Visiting Professional: Tom Joyes

Tom Joyes

Works for ELEPHANT magazine.
Research Practice -
Methods used such as go pros, cameras, screen recordings, magazine

Ai Hasegawa
Design Indaba
salvi
forbiddenkn0wledge
lilmiquela
Balenciaga campaigns

Today's workshop

(Fuzzy Logic Magazine)

Museum of Fiction (Today's Workshop)

After his talk we formed in groups of 5-6 in order to produce a piece of design which correlates to a series of words (Rogue, Lucid, Army). We initially thought of making Ru Paul's Drag race being portrayed as a guerrilla/ army recruitment campaign and manipulating clips form the show in order to attract audiences to join the army. However, upon doing it we found it a bit too hard and complicated as we felt that the clips from the show was more about drama and winning making it hard to portray the recruitment army. We decided that maybe we could work on different interpretations so I decided to take on the aspect of ludic dreams.

I took  the idea of lucid dreams being dreams that can be controlled by the sleeper and feeling like it's a real life experience. The stages of the dream are represented through the various visuals connoting to almost surrealistic and weird things that can come during dreams that can in turn also be something that interrupts sleep itself as they become uncontrollable and too much, making the experience very restless and in the end uncontrollable snapping one out of the dream. 

Here are the other interpretations that other people in my group created. 

Jocel created a propaganda like advert using Ru Paul's drag race and interpreting it as a way to make people enlist in guerrilla army; so when people may think they are joining the show they are actually joining the army. I quite liked her video and was really happy she went ahead with it, instead of changing ideas. I think it turned out quite good and is both funny and quite unsettling when played with the background music. 

                                          

Ellie and Lizzie created posters based on ants and how one ant may become rouge within the colony. The advert is meant to be warning to other ants within the colony to look out for the 'rouge ant'. This kind of personified the ants and make them act the same as us which I thought was cool, and made me think of how animals actually work together and the kind of procedures they do within their environment. How do they communicate? Why do they communicate? What can they communicate with?

Georgia also created this poster, which also relates back to Jocel's design and how drag has been used in a manipulative way in order to get people to enlist in the army. However, it does look a bit more straightforward visually I still like it because I think she created a good style and aesthetic to it that aid to JOcel's advert. I think that both designs would be able to be used together as a pair in order to further emphasise the concept of the drag race = army enlisting idea. 

Thoughts & Reflection: 

I thought Tom's talk in the morning was really really insightful although he didn't talk much about himself, he gave us suggestions of what we can do and who and where we should look at in order to broaden our research process and knowledge. And, I think think through that I knew who he was as a designer, his aesthetic and what the likes to do and want; which I think was really helpful. Also, the fact that he also gave use ideas on how we can broaden our research perspective through different mediums we could play around with showed how broad his research spectrum is as well. Fuzzy logic was also interesting, because it showed political issues in such an ironically interesting and funny satiric way that it actually will make you interested and aware of the topic rather than reading it from a boring news article. It also show real images from his own research making the magazine even the more factual and real. The workshop was also really fun, although we did hesitate a bit it was a really fun workshop and I enjoyed working on it and seeing everyone else's work. All in all, it was a really good workshop and was probably one of the most insightful and informative workshop we've had so far.