#wsaadm

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Guest Post: Scarlett Chen

Last year's graduate Scarlett Chen shares her thoughts and advice to current WSAadm students.

Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, Beijing Office.

  Hi folks, this is Scarlett. Hello from Ogilvy Beijing Office!

  After completing my dissertation, I returned to China in September of 2012 and got an Ogilvy internship by chance in October. Since then, I worked as an Account Executive in Ogilvy & Mather Advertising, Beijing. When I finally officially graduated from WSA in December, I got a firm offer from Ogilvy - I feel really lucky. But I could have not gone this far without my supervisor- Cui, and my dear friends’ help.

So yes, when I was asked to talk about some advertising trends in China, I had been thinking for a while. From the advertising point of view, I do find that new media advertising is gradually surpassing tradition advertising in China. Weibo and WeChat are two most important elements in Chinese new media advertising field. This is what I found interesting so far. Since I am still a fresher in this field, I think I will take a deep study on WeChat after work.

Meanwhile, I have some experience to share with current WSAadm students.

1, Attitude is everything.

If you are lucky enough to get an offer from a company you admire, then show your attitude to your colleague, your boss and yourself. Your positive attitude can help you to get over the transition from student to adult. I guarantee that if you work harder in this age, you would have an easier life in the future. Stay in a low key and be professional.

2, Summarize and reflect what you have done everyday.

If you have free time in your working hours, try to summarize what you have done. Think about which mistakes you can avoid in the next time.

3, Work is work, nothing personal.

When you step in the society, you will face different ppl and have to learn how to deal with colleague relationships. Do not bring your personal emotions to your work. That is un-professional.

4, Treasure your classmates now!

Believe it or not, your classmates in WSA would be your support in the future. There are six classmates of mine in Beijing. We often hang out in the weekend. When I feel upset or doubt myself for working issues, they are the one who back me up and give me advice. If you are Cui’s student, you are super lucky. She is a great teacher. What she is teaching you right now, is super super super useful in the future. Trust me, like super super super useful.

This is what I have been thinking so far. Maybe it is very childish to you, but it truly is how I feel right now. Good luck with your dissertation! Wish you well!

  Scarlett Chen Qinzi graduated from WSA with an MA in Advertising Design Management, Class of 2012.

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JP on Mobilities and Urban Mobile Culture

We had Reader and Senior Fellow at the WSA Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media, Jussi Parikka, gave the first of two guest sessions this morning, “Mobilities and Urban Mobile Culture”, as part of this semester’s learning on mobile media and apps. The questions we are thinking of: what is mobility? What is mobile media? Here's my quick recap and thoughts.

In true steampunk fashion, our resident media archeologist’s story of mobilities begins in a time long ago - the 19th century. Back then, both our experiences and imaginations of media use were quite conservative in terms of movement; in the sense that people thought of media as something designed for people who are sitting down or standing, at home, in the office, sat hours on a train, or in a phone booth. The characteristic of portability was certainly something Victorians were already thinking about when they invented the paperback book - printing text on sized down low quality paper - or the broadsheet newspaper since they were often ‘on the move’ (used to take FOUR hours to get from London to Brighton!). Like commuters today on their phones, Victorians could carve out tiny pockets of private worlds whilst being in (crowded) spaces with lots of strangers they don’t want to talk to. A banal detail perhaps but this mode of industrialized travel marked both the modern self and its relationship with technology. And now we can see them clearly: quaking sardines in trains with hurting feet - and in those clothes! - Victorians cling on to their Dickens, stiff upper lips and inner monologues; and what they remind us of is that mobility is definitely much more than the abstract motion of getting from point A to point B (again, another modern rationalized way of thinking about movement). Mobility and mobile media was experienced viscerally, as embodied movement.

