purpose of AD1 is to sell Adidas shoes to creative types and artists. The picture on the wall is, in an understatement, “artists wear Adidas so if you consider yourself an artist you should wear Adidas too.” In order to meet that purpose the advertisement relies inordinately on an appeal to Ethos. As evidence, the commercial in its entirety is a roundtable discussion between 25 celebrities who continually refer to themselves as artists throughout the length of the commercial. This clearly operates as a lens – the entirety of the warrants, claims and support are delivered through the artists. The opening lines are representative of those claims, “calling all creators, those with the need to make something new, who are obsessed with progress.” Those claims are trite and meaningless on their own; however, since they are delivered through the mouths of creators they gain meaning – or credibility. Furthermore, the aesthetics, the visuals, are geared toward highlighting the artists as they deliver those warrants, claims, and supports. The dimly lit room, the artists seated around the table, and the camera hopping back and forth from one individual to another all generate a visual representation of the artistic process. Again, this increases the artists’ credibility while simultaneously appealing to the audience who presumably would idolize this very format for discussion. The commercial’s purpose reaches its audience because its strategies are directed at them through a strong appeal to Ethos.

The primary purpose of AD2 is to sell Adidas shoes to athletes (particularly aspiring athletes). The picture on the wall is, “Athletes wear Adidas so if you want to be an athlete you should wear Adidas too.” In order to meet that purpose the advertisement, unlike AD1, relies overwhelmingly on an appeal to Pathos. For example, the commercial features motivational clips of athletes training strenuously and then going on to perform impressive physical feats (such as backflip kicking a soccer ball which this author didn’t even realize was possible). The shots appeal to the emotion inherent in the popular mythos of the underdog who succeeds through hard work. These images are the claims, warrants, and support – every athlete featured is wearing Adidas shoes as they perform. It is the emotion of the images which lend credibility to the claims. Furthermore, the aesthetics of these visuals only serve as a vehicle for that effect. The athletes are sweating and grunting in the gym, they are running in the rain on the field – all going to try to turn a correlation into a causation. Essentially, the message that these athletes excel while they wear Adidas is transformed throughout the commercial to one that these athletes excel because they wear Adidas. That transformation is only made possible because the strategies are directed through an appeal to Pathos.

Persuasiveness

Each commercial targets a clear audience and efficiently reaches that audience. Each projector is specialized to target one audience – whether it be artists or athletes – and every detail throughout the commercial is relevant to that audience. The individuals in AD1 are all artists in their own ways, the format is one of artistic expression and discussion, and the claims are on the merits of art in the modern world. The videos in AD2 are all of athletic activities, the format highlights the emotion of those activities, and the claims are unanimously toward the merits of hard work. Both advertisements then draw connection between the shoes and the message whether that be to the Ethos of the artists in AD1 and the emotion of athletics in AD2. The advertisements are, then, as persuasive as they could be.

-JK

#visrhet #adanalysis

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screeendance · 5 years

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Screen Dance Concept to Production: Critical Evaluation

This module has both given me challenges but also opportunities to learn new skills. My main focus during this module was to expand my personal repertoire as a screen dance artist and performance maker. As a group we had many creative ideas for our final submission, taking on the role of group leader meant I could oversee all these ideas and decide which was practically going to be successful and accessible. Our first challenge as a group was to decide on a theme/style/idea for our submission, we wanted to push ourselves out of our comfort zones and learn new styles of dance.

Once we had settled on the fact that we wanted to investigate 1950s style ideas started to flourish from there, we’d found a location, costumes, and a place to teach us the 1950s dance styles. Our location was ‘Great Central Railway, Quorn Station’ (Picture 1) A station which had not been decorated or changed since the 1950s. Of course, once we saw the station our piece became very site specific, we started choregraphing to suit this location, playing with shots from the track and around corners on the station. We really felt this location would give us an authentic 1950s look. After Choreographing and working with 6 dancers and running with this idea we were then contacted by the location saying that we could no longer use the station for filming as it was due for construction. One of the problems of being screen dance makers on a budget meant we were not able to find another location that wouldn’t not charge us, our piece was very much site specific at this point, so this meant we must sit back and rethink our whole idea.

This turned out to be a huge benefit to us, because it gave us a chance to evaluate our choreography, We realised the majority of our shots were of two people at a time and that it would be a considerable amount easier to only have 2 dancers to rely on for filming instead of 6. It also gave us a chance to look at how we could still incorporate the 1950s style wed been working with but juxtapose this with the location. ‘The placing of a dancing body in unexpected surroundings is perhaps another way in which video dance seizes the spectator’s eye … Not only is the video dance body often situated in unexpected locations, but also, in several cases, it is presented within circumstances that are illogical and peculiar.’ (Dodd’s, 2001) We wanted to play on this idea of day dreaming as if the dancer is skipping back in time in their day dreams. Mixing the rock and roll style dance with modern elements such as the modern park location and the modern headphones gives this eclectic mix of props and styles.

McPherson believes that ‘the choreography should interact with the space, not just be used as a backdrop’ (McPherson. 2006) By cutting down on the number of dancers we could focus more on the two dancers we had and how they interacted with the space around them. I wanted the dancers to interact with the bench and their surroundings as well as each other. For example, when both dancers first appear on screen, they are acting very reclusive because they are in a public park and you can see they have their barriers raised in terms of special distance between them. On the flip side to this when the shot cuts to the dream like state the two have an instant connection and their proximity to each other instantly increases. The idea that in the daydream they can dance like no one is watching creates this sense of freeness and we wanted to display that through the shots we took.

When filming our piece, I took on the role of main camerawoman, this meant I had to look at what angles would be best fitted to filming each move. For example I created close up shots of the two dancers caressing each other to emphasise this close proximity they have to each other and to draw the viewers vision into this particular movement, but I also took wide angle shots of the two dancers in frame to play with this idea of childlike freeness of them running around the park. I wanted to play with mirrored shots of the two dancers looking at each other In the first few shots to show that these two people have a subtle connection although not completely clear what it is yet. (Picture 2, Screenshot from final film) When getting feedback from piers Sian Evans said, ‘It’s almost as if they have a secret between them’.

