There are two components to my final project: the visual and literary work.

Above, are two abstract drawings to show the relationship between the media, the individual, and the world. Drawing from works by Kracauer, Brecht, Adorono, and Horkheimer, I wanted to show a seemingly pessimistic view of the consequences of mass media communication (specifically, mass media manipulation). There are many subtle representations present in the work. One representation of note is the man with a crown standing at the edge of the pole, above a hanging man. He stands beside the sun and came to power at the cost of many lives.

The second piece of work that I’ve done is a thought experiment.

You can find the link here (Thought Experiment)

In this literary piece, I wanted to expand upon the visual work. Specifically, I wanted to capture the relationship between the effects of media on the individual in a social context. It is heavily influenced by my favorite philosophical paper, The Allegory of the Cave (by Plato). Bits and pieces, as well as combined bits, of ideas proposed by some of the proponents of the Frankfurt School have been synthesized in the paper. It is an attempt to approach the matter in a multidisciplinary manner, drawing on concepts from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and media studies.

Loop is system of files that cycles a user endlessly from file to file to file. Inspired by concepts from Kittler and Vismann, the piece explores the construct of the digital file as a media of storage, transmission, and administration. Loop also plays with the underlying recursivity in media, a nod towards Kittler’s digital binary and Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea of media sameness. Its interactive form, while presenting a sense of autonomy, is ultimately a futile act through the constraints of a looped system.

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Angela Leung and Rosanna Chung

An appropriated diagram of Bruno Latour’s “Purification and Translation” theory. We contrast the use of the mobile phone today and its users to his idea of the “modern”. He writes that there are two sets of practices that should remain distinct in order to remain effective. These include the work of translation, mixing “between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture” (10), and work of purification, creating “two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other” (10). As such, hybrids start existing and expanding due to our interactions with the nonhuman nature of the phone. According to Latour, as long as we consider the two practices of translation and purification separately, “we are truly modern” (11).

By: Sharon Choi & Kelly Chen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbK5C-w1-UQ&t=277s

In this video, we discuss the culture industry and how it relates to advertising and marketing on YouTube.  We gathered a variety of clips from content creators who use sponsorships or brands in their videos.

The goal of this project is to analyze the modern transition from cigarettes to vapes as a symptomatic reading of cultural phenomena. We propose that cigarettes embody a temporal medium while vapes are oriented towards space. This transition indicates that society is undergoing a transformation that is being reflected in modern mediums, vapes among others. 

TARA ROGIC / LUKE KIM

In the goal of creating a piece of functional art, I end up rendering it useless and non-functional in order to create art, that is then in turn made invisible by the very function of a skateboard. Basing off Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Latour’s Berlin Key or How to Do Words with Things, I consider what it means to create functional art that ends up in an invisible state in its use.

Postcards are not only an instrument of visual communication, they shape the image and identity of a country or city, casting its natural and cultural resources in the best light. They create dream destinations and allow us to explore an exaggerated, idealized version of a place through the eyes of the host. Following Walter Benjamin’s notion of photography as a way of exposing the optical unconscious, this project analyzed tourist’s postcards in Vancouver according to pictorial content (space and subjects) and symbols in order to describe main themes of Vancouver’s identity.

Anna
anna.hild@fu-berlin.de

PDF: Dream Destination Vancouver_final

This project is based off of Marshall McLuhan’s concept of media as extensions of the self. The following photographs explore the 5 senses and how they can be extended and/or enhanced by technology.

Eyes

Mouth

Touch

Nose

Ear

By: Mariah Collins and Nuala Turner

To reflect the theorizations of Horkheimer & Adorno and Kracauer, we juxtaposed the styles of Barbara Kruger and Shepherd Fairy with popular movie posters of the 2000’s. This project aims to expose the culture industry at work; the posters are altered to highlight their implication of being a piece of popular culture which serves as a mirror of the prevailing society. The text is used to speak to relevant themes, those being sameness, commodification, and of control.

(Get Out, 2017) 

(The Dark Knight Rises, 2012)

(The Wolf of Wall Street, 2013)

By Kate, Alethea, and Rochelle