ITAP week 1 - Connectivity

Can recontextualised ideas be contemporary & Relationships developed from existing forms of historical culture.

Cultural context within your chosen medium is to recontexualise a certain culture eg. In 1866 the L'Origine du Monde's, was painted by Gustave Courbet which is also known as Origin of The World. A close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with legs spread. The framing of the nude body, with head, arms and lower legs outside of view, emphasizes the eroticism of the work. At the same time its showing us and reminding us, this is where it all started.

Later in 1989, an artist named Orlan painted something similar to the Origin of The World which is known as Origin of War. Using the previous painting the artist recontextualised the original painting and came up with a brand new painting. In this painting, the concepts are total different and opposite. It shows a big contrast in 2 different paintings. One, saying about creation of the world; the other saying about the corruption of the world.

In these two paintings we can see how people are different can come up with different ideas. David Malki a Comic Strip Doctor posted this in his website "I’m hardly the first to be dissatisfied with the quality of the comics I read, and so it should be no surprise to anyone that there are many, many people who do the same thing I do: re-write the comics to make them funnier." [WONDERMARK] . Frankly, recontextualising is another way of improving it and vice versa.



Notions of originality, whenever I am trying to do something new I always wonder is this original? I don't want to be plagiarising. I'll ask myself again, is there anything that is so original other than God's creation? Everything has to exist before you can further develop it. Did Thomas Edison really invented the light bulb? The answer is no,In reality, light bulbs used as electric lights existed 50 years prior to Thomas Edison's 1879 patent date in the U.S. Joseph Swan, a British inventor, obtained the first patent for the same light bulb in Britain one year prior to Edison's patent date. [That explains it!] Now, did the light bulb just popped out from Joseph Swan's head? If there is no light, would someone think of inventing a light bulb? This could be part of recontextualising. Forming something from an existing matter.

An Italian poet, Petrarch, once said "He who imitates must have a care that what he writes be similar, not identical . . . and that the similarity should not be of the kind that obtains between a portrait and a sitter, where the artist earns the more praise the greater the likeness, but rather of the kind that obtains between a son and his father . . . we (too) should take care that when one thing is like, many should be unlike,and that what is like should be hidden so as to be grasped only by the mind's silent enquiry, intelligible rather than describable. We should therefore make use of another man's inner quality and tone, but avoid his words. For the one kind of similarity is hidden and the other protrudes; the one creates poets, the other apes."


You could have been copying unintentionally but its still breaking the law. That is why, we need a record on how we do things and end up producing the final piece. It is judged by seeing the sequence on how you worked. This is to make sure the effort given by the artist is not abused.



Bibliography:
http://wondermark.com/the-comic-strip-doctor-recontextualization/
http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/docs/edison.asp
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/alfrey.html