Adios Barbie

http://www.adiosbarbie.com/

This is something I came across on StumbleUpon and thought it was relevant, though slightly late. 

Submission today

Please either sent or submit all your work concerning this course at latest 1pm today . I will be in the N3 campus to collect heavier files, which cannot been sent.
Films can be uploaded to the net and the links posted here.
 

There is an internationl online Film Festival, where you could submit films
http://bitfilm.de/festival/home.php?lang=eng

See you.
Sabina

Some pics from the exhibit

Bit Film Festival, Deadline September 1st

There is an internationl online Film Festival, where you could submit your films
http://bitfilm.de/festival/home.php?lang=eng

Tuesday, 16th

9.30 am in N 3, all students deliver the finished visual essay and their brief:

Graphic-designs, games, films, animations as soft-copies. Board games, sculptures and installations have to be documented in photos and drawings

Print outs can be done during the day. Everybody has to prepare a list of needs for the exhibition.

Please post ideas for the exhibition- poster on the blog.

Documentation, the compiled research on beauty and an essay of min. 1000 words with reflection on your reading can be delivered next Monday, 22nd August.

Thylane Loubry Blondeau

http://www.dailygossip.org/vogue-paris-presents-10-year-old-girl-in-sexy-photo-shoot-1351

The model that you will see is only ten years old. And the world at large seems outraged. People are speaking up against this controversy. The newspaper article i read from the Bangalore Mirror,

calls her a 'Sultry Siren' in the headline. Everyone really should have a look at her pictures on the net.

http://www.styleite.com/media/thylane-loubry-blondeau/

What's happening Tuesday?

Hard work and nothing else, since we want to see good WIP (work in progress) presentations on Wednesday.
Please also prepare a presentation of your readings along with your own work.

Suddenly, My Body

The ugly side of beauty

Chilling. What have we done to our children? All these girls are aged 6 or 7.

Filmfestival

Today the Docfilm festival in Max Mueller Bhavan, Indiranagar starts with an exciting program, there is much to discover and learn.

DocEdge - Panel Discussion: Documentary films in the times of Twitter, Facebook and Wikileaks Friday August 5, 2011, 6.00 p.m., at the Bhavan

DocEdge - The Documentary Film Festival kicks off with a Panel Discussion on an innovative and thought-provoking topic: Documentary Films in the times of Twitter, Facebook and Wikileaks, moderated by independent journalist and documentary filmmaker Nupur Basu. Panelists include: Madhusree Dutta, filmmaker, Sugata Srinivasaraju, Senior Associate Editor (South), Outlook Magazine, M. K. Raghavendra, film and media critic and Kiruba Shankar, CEO, Business Blogging Pvt. Ltd.

Before the Panel Discussion, we will screen Vodka Factory by Jerzy Sladkowski. The Festival continues on the 6th and on the 12th and 13th of August.

For more information and the screening schedule, please call the Bhavan or go to our website: www.goethe.de/bangalore.

A Feature film by Shyam Benegal

This is mainly for Radhika and Aashtha, as it concerns your projects. But those who are interested in seeing it can take the DVD from me today. I will be in the Old Campus Library.


Mandi

Mandi (Hindi: मंडी) (translation: Market Place) is a 1983 Hindi movie directed by Shyam Benegal.

The film is a satirical comedy on politics and prostitution, and stars Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah and Smita Patil. Based on a classic Urdu short story Aanandi by Pakistani writer Ghulam Abbas, the film narrates the story of a brothel, situated in the heart of a city, an area that some politicians want for its prime locality.^[1]

The film won the 1984 National Film Award for Best Art Direction for Nitish Roy. It was selected Indian Panorama at Filmostav, Bombay 1984, and was invited to the Los Angeles Exposition (FILMEX), the Hong Kong International Film Festival 1984, and London Film Festival 1983.^[2]

Some cartoons I found.

SO true. SO false

Dear reader,

Which brands do you use most often? Which magazines do you read with concentration? How many advertisements have left you wistful for the promised effect? How many of these products have actually worked for you? How much closer are you attaining that sense of perfection after all this?

Advertisements are one of the most influential factors while a woman is questioning her appearance and forming an image of herself, sadly most of these ads tend to make you believe that you aren’t perfect but there is something you can do about it. Very few of these ads tell you how beautiful you are, and that is what we bring forth in this letter.

Fair and lovely. Timeless perfection .Get Slim and make yourself beautiful. Lingerie for perfect figure. Age miracle creams for when your skin is the only part of you that makes you feel old. Perfect curves. Flawless complexion. These are a few of the many advertisement gimmicks women fall prey to. This happens because we are convinced that we’re “worth it” and deserve everything that will bring us closer to the false sense of perfection created by the Photoshop geniuses of the beauty industry. And hence the never ending quest begins.