Why 19th century? Seems a long time ago when you think about mobile technology. Elsewhere, Jussi demonstrates how by examining this era - marked by the birth of media culture, modernity and its technologies - we can show that the ‘new’ in new media is actually quite a prosaic term; mobility and urban mobile culture, for instance, has had a long duration than we think. I think he means to tell us that in investigating this past, one gains a perspective of mobility and mobile media from not only from mobile devices but from social life.

Which brings us to one thing Victorians hadn’t envisaged in their use of mobile media: connectivity. Fast forward to the 1990s, the idea of mobility also attached itself to the idea of connectivity. And we know this with our mobile phones and pagers. Texts, beeps, emoticons on early small dot-matix green screens was how we communicated with each other whilst on the move. Now with our smartphones, i.e. 3G enabled internet access, mobility acquires another layer of experience. Our dull commutes are augmented by an even bigger range of possibilities. Connectivity is an affordance that “implodes our time and space” because of all these added information and range of microdata included in our movement. We use Google maps to navigate, we can tweet, email, take a picture, check the weather, Whatsapp our friends, Instagram, post FB updates and make snazzy six-second videos. Movement is now simultaneously happening both onscreen and off. We can now connect with friends, people we love who are far away or even in different timezones. Even when you are alone, you are never alone if you have your mobile phone. Urban mobility is living as if the world is one big screen if Google would have its way with us. But does this seamless fluid social connected movement mean that our mobility seems freer?

Jussi also argues that technology has a dark side to it. It doesn't always work the way we imagine it to. We might not get a signal or connection all the time and in every place; immobility can also highlight how mobility works within certain restrictions and limits. Mobility in the city can be thought of as a question of power over the users, about managing movements within the city - an environment that dictates, governs and regulates how we move. Apps such as the Transport for London app might seem like a handy informational tool but it also helps the city regulate your movements within it. It allows for the “synchronisation of your movement in space” - hundreds of commuters need to make sure they catch the 9:05am Waterloo station, and complete the walk to the bus stop within 7 minutes and so on and so forth. We are creatures of habit. Certainly we already know that apps behave like databases, they collect data from each user but more than that, Jussi warns, apps “can measure, quantify and feed forward” information about us so much so that perhaps one day our movements can be predicted with reasonable accuracy.

The most interesting part of the lecture for me was this idea of vertical mobility. Echoing John Urry, a sociologist doing lots of research about mobilities, Jussi suggests we need not only think of mobility in the horizontal sense: why not think about mobility in the vertical sense? Vertical mobility not only as social mobility - upwards and downwards through socio-economic scales - but also geographically? We might question what is mobility in the air? or underground? Media use during flights, for safety reasons, is a pretty strict experience both in terms of content and the physical experience - what might mobility mean in that context?

[wsaadm]

WSAadm on Weibo

It is easy forget there are social worlds outside of Facebook and Twitter. WSAadm has more followers/fans on the Chinese twitter - Weibo - than on Facebook: 119! :)

[but we do have 135 tumblr followers tho YAY!]

[wsaadm]

Better Worse, Fail better.

WSAmacd and WSAadm students remixing the 'official' poster of the WSAcgf event.

Yesterday we heard from the generous Mark Amerika; he gave an inspiring and fun session, particularly I think, for students who are worried about 'making it' in the great big world when they graduate. What are they going to do with their work? Worries about 'portfolios'. He opened his talk with the famous quote from Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: "Ever tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." -