Along with playing with Proximity, my dancers brought their own personality to their performance and from their appearances I wanted to play with the idea of what your clothes say about your gender and sexuality. Now obviously in the 1950s gender fluidity was not an accepted concept, by dressing my dancers in 1950s style costumes I asked them to add their own flare to the costumes to see what this would reveal about gender fluidity in 2019 in comparison. The female dancer chose to wear big green boots instead of small ballet pumps to show her strong side, and my male dancer chose to wear tight fitting trousers and dye his hair blue (Something generally not accepted in the 1950s) these little tweaks to their costumes mean we had this mash up of 1950s brought to the present day. It also meant when we were choreographing, we could look at play with masculine and feminine roles within rock and roll dancing. Men in the rock and roll dance scene are generally seen as rough and strong but my male dancer was very delicate in his moves which meant when I was choreographing, I had to take in consideration that his moves were light footed and flowing.

To gain research on how to perform rock and roll dance for our piece we needed to go and learn from some experienced dancers. We took it upon ourselves to join a local rock and roll night and speak to some of the regulars their about what they feel true rock and roll is. This experience of learning all the twists and turns were a real eye opener for us a group and gave us some insight into the lives of these people who had been dancing rock and roll since they were very young. We also heard many stories from the dancers there who had been dancing during the war or had been affected by rock and roll during their life time. Most dancers there had met their partners through rock and roll dancing in their younger years, we wanted to show the difference between how young people meet in 2019 in comparison to the 50s. With modern technology a lot of young people are cut off from true human connection, but any kind of ballroom dance combats this lack of touch. By setting our piece out as if it were a daydream it brings to light this crave the modern youth have for social interactions, when in the reality we see in the final shot that the two dancers didn’t in fact move from the bench at all they simply just sat there listening to music and holding this public persona as if nothing had happened. (Picture 3)

“Deren and Berkeley both used the camera as a participant in the choreographic event that was being filmed, and both filmed with a single camera…. Deren, in her comparatively small-scale work, considered her performer as a partner in the creative process. (Lewis-Smith, C. 2016). Our Screen dance piece was a completely collaborative process between me, the camera operator, and the dancers. I wanted them to feel comfortable and give them as much inspiration to create dance as possible. Thankfully my dancers already knew each other and were fine with working close with each other and with the camera, this meant I could focus on close ups of fine details during the choreography without them feeling as if they are losing the ‘moment’. Although my dancers being close meant I could work with them easier it also meant it was heard for us all to be professional about our filming and meant filming the shots took twice as long for cuts for things such as laughing and talking.

We filmed our whole piece in March with costume and thankfully good weather, but once it came to editing I found it extremely difficult to edit the shots to look at a professional standard because in every other shot we had someone was either laughing or talking or had messed up a move. This was a major learning curve for both me and the dancers because we all saw our lack of professionalism, thankfully we could go back to film another day, but it meant we had chances to look at what choreography worked and what didn’t or could be changed. When it came to film the second time, I had a friend assisting with a second camera for different angles meaning we could get twice as many shots in a shorter amount of time. By doing this it meant we could put more pressure on the dancers to not look away from the camera and smile as they were always seen on camera. Overall, I feel I’ve had a huge learning curve from this as a dancer, a camera operator and a director.

Bibliography

· Dodd’s, Sherril. 2001. Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art. New York: Palgrave.

· Lewis-Smith, C. 2016, “A brief history of the dancer/camera relationship”, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, vol. 5, no. 1-2, pp. 142-156.

· McPherson, Katrina. 2006. Making Video Dance. New York: Routledge.

· Picture 2 and 3: Screen shot of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGVjlMWogQE

· Picture 1: http://www.gcrailway.co.uk/station-facilities/quorn-woodhouse/

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archiveofprolbems · 6 years

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International Art English: On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release by Alix Rule & David Levine

Of this English upper-middle class speech we may note (a)that it is not localised in any one place, (b) that though the people who use this speech are not all acquainted with one another, they can easily recognise each other’s status by this index alone, (c) that this elite speech form tends to be imitated by those who are not of the elite, so that other dialect forms are gradually eliminated, (d) that the elite, recognising this imitation, is constantly creating new linguistic elaborations to mark itself off from the common herd.

—E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, 1954

The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language—what ultimately makes it a language—is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.

In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAE’s origins, and speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke. But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious.

Hypothesis

IAE, like all languages, has a community of users that it both sorts and unifies. That community is the art world, by which we mean the network of people who collaborate professionally to make the objects and nonobjects that go public as contemporary art: not just artists and curators, but gallery owners and directors, bloggers, magazine editors and writers, publicists, collectors, advisers, interns, art-history professors, and so on. Art world is of course a disputed term, but the common alternative—art industry—doesn’t reflect the reality of IAE. If IAE were simply the set of expressions required to address a professional subject matter, we would hardly be justified in calling it a language. IAE would be at best a technical vocabulary, a sort of specialized English no different than the language a car mechanic uses when he discusses harmonic balancers or popper valves. But by referring to an obscure car part, a mechanic probably isn’t interpellating you as a member of a common world—as a fellow citizen, or as the case may be, a fellow traveler. He isn't identifying you as someone who does or does not get it.

When the art world talks about its transformations over recent decades, it talks about the spread of

biennials. Those who have tried to account for contemporary art’s peculiar nonlocal language tend to see it as the Esperanto of this fantastically mobile and glamorous world, as a rational consensus arrived at for the sake of better coordination. But that is not quite right. Of course, if you’re curating an exhibition that brings art made in twenty countries to Dakar or Sharjah, it’s helpful for the artists, interns, gallerists, and publicists to be communicating in a common language. But convenience can’t account for IAE. Our guess is that people all over the world have adopted this language because the distributive capacities of the Internet now allow them to believe—or to hope—that their writing will reach an international audience. We can reasonably assume that most communication about art today still involves people who share a first language: artists and fabricators, local journalists and readers. But when an art student in Skopje announces her thesis show, chances are she’ll email out the invite in IAE. Because, hey—you never know.

To appreciate this impulse and understand its implications, we need only consider e-flux, the art world’s flagship digital institution. When it comes to communication about contemporary art, e-flux is

the most powerful instrument and its metonym. Anton Vidokle, one of its founders, characterizes the project as an artwork.1 Essentially, e-flux is a listserv that sends out roughly three announcements per day about contemporary-art events worldwide. Because of the volume of email, Vidokle has suggested that e-flux is really only for people who are “actively involved” in contemporary art.

