Prior to joining this Studio, my understanding on the concept of lists were shallow. I only thought that lists serve the purpose of memorisation, categorising and hierarchy, yet just in my first reading and session of this studio my perception on List have drastically changed. In Umberto Eco Book ” The Infinity of List” it describes the “important distinction….. Between practical or pragmatic and poetic list.” this further incited me that list were not a shallow understanding but can be taken in different forms (seen later in this reflection). The Class discussion also open a new idea that listing can have a form of persuasion on us and the idea that list can create a certain view to the reader/viewer. The class discussion really highlighted the concept that list can take the form of different things and the way we write or shoot certain things can change the way a list is view.
The media artefact that I created shows a significant respond to the mode of listing, not only does the order of the photo show my Process of cooking but the composition of the image shows the hierarchy of importance and relevance. Previously, the thought of list in my head where seen to only be in the form of words, yet as Alice Twenlow states in “List: Essay: Vertical Writing” the “camera is a list maker, the film nothing but a series of shots in order of their snapping”. This opened my eyes in the ways i saw a list, and the media artefact is an example of this; this is due to the understanding that the sequence of the different shot from the baking process is simply a chorological list of the step i took to back the cake. I now saw that list can take the form of anything, music, video, writing, they all contribute to the idea of a list. The composition of the image also play a massive role as well. In Umberto Eco book it saw practical list “confer unity on a set of objects that, no matter how dissimilar among themselves, comply with a contextual pressure.” The composition of the image shows the item may seem different from one another yet they come together due to a single idea, the idea of baking. This shows in my refection of my artefact as well, fellow class mate informed me to look at the composition of my image to create a better understanding on what is going on, so i change position of certain things to show the importance of certain things.
Although this is just the beginning of a journey in discovering the practically of listing in media, the first studio enhance my perception of list by ten-folds.
Twenlow, A., 2003. Lists: Essay – VERTICAL WRITING (Links to an external site.). Eye: the International Review of Graphic Design; London 12, 38–47
Eco, U., 2009. ‘There are Lists and Lists,’ in: The Infinity of Lists. Rizzoli, New York, pp. 112–129.
-Simon Tran