It is often said that grass is always greener on the other side, and we my friends are the classic example of that. How many of us have even considered ‘why?’ while staring crazily at an ad of our favorite model endorsing a certain product because it makes her look better, makes her look more perfect- we don’t know why we want it but we do. While there is nothing wrong with aspiring to look like your role model there is a problem with the idea that you will only be beautiful if you look like her. This is how the ad professionals design the ads to subtly exploit us. These ads are tailor made to make women feel incomplete without the certain product that is being promoted. Ads make women want more, and in this pursuit for ‘more’ we tend to develop low self esteem and promotes insecurities. The world isn’t black and white and neither are these advertisements. There are a thousand shades of grey in the world of advertising; hence they are neither totally true nor false. The advertisements tend to shape our lifestyle, though the results may vary from person to person and different women will have different reactions. ‘BB every woman you want to be’- it promotes the idea that having a blackberry will somehow help you to be every version of you and implying that without it you wouldn’t be able to!

On the opposite end of the spectrum we have the feel good ads- Fun fearless female: embrace the woman you are, Love your body, be you be the star, anti zero heroes, it’s about shape not size. These ads help women experience the fact that the real you is beautiful and it’s not about fitting into a particular mould. ‘Real women real beauty’, that’s their motto. But because of the false sense of perfection we don’t see many of these feel good ads. We should want and demand more of these, a higher self esteem a better self image thinking that we are beautiful they way we are- because we are worth it.

So don’t let them ‘introduce you to you’ be you, because real women are real beauty.

By: Anukriti Arora, Nanki Josiya Singh, Sayori Mukherjee, Sreeja Basu

Storytelling and Foto Essay

Stories play a crucial role in human learning. As Schank (2005a) recently concluded:
Stories have been at the center of human consciousness for a long time. People tell
stories, and the stories they tell shape who they are. People hear stories and remember
those that resonate deeply with them …Good education requires good stories. (p. 5)
Stories can motivate people to make significant and lasting behavioral changes
(Denning, 2004; Singhal & Rogers, 1999), help them meaningfully interpret other
experiences (Bruner, 2004, 1987), and give them context to use learned information
in real-world environments (Andersen, 2004; Jonassen & Hernandez-Serrano, 2002).
Postman (1989) argued that peoples’ sense of identity is closely associated with the stories they tell. Schank (1990) hypothesized that stories are a fundamental component of human memory, and the foundation of even the most basic mental events. And there has even been some discussion about how the principles of storytelling might lead to these same or similar results if applied to instructional situations beyond only the telling of traditional stories (e.g. Parrish, in press; Schank, 2005a). Despite this considerable potential, the method of storytelling and the broader principles of storytelling are seemingly underutilized by today’s instructional designers (Hokanson & Fraher, 2008).
1. Example UNICEF
2. Luke Powell Afghanistan Essays
3. More on Afghanistan
4. A female doctor’s story: protecting the health of mothers amidst war, poverty and conservative culture.

Transgender in Facebook

Dear Friend,

Imagine that one day Facebook suddenly erased your identity from its social network-  What would you do?  The right to an online identity is something that most of us have come to take for granted, yet there are millions of people in every part of the world who are denied this right.

What we love about Facebook is the ability for people to create and customize online identities to reflect our lives. When it comes to languages, we can list virtually any language in the world, or even make up languages- how else could we show off our fluency in “Language of Love”?  If our ability to choose religions, languages, and interests are limitless, why should Facebook impose limits on something as essential as gender?

Join me and urge Facebook to become a vehicle, not a roadblock, in the uphill drive for recognition and respect of trans identities:

www.allout.org/facebook 

Campaign click here

Poster Art

The ones who are using posters as medium, please find out design criteria. Check our library, we have some really good books on posters, plus there is a lot in the internet, eg here
Please incorporate the WHY AND HOW  into your brief.

Visual Narratives

Here are some examples and links http://kissasskatha.blogspot.com/
Look at Scott Mc Cloud in our library and incorporate WHY AND HOW you are working with this medium into your brief.

Do we have sign up today, Sabina? And, do we have class?

Thursday, August 04

Dear all,
since we had a long feedback session today, everybody should be working on refining research, brief and project on Thursday and following days. You do not have to sign up on Thursday. Please do sent your refined briefs and storyboards by latest 8pm on Thursday..
Watch this tomorrow and think how you can apply these thoughts...
Please do present your work in progress on Monday morning (5 Min).

Fooled by fruits

FOOLED BY FRUITS

By: Indrajeet, Vishakha, Aastha, Anjum.