There are other ways of exchanging this kind of information online. A service like Craigslist could separate events by locality and language. Contemporary Art Daily sends out illustrated mailings featuring exhibitions from around the world. But e-flux channels the art world’s aspirations so perfectly: You must pay to send out an announcement, and not every submission is accepted. Like everything the art world values, e-flux is curated. For-profit galleries are not eligible for e-flux’s core announcement service, so it is also plausibly not commercial. And one can presume—or at very least imagine—that everyone in the art world reads it. (The listserv has twice as many subscribers as the highest-circulation contemporary-art publication, Artforum—nevermind the forwards!) Like so much of the writing about contemporary art that circulates online, e-flux press releases are implicitly addressed to the art world’s most important figures—which is to say that they are written exclusively in IAE.We’ve assembled all thirteen years of e-flux press announcements, a collection of texts large enough to represent patterns of linguistic usage. Many observations in this essay are based on an analysis of that corpus.

Vocabulary

The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar, investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visualbecomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.

Space is an especially important word in IAE and can refer to a raft of entities not traditionally thought of as spatial (the space of humanity) as well as ones that are in most circumstances quite obviously spatial (the space of the gallery). An announcement for the 2010 exhibition “Jimmie Durham and His

Metonymic Banquet,” at Proyecto de Arte Contemporáneo Murcia in Spain, had the artist “questioning the division between inside and outside in the Western sacred space”—the venue was a former church—“to highlight what is excluded in order to invest the sanctum with its spatial purity. Pieces of cement, wire, refrigerators, barrels, bits of glass and residues of ‘the sacred,’ speak of the space of the exhibition hall … transforming it into a kind of ‘temple of confusion.’”

Spatial and nonspatial space are interchangeable in IAE. The critic John Kelsey, for instance, writes that artist Rachel Harrison “causes an immediate confusion between the space of retail and the space of subjective construction.” The rules for space in this regard also apply to field, as in “the field of the real”—which is where, according to art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty, “the parafictional has one foot.” (Prefixes like para-, proto-, post-, and hyper- expand the lexicon exponentially and Germanly, which is to say without adding any new words.) It’s not just that IAE is rife with spacey terms like intersection, parallel, parallelism, void, enfold, involution, and platform. IAE’s literary conventions actually favor the hard-to-picture spatial metaphor: A practice “spans” from drawing all the way to

artist’s books; Matthew Ritchie’s works, in the words of Artforum, “elegantly bridge a rift in the art-science continuum”; Saâdane Afif “will unfold his ideas beyond the specific and anecdotal limits of his Paris experience to encompass a more general scope, a new and broader dimension of meaning.”

And so many ordinary words take on nonspecific alien functions. “Reality,” writes artist Tania Bruguera, in a recent issue of Artforum, “functions as my field of action.” Indeed: Reality occurs four times more frequently in the e-flux corpus than in the British National Corpus (BNC), which represents British English usage in the second half of the twentieth century.2 The real appears 2,148 times per million units in the e-flux corpus versus a mere 12 times per million in the BNC–about 179 times more often. One exhibit invites “the public to experience the perception of colour, spatial orientation and other forms of engagement with reality”; another “collects models of contemporary realities and sites of conflict”; a show called “Reality Survival Strategies” teaches us that the "sub real is … formed of the leftovers of reality.”

Syntax

Let us turn to a press release for Kim Beom’s “Animalia,” exhibited at REDCAT last spring: “Through an expansive practice that spans drawing, sculpture, video, and artist books, Kim contemplates a world in which perception is radically questioned. His visual language is characterized by deadpan humor and absurdist propositions that playfully and subversively invert expectations. By suggesting that what you see may not be what you see, Kim reveals the tension between internal psychology and external reality, and relates observation and knowledge as states of mind.”

Here we find some of IAE’s essential grammatical characteristics: the frequency of adverbial phrases such as “radically questioned” and double adverbial terms such as “playfully and subversively invert.” The pairing of like terms is also essential to IAE, whether in particular parts of speech (“internal psychology and external reality”) or entire phrases. Note also the reliance on dependent clauses, one of the most distinctive features of art-related writing. IAE prescribes not only that you open with a dependent clause, but that you follow it up with as many more as possible, embedding the action deep

enlarge image

The structure of a typical IAE sentence.

within the sentence, effecting an uncanny stillness. Better yet: both an uncanny stillness and a deadening balance.

IAE always recommends using more rather than fewer words. Hence a press release for a show called “Investigations” notes that one of the artists “reveals something else about the real, different information.” And when Olafur Eliasson’s Yellow Fog“is shown at dusk—the transition period between day and night—it represents and comments on the subtle changes in the day’s rhythm.” If such redundancies follow from this rule, so too do groupings of ostensibly unrelated items. Catriona Jeffries Gallery writes of Jin-me Yoon: “Like an insect, or the wounded, or even a fugitive, Yoon

moves forward with her signature combination of skill and awkwardness.” The principle of antieconomy also accounts for the dependence on lists in IAE. This is illustrated at inevitable length in the 2010 press release announcing the conference “Cultures of the Curatorial,” which identifies “the curatorial” as “forms of practice, techniques, formats and aesthetics … not dissimilar to the functions of the concepts of the filmic or the literary” that entail “activities such as organization, compilation, display, presentation, mediation or publication … a multitude of different, overlapping and heterogeneously coded tasks and roles.”3

Reading the "Animalia" release may lead to a kind of metaphysical seasickness. It is hard to find a footing in this "space" where Kim "contemplates" and "reveals" an odd "tension," but where in the end nothing ever seems to do anything. And yet to those of us who write about art, these contortions seem to be irresistible, even natural. When we sense ourselves to be in proximity to something serious and art related, we reflexively reach for subordinate clauses. The question is why. How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?

Genealogy

If e-flux is the crucible of today’s IAE, the journal October is a viable candidate for the language’s point of origin. In the pages of October, founded in 1976, an American tradition of formalist art criticism associated with Clement Greenberg collided with continental philosophy. October's editors, among them art historians Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, saw contemporary criticism as essentially slovenly and belle lettristic; they sought more rigorous interpretive criteria, which led them to translate and introduce to an English-speaking audience many French poststructuralist texts.4 The shift in criticism represented by October had an enormous impact on the interpretation and evaluation of art and also changed the way writing about art sounded.

