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Right, this should have been added on here on Wednesday....
This is my contextual analysis essay:



Matthew Barnstable BAIMP1 Images 2008 Contextual Analysis

For the images unit I have looked at the way technology has integrated with human operations and evolved through discoveries in advanced communication techniques and to assist general human functions. Through looking at these topics, I have created a series of images that portray a historical evolution and predictive ramifications on nature and ourselves through our use of technology.
We perceive images as a representation of reality that reflect the likeness of the object featured within. They are an optical counterpart produced unnaturally by human devices, advancing in simulation by the progression of technology.
Technology is the concept of our knowledge to create and use tools to better adapt to our environment and aid in the completion of tasks, and perhaps our intervention with nature. Nature and technology are therefore two conflicting elements within our ever developing and evolving society.
The definition of technology has evolved by way of the creation of mechanical items.
In the nineteenth century, technology referred simply to the practical arts used to create physical products, everything from wagon wheels and cotton cloth to telephones and steam engines. In the twentieth century, the meaning of the word was expanded to include everything involved in satisfying human material needs and wants, from factories and the organisations that operate them to scientific knowledge, engineering know-how, and technological products themselves. (National Academy of Engineering, 2008)


As it states, technology satisfies human material needs and wants. Civilisation's growing dependancy on technology is a cause for concern. In our continuing quest to further enhance the speed, efficiency and reliability of our technical equipment and products, we are fast consuming the Earth’s natural resources, damaging ours, and Earth’s creature’s inhibitable environment.
According to Moore’s law (a trend observed by Gordon E. Moore, cofounder of Intel), the number of electrical transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This observation was first made by Moore in a 1965 paper, and after almost half a century the observation shows the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing.
Moore said “Integrated electronics will make electronic techniques more generally available throughout all of society, performing many functions that presently are done inadequately by other techniques or not done at all.”
Society having access to and use of electronic equipment means that there is a great demand for production and supply. With the constant evolution of technological products for our entertainment and productivity, we are psychologically besieged by media and advertising to keep our needs satisfied. We upgrade our technical products with new models, constantly feeling the need to upgrade every time there is a quicker or easier way of performing tasks introduced. This has turned our society into a disposable culture, constantly discarding our outdated, unfashionable and unwanted equipment, and then introducing newer versions slightly superior in effectiveness. The only way to dispose of them is by returning them to the realms of our natural environment, traditionally finding a location uninhabited by humans to dump our waste, further destroying our habitat that has already been damaged by obtaining materials to fabricate the products.
Image 1, It came from the deep, focuses on this event of disposing consumed products upon our natural environment. It uses an imaginary concept of our discarded items gaining life, taking human form and returning to frighten us all into stopping our wasteful behaviour.
The series of images I have created keep to a consistent visual style trying to be realistic, and follow a narrative throughout the embedded text flowing from the first image through to the last. The images focus on the ideology of technology’s assistance in our day-to-day lives and living habits, mainly in tasks such as transportation and navigation within our surrounding environments. They look at how technical equipment integrates with the world around us and our lifestyles, and try to communicate the messages clearly through the content.
It came from the deep doesn’t focus on technology’s integration with society like the other images, it sets the narrative and the main message behind the series, the message of the impending chaos due to ensue from the constant updates in technology we frequently adopt into our lifestyles and disregard for our outdated items.
In a way, by using this image as my start, the message becomes less vague and the narrative flows logically. By starting at the end we know what to expect, to which we can then work backwards finding the cause of the encounter.
The first image has been given a dark shade and saturation to give the connotation of a desolate and unhappy feeling. The shipwreck at the side of the image adds to the dead and cold feel of the image, and evokes the thought that there is nothing good or cheerful about the content. The dull, gloomy feel interpreted by the viewer from the cold colours used can also construct the idea that it is early morning on a cold autumn or winter’s day, dawn is breaking on an unhappy event - Nature is regurgitating our waste to seek revenge.
Inspiration for this image came from looking through photographs that I had taken in an attempt to find a suitable image for nature. The beach, rocks and calm sea allowed me to imagine something creeping out, in a monsterly behaviour. This thought of a monster made out of discarded electrical products, creeping up out of the ocean like a swamp creature in a 1950s B-movie gave way to the thought of a flowing paragraph throughout the images: It came from the deep, travelling through the lens, interacting with surroundings, evolving technology, on a journey travelling from one place to another.
I had the idea of what to say in this serialised sentence, but needed to create images based upon this idea and to then further shape the words used.
The second image Travelling through the lens was created after reading this quote:
The rapid development or contemporary technology opens up the possibility that, in the next millennium, nature will be less and less constitutional, as it is more and more modified, in the increasingly technologically sophisticated world of the future. (Holmes Rolsten III, 1998)


My image challenges the basis of his statement by taking current global fears of resource consumption and setting my image in the very same time period but showing how the world may not be as technological as everyone predicts now.
Travelling through the lens continues the theme of water and the sea from the first image and as the title suggests, symbolises looking back in retrospection. The woman looks out across the sea at a sun setting behind the land of what used to be. Before we used up Earth’s natural resources and were dragged back to the foundations of civilisation. How we used to travel symbolised by the ferry and plane, and how she now uses a row boat again to travel around in the future without fuel or man-made synthetic materials.

Throughout the images, there are certain elements that capture the viewer’s gaze. The production principles lectures taught that colour and their associated moods play a part, but compositional elements such as lines, depth, value, and picture area assist in guiding the eye to certain focal points of interest in the image.
A design that has been composed well, leaves the viewer satisfied, urging them to view more.
In the composition production theory lecture, learning about the rule of thirds helped when designing evolving technology, to create a visually appealing composition to the image and to create a suitable layout to position the characters.
Designing the image around this concept keeps the layout clean and simple.
Lines play a very important part within an image, guiding the viewer’s gaze across the compositional features and can control how a viewer studies the image.
Interacting with surroundings features good use of lines to direct the viewer’s gaze from the bottom of the image into the middle of the crowd on the lower third proportion. There are then curved lines following the rooftops of the buildings and along the wall in the bottom left corner to the hand holding the phone.
Also with this image, studying and experimenting with typography after the typography lecture allowed me to decide upon a suitable font style that allowed me to re-create the text found on Google maps.
The requirement of text within the images helped in some respects with the development of ideas, as it allowed the integration of the serialised sentence within the images, creatively using the distort, perspective and scale tools featured in photoshop to merge the text into being an element within the design.

Over the unit, there were initial difficulties conceiving a consistent theme or idea throughout to feature within the images. This obstacle was overcome eventually through the idea focused around the integrated text and a set of image ideas were produced. There was then further difficulty choosing how to best visually represent the serialised sentence segments.
The overall theme and image ideas turned out extremely well, however due to novice knowledge and careless use of perspective and distort tools, text wasn’t merged within the images quite as had been intended.
Given an opportunity to do this unit again, the same theme would be kept and some varied images would be produced, perhaps even a longer series of images.

Word count: 1,565


My project website can be found at: http://www.freewebs.com/barnopolis89/index.html