WR: 7 + 8

WR: 7 + 8

Paul DiStefano

It was very interesting the way everyone responded to this exercise. Most people responded very similarly in their drawings. The reason I think this is because of the same media we are all exposed to everyday. This is the “brainwashing” that Lasn talks about. We are all exposed to the same icons and logos that are constantly forced into our heads. It is only natural in this day and age that these images would be brought up just from general words and phrases.
However there were still many differences in our reactions to this exercise. The reason I think that we still responded differently is because we are all art students. We are the young creative minds of our future that can break away from that brainwashing and look at things a different way. We have the power to take something and run with it, we don’t let the advertisements and media control what we think. Even though we are still being controlled in a way, I feel that we can use it against itself knowing how the common consumer thinks. We take that and using our knowledge of advertising we can go in a direction that brings about a better reaction than that of the media.
The most interesting response on my specific paper is on the last box, where we described what we thought of from a drawn line. The drawn line was in a shape of a tree. Most people would have written down “tree”, but not this person. This person wrote down “tree shaped Christmas cookie.” This goes to show, and is a great example of how creative minds think. Since it was a very generic tree icon, almost everyone would just think of a tree. There are not many options with that shape. However, instead of this person thinking of a tree when seeing the icon, it was put in a less obvious, more realistic response. A tree shaped Christmas cookie is more realistic because it is actually the shape of that icon, instead of an actual tree that looks very little like that icon.
We can chose to think what we actually do and want to think, or we can give in to the brainwashing that occurs constantly from our media. This exercise and this book is a good wake up call to how we are being controlled, and as art students we need to think for ourselves because we are the creative minds that can build our future.