Consider Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” published in 1979: “Their failure is also encoded onto the very surface of these works: the doors having been gouged away and anti-structurally encrusted to the point where they bear their inoperative condition on their face, the Balzachaving been executed with such a degree of subjectivity that not even Rodin believed (as letters by him attest) that the work would be accepted.” Krauss translated Barthes, Baudrillard, and Deleuze for October, and she wrote in a style that seemed forged in those translations. So did many of her colleagues. A number of them were French and German, so presumably translated themselves in real time.Many of IAE’s particular lexical tics come from French, most obviously the suffixes -ion, -ity, -ality, and -ization, so frequently employed over homier alternatives like -ness. The mysterious proliferation of definite and indefinite articles—“the political," “the space of absence,” “the recognizable and the repulsive”—are also French imports. Le vide, for instance, could mean “empty things” in general—evidently the poststructuralists’ translators preferred the monumentality of “The Void.”Le vide occurs 20.9 times per million in the French Web Corpus; the void occurs only 1.3 times per million in the BNC, but 9.8 times per million in the e-flux corpus. (Sketch Engine searches are not case sensitive.) The word multitude, the same in English and French, appears 141 times in e-flux press releases. A lot appears 102 times.French is probably also responsible for the prepositional and adverbial phrases that are socommon in IAE: simultaneously, while also, and, of course, always already. Many tendencies that IAE has inherited are not just specific to French but to the highbrow written French that the poststructuralists appropriated, or in some cases parodied (the distinction was mostly lost in translation). This kind of French features sentences that go on and on and make ample use of adjectival verb forms and past and present participles. These have become art writing’s stylistic signatures.5French is not IAE’s sole non-English source. Germany’s Frankfurt School was also a great influence on the October generation; its legacy can be located in the liberal use of production, negation, and totality. Dialectics abound. (Production is used four times more often in the e-flux corpus than in the BNC, negation three times more often, totalitytwice as often. Dialectics occurs six times more often in the e-flux corpus than in the BNC; at 9.9 instances per million, dialectics is nearly as common to IAE as sunlight to the BNC.) One press release notes that “humanity has aspired to elevation and desired to be free from alienation of and subjugation to gravity. … This physical and existential dialectic, which is in a permanent state of oscillation between height and willful falling, drives us to explore the limits of balance.” Yes, the assertion here is that standing up is a dialectical practice.October’s emulators mimicked both the deliberate and unintentional features of the journal's writing, without discriminating between the two. Krauss and her colleagues aspired to a kind of analytic precision in their use of words, but at several degrees’ remove those same words are used like everyday language: anarchically, expressively. (The word dialectic has a precise, some would say scientific, meaning, but in IAE it is normally used for its affective connotation: It means good.) At the same time, the progeny of October elevated accidents of translation to the level of linguistic norms.IAE channels theoretical influences more or less aesthetically, sedimented in a style that combines their inflections and formulations freely and continually incorporates new ones.6 (Later art writing would trouble, for instance, and queer.) Today the most authoritative writers cheerfully assert that criticism lacks a sense of what it is or does: Unlike in the years following October’s launch, there are no clearly dominant methodologies for interpreting art. And yet, the past methodologies are still with us—not in our substantive interpretations, but in the spirit and letter of the art world’s universally foreign language.7

Authority

We hardly need to point out what was exclusionary about the kind of writing that Anglo art criticism cultivated. Such language asked more than to be understood, it demanded to be recognized. Based on so many idiosyncrasies of translation, the language that art writing developed during the October era was alienating in large part because it was legitimately alien. It alienated the English reader as such, but it distanced you less the more of it you could find familiar. Those who could recognize the standard feints were literate. Those comfortable with the more esoteric contortions likely had prolonged contact with French in translation or, at least, theory that could pass for having been translated. So art writing distinguished readers. And it allowed some writers to sound more authoritative than others.

Authority is relevant here because the art world does not deal in widgets. What it values is fundamentally symbolic, interpretable. Hence the ability to evaluate—the power to deem certain things and ideas significant and critical—is precious. Starting in the 1960s, the university became the privileged route into the rapidly growing American art world. And in October’s wake, that

world systematically rewarded a particular kind of linguistic weirdness. One could use this special language to signal the assimilation of a powerful kind of critical sensibility, one that was rigorous, politically conscious, probably university trained. In a much expanded art world this language had a job to do: consecrate certain artworks as significant, critical, and, indeed, contemporary. IAE developed to describe work that transcended the syntax and terminology used to interpret the art of earlier times.

It did not take long for the mannerisms associated with a rather lofty critical discourse to permeate all kinds of writing about art. October sounded seriously translated from its first issue onward. A decade later, much of the middlebrow Artforumsounded similar. Soon after, so did artists’ statements, exhibition guides, grant proposals, and wall texts. The reasons for this rapid adoption are not so different from those which have lately caused people all over the world to opt for a global language in their writing about art. Whatever the content, the aim is to sound to the art world like someone worth listening to, by adopting an approximation of its elite language.

But not everyone has the same capacity to approximate. It's often a mistake to read art writing

for its literal content; IAE can communicate beautifully without it. Good readers are quite sensitive to the language’s impoverished variants. An exhibition guide for a recent New York City MFA show, written by the school's art-history master's students, reads: "According to [the artist] the act of making objects enables her to control the past and present." IAE of insufficient complexity sounds both better and worse: It can be more lucid, so its assertions risk appearing more obviously ludicrous. On the other hand, we're apt to be intimidated by virtuosic usage, no matter what we think it means. An e-flux release from a leading German art magazine refers to "elucidating the specificity of artistic research practice and the conditions of its possibility, rather than again and again spelling out the dialectics (or synthesis) of 'art' and 'science.'" Here the magazine distinguishes itself by reversing the normal, affirmative valence of dialectic in IAE. It accuses the dialectic of being boring. By doing so the magazine implicitly lays claim to a better understanding of dialectics than the common reader, a claim that is reinforced by the suggestion that this particular dialectic is so tedious as to be interchangeable with an equally tedious synthesis. What dialectic actually denotes is negligible. What matters is the authority it establishes.

Implosion

Say what you will about biennials. Nothing has changed contemporary art more in the past decade than the panoptic effects of the Internet. Before e-flux, what had the Oklahoma City Museum of Art to do with the Pinakothek der Moderne München? And yet once their announcements were sent out on the same day, they became relevant—legible—to one another. The same goes for the artists whose work was featured in them, and for the works themselves. Language in the art world is more powerful than ever. Despite all the biennials, most of the art world’s attention, most of the time, is online. For the modal reader of e-flux, the artwork always arrives already swaddled in IAE.

Because members of today's art world elite have no monopolies on the interpretation of art, they recognize each other mostly through their mobility. Nevertheless, the written language they’ve inherited continues to attract more and more users, who are increasingly diverse in their origins. With the same goals in mind as their Anglophone predecessors, new users can produce this language copiously and anonymously. The press release, appearing as it does mysteriously in God knows whose inboxes, is where attention is concentrated. It’s where IAE is

making its most impressive strides.

