Lecture Questions/Response: Mia Rockel

1. Could you explain more about your No Hidden Message project?

2. Do you think that the idea could hold the same meaning across disciplines?

Response:

I really found I was having a hard time really understanding a lot of what was said during this particular lecture. I think the fact that it was a graphic design lecture had a part in that. There were a lot of technical things discussed, as well as a lot of principles of graphic design that I really didn't have much knowledge of beforehand. However, it was interesting to see a lecture from such a different discipline. It's almost the exact opposite of photography.

Rockel discussed her project Bonia, which was commissioned during an internship in NYC. She took a man's diary and designed it into a book. She used the symbolism of info graphics and maps to illustrate bits of the book. She would also take certain parts of the text and give them an entire page, using the size and placement to show how important the text was. She also talked about another project, her thesis work, No Hidden Message. This was the project I was most excited to hear her talk about today, and I found what she had to say very interesting, but it was different from what I thought the project was looking at it online. "The message is the medium is the message is the medium is the message is..." was an interesting quote from that segment of the lecture, it was essentially the idea behind the whole thing. She described how her thesis advisor asked her to come up with a mission statement for it, and she wrote:

"The medium is the mission,

fonts are software,

words are images,

and the moment is now."

At one point she mentioned that you have to know what you are looking for, and she related the idea to photography stating that you can have a hard drive full of images, and you have to select the one that has the most potential from many. Which I thought was interesting. It sort of answers my second question a bit. One person asked how the basics and fundamentals of graphic design worked in her projects and wether she used them or just threw them out the window, and she said that having the knowledge beforehand helped her to be informed and to make decisions in her work. So they are always there.