“You are making my skin glow, your making my cheeks blush, it’s all a secret so baby hush hush, deep clean and rehydrate your skin with fruits”, says Lakme new fruit blast face wash and moisturiser range. How will a girl not get influenced to buy the product if the advertisement is loaded with images of fruits and it looks so natural and non-toxic? The advertisement is over exaggerated with the content of fruit in the product. Certainly, the product doesn’t contain that amount of fruit extracts, as it will get perished over a period of time. Moreover if you read the contents on the back of the tube, it mentions 20 chemicals and one fruit extract; leading to majority of chemicals.

The marketing department works smartly to target as many consumers as possible. Their research techniques aim at fooling you. Consumers started complaining about the number of chemicals a product contains, and how harmful it is. As a result, the cosmetic companies came up with the idea of using ‘real’ fruit extracts (or not) as a major content in their products, so that it doesn’t harm their skin or hair in the long term.

From many years companies like VICCO and Himalaya assure about adding natural things in the product and these companies do publish the amount of natural content on their products, while the recently developed products don’t. This makes it obvious that they don’t h­ave a real proof of the amount of natural ingredients in the content. The cosmetic industry sells dreams and the absurdity of the word ‘natural’ is evident more in this field than anywhere else. In the last 15 to 20 years it has become fashionable to incorporate a couple of plant ingredient in cosmetics and market it with a natural or herbal brand to make money. The consumer seeing all the marketing and promotional jargon invokes images of exotic plants and believes he has a better product than the one he is currently using.

It is quite possible that the final extract obtained from a dried herb will be completely different from what you are likely to get from a fresh herb. Or a picture of a flower or fruit leads the consumer to think that the jasmine scent must be from real jasmine. More often than not, this is simply not the case

There are many food products that claim ‘baked with real fruit’ or otherwise. But they themselves don’t contain it in reality. If the food doesn’t have real fruits, how can beauty products have real fruit extracts?

If you want to experience something natural on your body, go for real fruits. Crush some strawberries and apply on your face or cleanse your face with real dried orange peel. You will then feel the difference between fake fruit beauty products and real fruit effect.

Ancient civilisations have proven their skills to cure illness and enhance the  well being of consumers using herbal ingredients and this was possible without any help of modern science and technology we have now at our disposal. In most cases, “Products are selling only dreams!” and one should not rush to buy ­cosmetics only because it incorporates some herbal or natural materials!

It is for all of us, as consumers, to question and understand the rational behind its usage in a product, so that, in reality, it enables us lead a better quality of life.

Beauty and Sex

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the year 2011. Lose your personality and drop all your clothes off at the door. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Eleven years into the new millennium, you are now living in a claustrophobic world where celebrities shed their clothes to pose for magazines in order to save endangered animals, where even anti-dandruff shampoo ads focus on sexuality, where young girls are taught not to trust a man because all he wants is, to get into their pants. If you think being well groomed is the key to a successful job, you are wrong. You need to strip down and seduce your way to the top.
The world is no longer about fashion or clothes that may define a trend, but more about the naked body. Your body is an object, packaged with the beauty products and a price tag stamped on to it. Don’t believe us? Take a look around. Young girls are being manufactured at the factories as we speak. Forget looking ‘just presentable’, they don’t even want to look beautiful. They want to be sexy, sultry and seductive. They rip down old t-shirts to show some skin, cut down shorts, wear colorful bras and learn to walk with a bounce. They pout and preen and pose. They want longer legs, smaller waists, bigger breasts, narrower thighs, protruding collar bones, bronzed skin, red nails, silkier hair, cushioned buttocks, flat bellies, symmetrical ears and tiny noses. Men are told that their brains are of no value in this day and age. Smart has the brains, stupid gets the Balls. The men too like looking at perfectly toned bodies of women, having fantasized about many a digitally-modified woman in the adult magazines that lie under their beds. The whole world has collectively acknowledged their desire to get laid so get ready to cut, nip, tuck, tear, compress and stitch up your body to match his/her fantasy. Take a walk and lose that flab. Drink protein supplements and build your metabolism. Grab that latest magazine and read the Sex Tips for a better performance. Stay ugly, remain a virgin.

Sincerely,
Modern, Sexy, Photoshopped Women.

By. Adrita Das, Anvita Goenka, Rutuja Patil, Sadhna Prasad.

It'a all about YOU.

By. Medha Gupta, Prateek Vatash, Radhika Mantri, Tanushree Agarwal

Dear Reader/Viewer,

It is a great honour for us to present to you this work of art, which is a collaboration of thoughts on YOU. Or so the magazines say to YOU.