The collective project of IAE has become actively global. Acts of linguistic mimicry and one-upmanship now ricochet across the Web. (Usage of the word speculative spiked unaccountably in 2009; 2011 saw a sudden rage for rupture; transversalnow seems poised to have its best year ever.)8 Their perpetrators have fewer means of recognizing one another’s intentions than ever. We hypothesize that the speed at which analytic terms are transformed into expressive, promotional tokens has increased.

As a language spreads, dialects inevitably emerge. The IAE of the French press release is almost too perfect: It is written, we can only imagine, by French interns imitating American interns imitating American academics imitating French academics.9Scandinavian IAE, on the other hand, tends to be lousy.10 Presumably its writers are hampered by false confidence—with their complacent non-native fluency in English, they have no ear for IAE.

An e-flux release for the 2006 Guangzhou Triennial, aptly titled “Beyond,” reads: “An extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization takes the Pearl River Delta”—the site of a planned forty-million-person megacity—“as one of the typical developing regions to study the contemporary art within the extraordinary modernization framework that is full of possibilities and confusion. Pearl River Delta (PRD) stands for new space strategies, economic patterns and life styles. Regard this extraordinary space as a platform for artistic experimentation and practice. At the same time, this also evokes a unique and inventive experimental sample.” This is fairly symptomatic of a state of affairs in which the unwitting emulators of Bataille in translation might well be interns in the Chinese Ministry of Culture—but then again might not. The essential point is that learning English may now hardly be a prerequisite for writing proficiently in the language of the art world.At first blush this seems to be just another victory over English, promising an increasingly ecstatic semantic unmooring of the art writing we've grown accustomed to. But absent the conditions that motored IAE's rapid development, the language may now be in existential peril. IAE has never had a codified grammar; instead, it has evolved bycontinually incorporating new sources and tactics of sounding foreign, pushing the margins of intelligibility from the standpoint of the English speaker. But one cannot rely on a global readership to feel properly alienated by deviations from the norm.11We are not the first to sense the gravity of the situation. The crisis of criticism, ever ongoing, seemed to reach a fever pitch at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Art historian and critic Sven Lütticken lamented that criticism has become nothing more than “highbrow copywriting.” The idea that serious criticism has somehow been rendered inoperative by the commercial condition of contemporary art has been expressed often enough in recent years, yet no one has convincingly explained how the market squashed criticism’s authority. Lütticken’s formulation is revealing: Is it that highbrow criticism can no longer claim to sound different than copy? Critics, traditionally the elite innovators of IAE, no longer appear in control. Indeed, they seem likely to be beaten at their own game by anonymous antagonists who may or may not even know they’re playing.

Guangzhou again: “The City has been regarded as a newly-formed huge collective body that goes beyond the established concept of city. It is an extraordinary space and experiment field that covers all the issues and is free of time and space limit.” This might strike a confident reader of IAE as a decent piece of work: We have a redundantly and yet vaguely defined phenomenon transcending “the established concept” of its basic definition; we have time and space; we have a superfluous definite article. But the article is in the wrong place; it should be “covers all issues and is free from the time and space limit.” Right? Who wrote this? But wait. Maybe it’s avant-garde.

Can we imagine an art world without IAE? If press releases could not telegraph the seriousness of their subjects, what would they simply say? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?

If IAE implodes, we probably shouldn’t expect that the globalized art world’s language will become neutral and inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for something like conventional highbrow English and the reliable distinctions it imposes.

Maybe in the meantime we should enjoy this decadent period of IAE. We should read e-flux press releases not for their content, not for their technical proficiency in IAE, but for their lyricism, as we believe many people have already begun to do.12Take this release, reformatted as meter:

Peter Rogiers is toiling through the matter

with synthetic resin and cast aluminum

attempting to generate

an oblique and “different” imagery

out of sink with what we recognize

in “our” world.

Therein lies the core

and essence of real artistic production—the desire

to mould into plastic shape

undermining visual recognition

and shunt man onto the track

of imagination.

Peter Rogiers is and remains

one of those sculptors who averse from all

personal interests is stuck

with his art in brave stubbornness

to (certainly) not give into creating

any form of languid art whatsoever.

His new drawing can further be considered

catching thought-moulds

where worlds tilt

and imagination

chases off grimy reality. We have no idea who Peter Rogiers is, what he’s up to, or where he’s from, but we feel as though we would love to meet him.

1 “In its totality, e-flux is a work of art that uses circulation both as form and content,” Vidokle told Dossier in 2009, after an interviewer asked whether e-flux—by that time quite profitable—was art or a business.

2 Using Sketch Engine's parts-per-million calculator, we can measure the frequency of words in IAE relative to their usage in other corpora. For instance, the website of the BNC, which is searchable on Sketch Engine, describes the corpus as “a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources.” Searching for "reality" in the e-flux corpus returns 1,957 hits, which represents 313.7 hits per million; searching for "reality" in the significantly larger BNC returns 7,196 hits, which represents only 64.1 hits per million. In other words, reality plays a much more prominent role in International Art English than in British English.

3 Similarly, White Flag Projects describes Daniel Lefcourt’s 2012 exhibition, “Mockup,” as “a storage room, a stage set, a mausoleum, a trade show, a diagram, a game board, a studio, a retail store, a pictograph, a classroom, a museum display, an architectural model, and a sign-maker's workshop.”

4 IAE is rarely referred to as writing, much less prose, though on occasion art people want to write, or claim to have written, an “essay,” which at least has its etymological roots in the right place. The choice of text—fungible, indifferent, forbidding—says much about how writing has come to be understood in the art world. Texts, of course, are symptomatic on the part of their authors, and readers may glean from them multiple meanings. The richness of a text has everything to do with its shiftiness.

5 The release for Aaron Young's 2012 show at the Company, "No Fucking Way,” reads: “This blurring of real and constructed, only existing in the realm of performance, speculation and judgment, implicates the viewer in its consumption, since our observation of these celebrities will always be mediated.”

6 It’s hard to pinpoint the source of some of IAE’s favorite tics. Who is to blame for the idle inversion? Chiasmus is at least as much Marxist as poststructuralist. We could look to Adorno, for whom “myth is already Enlightenment; and Enlightenment reverts to mythology.” Benjamin, in his famous last line of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” writes about fascism’s aestheticization of politics as opposed to communism’s politicization of art. David Lewis, reviewing a George Condo exhibition in Artforum, writes that the artist’s “subject matter, ranging from whores to orgies and clowns, is banal but never about banality, and Condo does not seem to really ‘play’ with bad taste—it appears instead that bad taste plays with him.”

