FIRTH AND FINAL POST!: Realism!

This is the final post for our media, historie and culture projects. this weeks lesson was on Realism within media .

the definition of realism is: The attitude or practice of accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to deal with it accordingly: "a new mood of realism". this basically means, creating somthing belevable to an audience. there is a common misconcenption that realism is to do with creating somthing as accurate to life as possible, but it can also mean create somthing to be beleivable, as if it could function within the real world. i will cover examples of these later.

realism started during the romantic period of art, at this time realism and drawing correctly was the biggest thing in art, until around 1860 when the camera was invented showing a much easier way to capture life and memories, this is when the artists gave up with realistic drawings as this was already seen as obsolete by the camera, so they started to develop surrealism, expressionism and other techniques showing expression through a less perfect form, this of corse can be seen as a good thing or a bad thing from your point of view. but very recently in 1988 Ralph Goings created the image Still Life With Red Matt, this image looks like a photograph but is actaully a painting! this is because he saw painting as a fun activity and being able to say he painted this image! rather than being put down by new technology.

another point about realism and artists is that an artist is entitled to "artistic license" where they can alter imformation slightly to distort reality but keep realism, a good example shown to us in class is image from the national geographic. the image of the giza pyramids on the cover have be altered, they have been pushed closer together to create a better composotion for there cover. this is obvisouly not real as it has been edited, but the idea is that it looks real and that is what realism is all about.

if we look back in the past at animations you can see a very big change in detail, but back then these images were still seen as realistic, this is because our tastes as humans and the computers we use to create these images has fastly improved, this means we have alot higher standards of what we consider realistic images.







here is a prime example, a remake of the old king kong movie. the original is very dated and you can obviously see it is a puppet used, espically how the women is drastically out of proportion with the city. but this was still seen as realistic and beleivable. since then computers have increased alot more power, creating more advanced images like this.

with alot more detail and alot more realism, create basically a giant ape creature. of corse this is not real but it is realistic, the muscles scructure and hieght compared to the rest of the scene is alot more beievable, but the main detail i would say that sells it is the face and hiar on the body.
we can look as far back as cave paintings to see the diffrents in realism, the imagery back then wasnt at all detailed, it was only stick people and very our of porpotion figures, but at this point in time realism wasnt very important, yes you can still work out what a image is and what it suggests, but at this point in time the only form of communication was drawings, nothing to do with culture or the ability to show off, but to show things that are important, this brings me to the point of diffrent ways information is repersented:

1) the world as i see it
2) The world as i expreince it
3) The world as it can be imagined to be

these three are very basic meanings, the world as i see it, would be the most realistic view and very defined. the world as i expreience it would be a more expressionist apporach still showing details, but it becoming slightly more distorted with less realistic colors, and then finally the world as it can be imaged, this is the very surrealist view, where anything can possibly happen. these range from the most realistic to the least.

as a final topic, there is a interesting concept raised by Plato.

this is a image of "Platos Cave". the concept here is 3 men locked in a cave, where the only light source is the fire behind them which is casting shadows onto a wall infront of them. the idea is that if the men where left there for the whole of there lives, this would be the world as they know it.

but if they were released to the outside world they would not be able to handle it and would run back into the cave to what they find comfortable. this is playing with the conecept of what we find realism is, realism is what we percieve it and what we have grown up with around us.