After a great deal of thought, research and reading we have come to a general consensus about YOU. YOU are fat, even if YOU are a bag of bones and YOU need to loose weight. YOUR skin colour is all wrong and YOU really ought to do something about those dark circles and wrinkles that don’t exist yet. Plastic surgery and botox will give YOU the new YOU, that we all desire to see YOU as. YOU need to spend more time in the salon and YOU definitely need to indulge in the beauty products because we feel YOU are worth it, even if YOU don’t. YOU see, we really care. About YOU. If YOU are a woman, YOU are not womanly enough and if YOU are a man, YOU really gotta work at it dude! YOU may be a victim to a lot of other imperfections as yet undiscovered; but rest assured, YOU will be informed in time.

If you really believed all that, we just YOU-ed you!

We just gave you a taste of what the media is doing today on a much larger scale. Psyching you into believing that you are imperfect as you are and no matter how hard you try, you are never quite there. In this day and age of knowledge and technology, we ought to realize that we are beautiful the way we were created. Our individuality is what separates us from being mere creatures , and to have a standard dictated to us by the Media is destroying the ability for us to be unlike and special in our own way. As the smartest creatures on the planet, it is only our duty to do so.

The REAL YOU, is greater than the media propagated ‘YOU’. Following the latter makes you a part of ‘THEM’, and not you at all. What we need you to do , is stop following articles and advertisements mindlessly. Rejoice in the self and the individuality that you have been blessed with.

Yours sincerely,

Worried about YOU.

To all those Facebook addicts!

For all the girls.

Dear girls all over the world,

Make-up companies play off your weaknesses.

Sincerely, you're not ugly, the world is.

Reminder: Assignments For Tuesday 2nd August

1. Hope everyone's interviews have been going well. You need to have your research presentations ready for Tuesday morning. Collate the data you have gathered from the interviews under different themes. See that you are at class by 9 and upload everyone's presentations on one person's laptop to save time. Save multiple copies of your work and check if you can open it on a laptop other than your own. Rehearse your presentations and time yourselves. You will be stopped at the end of 5 minutes however interesting your presentation is, so keep it brief. This assignment will be graded and we will begin at 9.30 a.m.
   
2. Each group also needs to have its collages ready to show Sabina on Tuesday morning. It should be accompanied with a title which clearly states the message of the images in one sentence and a 500 word letter to readers from the editors. In this letter you will 'deconstruct' the message of images and articles presented in the magazines. This means you will tell people what the image is saying to readers about their beauty, health, well being, intelligence or efficiency. See that you have a print out or a hand written letter attached to the collage.
   Here is an unrelated example of how mothers' guilt and concerns over their children's well being is exploited by advertisers of food supplements. Hope it gives you some ideas:
   "Dear Reader, It is time you realized that the reason your child is doing so badly in school is because you are not feeding him the right sort of food. Educated, well informed mothers know the importance of the right nutrition in giving children a head start in this competitive world. If you took the trouble to educate yourself you would buy a good quality food supplement for your child. Of course children don't like eating vegetables, but that's no excuse for a responsible mother. A caring, responsible and clever mother knows how to get around these things. She buys a food supplement that is tasty and healthy to give her child the right nutrition which would help him/her to perform to the best of her ability in school..."
   

Articles on beauty written by Sitaram Dixit

http://sitaramdixit.synthasite.com/my-published-papers.php

Sitaram Dixit has written well explained and researched articles on beauty, marketing etc. Very detailed, scientific and interesting articles. have a look.

Mad definitions.

Feminine Mystique: A woman's customized speciality.
Glass ceiling: A woman window shopping for success.
The second shift: A non-paid homework done by women.
Bonafide Occupational qualification: If you have it, you get it.

Something interesting that I found on Dear Blank Please Blank.

Dear Disney,

You've made a princess out of about every ethnicity. Now isn't it time for a fat princess?

Sincerely, I want my daughter to know she's beautiful too

Book Your Miracle Now - An editor's letter to readers.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the world of miracles. It’s about time you lose your common senses and expect the not so practical things. It is time to start fighting the nature and start looking artificial and plastic. It is a miracle. We are here to redefine miracles. We make them happen. We just do it.

We know you are short on patience and miracles are the way you would like to go. With what we call ‘growing technology’ (also known as ‘clever marketing’ in our circles) you can look 20 years younger in just 20 days. Isn’t that what you always wanted? Even if you don’t agree I know that is what you always wanted. Now you can be fairer by four shades or so in just 7 days. It is time to mess with the nature. Take control of everything possible. Change your skin tone, your body type and even your age in just a matter of few hours or days. Forget about your natural body and look, the artificial is in.

The time to be living among miraculous chemicals is here. Anti -aging cream for you to remain young forever. Skin cream for a skin softer than a baby’s. Fairness cream to make you white and superior and Sunscreen to protect you from the harsh sun (which has pretty much been above and around the humans since forever, but you understand).

So buy the advertised products right away and book yourself a nice, quick miracle^*.

[*Conditions Applied, of course]

(Adiba M., Karan W., Koshy B.)