7 IAE conveys the sense of political tragedy: Everything is straining as hard as it can to be radical in a context where agency is perennially fucked, forever, for everyone. Art must, by lexical design, “interrogate” and “problematize” and “blur boundaries” and even “highlight blurred boundaries.” But the grammatical structures make failure a foregone conclusion. (Thinking of these structures as social structures conjures up a world—borrowed vaguely, and wrongly, from Marx—in which thinkable action is doomed.) Of course, not all art is actually working to make revolution, and neither are art institutions that provide “platforms” for such work. But once artists themselves start making work that is expressed in these terms, such statements do become trivially true: Art does aim to interrogate and so on. Even the most naive attempts at direct action are absorbed by this language. An artist turns his museum residency into a training camp for activists, which the museum’s press release renders as “a site for sustained inquiry into protest strategies and activist discourse” that “attempts to embody the organic, dynamic processes of the protest in action.” The activity dies in language—the museum, on the other hand, “emerge[s] as a contested site.”

8 For how to interpret Sketch Engine histograms, please consult this gallery.

9 We should not suppose that because of their privileged historical relationship to IAE, the French have any better idea of what they’re saying. “[Nico] Dockxs [sic] work continually develops in confrontation with, and in relation to, other actors,” reads an e-flux press release from Centre International d’Art et du Paysage Ile de Vassivière. “On this occasion he has invited [two collaborators] … to accompany him in producing the exhibition, which they intend to enrich with new collaborations and new elements throughout the duration of the show. The project … is a repetition and an evolution, an improvisation on the favourable terrain that is time.”

10 Consider the relatively impoverished IAE of this announcement for the 2006 Helsinki biennial: “Art seeks diverse ways of understanding reality. Kiasmas [sic] international exhibition ARS 06 focuses on meaning of art as part of the reality of our time. The subtitle of the exhibition is Sense of the Real.” The vocabulary is correct if unadventurous, including both “reality” and “the Real.” But the grammar is appalling: The sentences are too short, too direct; the very title of the exhibition surely includes at least one too few articles. The release suggests that its authors are not consummate users of IAE, but popularizers, reductionists, and possibly conservatives who know nothing about "the Real."

11 If IAE is taken to be inclusive precisely because it is not highbrow English, then it is no longer effectively creating the distinctions that have driven its evolution.

12 A nod to Joseph Redwood-Martinez, who, as far as we can make out, was the first to note the poetic possibilities of the IAE press release.

“International Art English” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Source: https://www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/international_art_english

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elsbethvanparidon-blog · 7 years

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A woman’s most sensuous asset during the Han Dynasty (221 B.C.- 220 A.D.) was her mouth. Women created rounded, heart and flower shapes on their lips using rouge, the ancient lipstick alternate. So what rocks the brush boat anno 2017? Temper hooks up with makeup artist Cooper “Tan!n” Cu!

From (non-)biblical times, we travel to a city deemed by some a Sodom and Gomorrah of the digital age: Shanghai. One cosmopolitan cosmetic playground.

Fantastical

The ancient Romans were widely using cosmetics by the middle of the 1st century A.D., make-up maven Medusa informs us. Kohl was an essential asset to literally tone down the eyelashes and eyelids, achieving that intense-looking smokey avant-la-lettre sultriness. Chalk, then, was used for whitening the complexion and rouge in turn was worn on the apples of the cheeks — how very Snow White. On a “did you know?” note: Hair removal too already proved a popular practice 2000 years ago and pumice was used for cleaning the teeth. And feet, I dare presume — given the fashionableness of sandals…

The earliest historical record of makeup hails from the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt (3218–3035 B.C., give or take). Tombs recovered from this era have revealed jars containing lotion, which in later periods became scented. Cream was extensively used by both the men and women — both in real life and afterlife — to maintain a supple, well-hydrated skin. The women of ancient Egypt decorated their eyes by applying dark green color to the under-lid and blackening both the lashes and the upper lid using kohl. This kohl was produced from the chemical (metallic) element antimony or plain soot.

In bulking up your impressively useless party-trivia beautycase: Legend has it that the Jews adopted their application of makeup from the Egyptians as references to “the painting of faces” appear throughout the New Testament. Salome must have really known her way around a brush.

Tan!n, Tokyo Harayuku 2012

From biblical times, we travel to a city deemed by outsiders a Sodom and Gomorrah of the digital age: Shanghai. Trained and educated at Tokyo’s MODE GAKUEN, currently Japan’s largest specialized training college, for four years, Japanese certified makeup artist Cooper “Tan!n” Cu in 2016 made his way from Japan’s metropolis to Shanghai. With his visual art published across fashion magazines such as ELLE, AR Tokyo, Zipper, EDGE STYLE, RAY, and having painted the catwalk multi-colori from Tokyo Fashion Week to Dior, make-up artist Cooper “Tan!n” Cu is one hot, hip and happening (and Temper trending) cookie.

Courtesy of Suzuki Swift for Japan Coolture

History Of Japanese Makeup: Geisha Matters

Because we simply cannot not go there.

The rightful origins of the white makeup on a geisha’s face are remain uncertain. According to Japan Coolture, one theory has it that during the Middle ages “a traveller returned from Europe with stories of “pale-faced” beauties”. Plausible as this may sound, the white makeup is said to have come from China and to have later been adopted by Japanese courtesans. Considering that its use first appeared in the Heian era (794-1185), when China exerted a strong cultural influence over Japan, this theory probably makes for the better-fitting explanation. Japan Coolture continues:

“Women in the Heian era used rice powder mixed with water to form a thin layer of paste to be applied on the face as foundation layer. Then they would remove their eyebrows and paint in thick, straight, false eyebrows high on their forehead and coloured them in thick black in the middle of the forehead. The lips were painted red. To finish off the overall look, the lips are colored in with a small, precise brush. Once the colour was extracted from the benibana flower (aka the safflower) infused in water, then covered with crystallized sugar to give it lustre.”