The idea of failure or failed work or failing work is a kind of ethos that informs what Amerika calls "applied remixology". A body of work that borrows heavily from that of the Situationists, montage, Dada, with the added emphasis on experimenting with and manipulating work using the Internet. One example of this he showed us is Immobilite, a 'foreign film' he made in Cornwall with the folks at University College Falmouth. For the 5-7 weeks that he was there, he made a film shot entirely using a mobile phone, - specifically a Nokia N95 one of the earlier models with videoing capabilities. "A feature length foreign film", Amerika tells us, is a very loaded term. Immobilite references and remixes the European art house film aesthetic [think Antonioni, Goddard, Warhol, etc] and "tendencies" and the weirdly jarring landscape imagery in Immobilite is influenced by the painterly abstract art tradition. His remix plays, and does so not within the media, - it is different from the art tradition of collage in that sense - Amerika advocates a kind of "deep research" which allows for remix across genres, aesthetic, histories and visual modes, creating simultaneously divergent and convergent moments. In Immobilite, he asks: "what is the relationship between the moving image and the mobile image?" Deep remix is disruptive of the assumptions within aesthetic traditions or conventions and one way of posing questions about these assumptions or habits is to, trans-remediate them.

Another example of his applied remixology came from the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics in Preston and which runs until 2 Jan - a very good reason to visit Preston I think! Amerika plays with the idea of canonized art inviting artists to remix 25 works of art using the Internet and propagating via thisArtist 2.0,'glitches' or glitch aesthetics. You can download the whole MOGA catalog from the site and you can see them on the website without the need for a museum but Amerika also explores the tension between glitch and aesthetizing glitch - a contentious difference as Jussi Parikka points out - the glitch ethos seems to contradict entirely the idea of museum and discursive enshrinement in the physical exhibition and also the multiple "voices" in the MOGA catalog. Are we finding beauty in glitch or are we making - canonizing - glitch so that it becomes beautiful?

I think the only thing we - students, designers, creatives - can do is to play close to this tension if only in order to make innovative work that isn't simply a standalone pretty thing, but also work that re-generates and morphs and produces other work by other people. "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it". And this is relevant to folks who do not consider themselves Internet artists, because remix is an ethos, not a fetishization of technology. Driven by theory. Not to say everyone should embrace 'failure' as a theme - because that would be fulfilling the the canonization of glitch - but to focus on the work and give some of it away, as gifts. As Amerika said to one of our students, "don't try to protect your work from its potentialities". Fail better.

[wsaadm]

Remixing #WSAadm #WSAmacd, remixing covers

Inspired by WSAmacd's Handbook Object, WSAadm re-mixed it:

Original cover design by Daniel Hobson, current student of MA Communication Design.

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"You Are Here" - MA Interim Show 2013

You are here. Our postgraduates are here: at WSA but also at a crossroads. No longer undergraduates, not yet industry professionals. Half way through their MA, our community of designers, artists, marketers and managers have come a long way. Some have discovered their voice. Some are deciding which route to take to that unique design proposition.This exhibition is about how far they have come and the directions they will take. Join us at their crossroads.   MA Interim Exhibition The Rotunda, Winchester School of Art Part I: 11 - 15 March Part II: 7 - 17 May 10.00 - 17.00   Private View: Monday 11 March, 16.00

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Double Whammy Thursday - Kin Design & Mark Amerika

THIS THURSDAY - we have two sessions a double whammy: UNMISSABLE, highly relevant, totally awesome speakers rocking Winchester in LTA, 330pm and 5pm. In terms of giving you value for money, your WSA education really doesn't get better than this.

First at 330pm, we have Matt Wade & Kevin Palmer from Kin Design here to talk to students about digital design practice and also open to anyone else who wants to attend. Matt and Kevin have worked with Google, Nokia, Ted Baker, Sony, London College of Fashion, and they will talking to students about the philosophy of Kin Design, how they strike a balance between commercial and experimental researchy projects.

AND at 5pm, we have Mark Amerika, the remixer, artist, academic, writer extraordinaire, who informs and inspires our course: in case you don't already know, WSAadm and WSAmacd students are collaborating on an e-publication project - unveiling in March 2013 - based on the theme of remix and remix culture, culture jamming and what all of this means for business, design and the future of content. We're absolutely thrilled to have Mark actually come to Winchester to tell us all about his work in person!

Two sessions, one location, all welcome - Thursday, 8 Nov, LTA. Don't MISS IT!