Minutiae alert: Teeth would be stained black with a mixture of oxidized iron steeped in an acidic solution, a custom that ended in the Meiji era (1868-1912) and is now only used by maiko (training geishas) in the week before they become geiko (“master” of the art). Bear in mind that the term geiko was primarily used to refer to geisha from Kyoto. Although geisha formerly referred to only those originating from Tokyo and its surrounding areas, this word has now become the general term for all geisha. Be that as may, the Heian era’s amorous and idyllic look was later adopted by the courtesans inside “houses of pleasure”, trying to mimic (recapture, even) the illustrative and symbolic delicacy of those golden geisha days long vanished into the mist.

Cooper “Tan!n”Cu

Ten Temper questions With Tan!n

1. How old were you when you became obsessed with makeup?

“Actually… It was purely by chance that I became a makeup artist when I was 22! When I was a kid, I liked painting and once I — fast forward a decade — had graduated from college, I decided I wanted to step into the fashion world. Why I chose to become a makeup artist, specifically, was simply because I wanted to make people more beautiful and show them how to build up their confidence and just own it by using colorful things to show off their personalities!”

2. When did you decide “okay, this is it, I’m going to be a professional makeup artist?”

“My first professional gig was with M.A.C., back when I was still in Tokyo. To dot the i’s and cross my t’s in my answer to this question, I should add that this was in fact my first job after striding into — and opening up — the world of fashion, or rather that of ‘makeup’. I like a challenge, especially when it comes to makeup, and always want to try to a lot of new things that at first glance may seem beyond my reach or capabilities. So whilst working on that very first M.A.C. job, I made up my mind and told myself ‘this is it’!”

Fantasy

3. What role does make-up play in Tokyo? How important is the role of make-up in Japanese history and culture? In a few words, if you please.

“As the second biggest city in the world, fashion and make-up play an essential part in the daily lives of many a Tokyo-resident. The whole world by now knows about ‘Kabukicho [Tokyo’s nightlife hub that, in the 21st Century, has witnessed the rise of the modern male ‘geisha’, if you will and FYI] and kimono’ geisha makeup. When walking the streets of Tokyo, one witnesses a vast array of styles. Harajuku, however cliche this may sound, is perhaps the one area boasting the widest variety in Japanese dress and makeup styles. Love.”

Fantasia

Fantasia Again

4. How do you communicate with the photographer you’re working with on a shoot to achieve his or her goals?

“First off, I have to tell the photographer what the client’s concept and thoughts on this are. That takes priority. Obviously, it takes some back and forth when deciding on which style-route to take and how we can really bring the idea to life! It’s a continuous dialogue. And of course, there are those times that a photographer shares with me the image he has his mind set on and I can just roll with that. Which is fun, obviously.”

5. How much of your input do you add to achieve the results the photographer is looking for?

“Quite a lot. First and foremost, you must remember that the photographer is the most important person on set. You have to channel his vision — or in the case of a fashion show, the designer’s vision, of course — through makeup and ensure the whole look is on-fleek. My input heavily relies on imagination and communication. We, the makeup artist, are there to get the job done. To perfection! Like I said before, communicating before shooting is key for any team. I then have to convey my ideas to my team. We’ll draft a plan of action and arrange for a strategy to be in place. And then… We go wild [laughs].”

6. What are the three tools in your makeup kit that you can never, ever be without?

“The three tools I can never, ever go without are my brushes, a small towel and sponges!”

Tan!n for the “Black Cotton”Collection by Daven Zhang, Shanghai.

7. Which one do you prefer to work on: Catwalk or photoshoot?

“Which one do I prefer… Honestly, I don’t think I have a particular preference. As a make-up artist, I often have no choice but to … well… face reality [laughs]. I like fashion. That’s just it; the setting, stage, shape or size doesn’t matter to me. I will say this, when it comes to photoshoots, you have to be more careful and precise when applying the makeup. The catwalk is a different beast: It’s fast, quickie makeup.”

Tan!n for the “Black Cotton”Collection by Daven Zhang, Shanghai.

8. Your move to China, then. Any No.1 trend spotted?

“My move to China. Basically, I’m now working as a freelancer, mostly! The larger part of my of jobs involve collaborations with high-fashion brands and then of course you have Shanghai Fashion Week. Trend-wise, then. Baby-face, baby doll, heavy eyeliner, smokey eyes, au naturel… There’s no pinpointing one current makeup trend here. At this very moment, I should add. It’s a party!”

9. What, to you, is “beauty”? Or “Chinese beauty”, in a non-offensive PC kinda way

” [laughs] Let’s just say ‘Asian’ beauty, shall we? Short and sweet: It’s all about maximalizing natural or ‘minimal’ makeup. That’s ‘beauty’ to me.”

10. Where do you get your inspiration from?

“Nature, objects, stories, anything and everything that crosses my daily path in a sensual, visual or audible way! Inspiration is everywhere and can strike at any time.”

Tan!n, 2014 Paris Collection, Tokyo.

History Of Cosmetics: Fun Facts

Women in the 19th Century would use belladonna to make their eyes appear more luminous. This poisonous plant that has been used as a medicine since ancient times; it was named “Belladonna” after the “beautiful women” of Renaissance Italy, who took it to enlarge their pupils.

Many cosmetics in the 1800s were formulated (literally) by the parish pharmacist and this type of “expert” commonly employed ingredients such as mercury and nitric acid. Lovely. Nevertheless, fast forward some 200 years and Melanie Haiker reported the following in Forbes back in 2012:

“The list of dangerous skin creams is fairly long, but — so far at least — contains only products you’d purchase from an import store or Latino, Asian or Middle Eastern market, and no American-made brands or products. The creams are intended primarily for “skin lightening” and anti-aging and include Stillman’s skin bleach cream, Diana skin lightening formula, and numerous products with labels in Chinese, Hindi, and other languages.”

Moving on. Men wore makeup until the 1850s. George IV spent a fortune on cold cream, powders, pastes and scents. However, not all men wore makeup, as many looked upon a man with rouged cheeks as a dandy. Well-heeled Louis XIV was a sleek bit of mink in his own right, both the women and men of Versailles bore heavy white makeup consisting of mercury, lead, egg whites and vinegar. Yummy.

On a final fun note, here’s one beauty tip recipe utilized during the late 19th Century, once again courtesy of Medusa’s Makeup:

“As a wash for the complexion: one teaspoon of flour of sulphur and a wine glassful of lime water, well shaken and mixed with half a wine-glass of glycerine and a wine-glass of rose-water. Rub on the face every night before going to bed. “

From the 1930s through the 1950s, Hollywood’s studio movie stars proved to be the cat’s meow in het world of makeup trends. Audrey Hepburn’s cat-eyed liner, the liberated “anything goes” or “je m’en fou” hippie look of the 1960s and the heavily lined eyes, shimmeringly showcasing every eyeshadow in the palette, throughout the 1980s yuppie culture. Today’s trend seems to have reverted to the more natural look with a blending of styles from our rich cosmetic past. Nonetheless, given Temper is wise as Solomon, never forget: One must never blend in, but indeed always stand out!

Contact Tan!n via

WeChat: Cooper_Coco E-mail: [email protected] Tel: +86 18362054976

Images: With the exception of the Suzuki Swift image, all images in this feature come courtesy of Cooper Tan!n Cu.

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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Tattoos, Pedi's, and Other Diabetes No-No's

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Tattoos, Pedi's, and Other Diabetes No-No's

As PWDs (people with diabetes), we face a huge laundry list of things we're supposed to do, and an equally long list of things we're not supposed to do, including having pedicures, getting waxed, or making any kind of permanent change to our bodies, namely getting pierced or tattooed. But where did these rules come from? And are they really worth listening to in this day and age? Today, Allison and I take a look a few of these "diabetes no-no's" to see what you can really get away with.

Pedicures

Amy: I didn't realize what a diabetes rebel I was until I read Kerri's recent post about the taboo on pedicures with diabetes. What the ... ? She was told as a youngster never to set foot in a nail salon, and has been afraid to do so ever since.

I, on the other hand, who was diagnosed at age 37, happen to live for salon pedicures. I have for a number of years now. I've even been to several mani-pedi birthday parties for friends here in the San Francisco Bay Area. My girlfriends and I just love the love salon experience. Nothing is quite as relaxing as sitting in that automatic-massage chair and having your feet luxuriously cleaned and pampered by a professional. You pick out youir colors and then plunge your feet into that little foot-sized hot tub to soak in fragrance water before they even get started... mmmm...

Could I cut my toenails at home and paint them myself? Certainly I could. I just don't want to. I know that there are many myths / rumors / warnings out there about salons that carry bacteria, but I, fortunately, have never had a negative experience, even after dozens (hundreds?) of salon pedicures. Salons have to be licensed by each state, and I always look for licensing information, usually displayed on the walls. I also look for general cleanliness clues, like where/how the clipping tools are stored, and the state of the bathroom — I kid you not! If the salon's bathroom looks shabby, head for the hills, Gals! That's a clear sign that things aren't being kept up. I also rely a lot on word of mouth. Salons are hyper-local, so if your local gang recommends them, thumbs up! If anybody you know has had a bad experience with a local salon, proceed with caution, for sure!

If anything pokes or pinches during your pedi, shout loudly, right away! There should be zero discomfort involved in a good pedicure, I can tell you that. But yes, Kerri: it usually tickles. A lot. And that's not a bad thing. Just makes it hard to sit still while they're painting your little piggies, is all 😉

Waxing

Allison: This might be venturing into TMI territory, but one of the first things I was surprised to learn is that, as a PWD, I shouldn't get waxed. Yes, that kind of waxed. What gives? Well, when the hair is ripped out of the skin, it leaves the skin more prone to infection from in-grown hairs. Anything related to infection (which is most of this list) is immediately banned from PWDs because high blood sugar can prolong healing. There have certainly been a few scary tales, but are problems post-waxing so common that it needs to be completely avoided? Clearly, if you're very prone to infection or in-grown hairs, you might want to be extra careful. Also, make sure you pick a reputable establishment, per Amy's comments above — for the sake of your unmentionables! But otherwise, this goes on our NBD list (No Big Deal). At our next appointment, we're sticking to the tried-and-true "don't ask, don't tell" policy that PWDs often use!

Open-toed shoes

Allison: I think this is one of the first rules I broke. Although I suffered through my fair share of regrettable sartorial choices in the name of fashion, open-toed shoes have always been something I have embraced with ease, especially given the hot and humid Northeast summers. Obviously, if you know you have neuropathy, you should probably avoid uncomfortable shoes that cause blisters. If you are willingly wearing shoes that cause blisters, please try to find attractive shoes you love that actually fit your feet! Ouch!

WebMD has a laundry list of rules: don't walk barefoot, don't wear high heels, don't wear new shoes for more than an hour at a time. Seriously, who makes this stuff up? I'm pretty sure I've broken every rule on this list... We say that as long as your shoes are comfortable and aren't causing blisters, you're probably safe in those cute new open-toed wedges. But yes, if you're planning on off-roading it with a summer hike, your best bet is to cover up your toes.

Body Art - Tattoos & Piercings

Allison: And then there are tattoos. One of the most permanent changes you can make to your body. We've written about folks getting medic alert tattoos before, so it's certainly something that PWDs can do, but are they allowed? Do you have to hide your diabetes in order to get one done?

Turns out: nope! This is definitely one myth that can be laid to rest. From medical alert tattoos to tattoo artist Darren Brass, a PWD and star on TV's Miami Ink, there is plenty of proof that diabetics can get tattoos with nary a problem. Of course, you want to make sure that you take care of your tattoo so that it heals properly, and there are some spots to get tattooed that are better than others. For example, lower extremities, like the ankles, might be a challenge for people with poor circulation.

Diabetes certainly didn't stop me from getting my very first tattoo this past weekend!

When filling out the liability forms, it did ask if I had diabetes, HIV, epilepsy or was pregnant. If I did have any of those, I was supposed to tell the tattoo artist. So, for the purposes of research, I did tell, wondering what they'd say. Turns out, they just like to know in case I faint. If they knew I had diabetes, they wouldn't simply think, "Oh she just can't stand needles!" So it was actually a really smart thing to ask, and it wasn't an issue at all.

It turns out piercing are in a similar boat. As long as your blood sugar is under good control (doctors recommend A1C under 8%) and you're up to the task of keeping your new piercing clean, you're at a pretty low risk for developing an infection. Staying infection-free does mean there's some work involved. Make sure to follow the directions for keeping a piercing clean, which means washing it regularly or using sea salt or antibacterial soap. They say you should consider the piercing an open wound and take proper care of it as it heals, which can take weeks! Personally, I've had diabetes since I was 8 years old, and now have six piercings: two in each lobe, one in my right nostril and one on my upper right ear. Keeping a piercing clean doesn't take a lot of time, but it's something you have to do consistently.

Tell us, Dear Readers, what kind of diabetes "no-no" rules have you broken? And how did you fare?

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

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