Journal: The Poster

“The poster-maker, the pamphleteer and the tagger aim to sway the popular heart and mind through visual public interventions. As new technologies rise, turning the public sphere into a transparent, ubiquitous communications medium and a global marketplace, is the privileged status of the poster doomed or are we seeing it transformed as part of a new wave of visual rhetoric? When the environment starts to become responsive to our very presence and aware of our individual nature what is the role of the ‘traditional poster’ delivering a classical rhetorical message? This peer-reviewed journal aims to lead the debate.

The Poster stands as a vehicle for the ideas of media theorists; scholars of Cultural Studies and Cultural Materialism; for social psychologists of visual communication, for architects and designers of wayfinding schemes; for philosophers of Aesthetics and Politics, Society and Linguistics; for social scientists, anthropologists and ethnographers; for political campaigners and artist activists; for communications researchers and visual communications practitioners.”

I’ve just been asked to be Associate Editor/Peer Reviewer on this journal – apparently they contacted me before, but I never received the email! Visit the journal site.

Freedom is in Peril T-Shirt

The Last Night of the Proms in Hyde Park in London seemed a good place to wear a bit of a statement t-shirt, and thanks to Freedom is in Peril for sending me this t-shirt!

Unfortunately, it does make people stare at your chest, but great slogans on t-shirts can get some great conversations going! This post was picking up pretty quickly by the Proms in the Park tweeters and re-tweeted!

A Little History
Well, I am a history lecturer!

Alongside ‘Your Courage…’, ‘Freedom is in Peril, Defend it with All Your Might’ was published, distributed and displayed almost immediately as war was declared. Even during the planning stages criticisms were raised that ‘Freedom’ is rather an abstract concept and was “likely to be too academic and too alien to the British habit of thought”. Mass-Observation reported that people felt that they could not defend ‘freedom’ because they cannot feel that they are being attacked, and this remained a problem throughout the ‘phoney war‘. The ‘Your Courage…’ poster probably attracted more anger than ‘Freedom is in Peril’ as there were twice as many produced as ‘Freedom is in Peril’, and the distinction between ‘You’ and ‘Us’ clearly struck a particular nerve. Keep Calm and Carry On of course never attracted any press coverage as it was never displayed.

Responsibility for the failure of campaigns was placed squarely with the government as it meant that, either the people had not been made to feel the urgency of the message, or that “the leaders have not spoken in a language which the people can understand and respond to.” The fact that “three-quarters of the population left school before they were fifteen” appeared to have been ignored. Minister of Supply, Herbert Morrison’s simple slogan ‘GO TO IT!’, echoed in posters, appears to have been far more positively received than “instructions in stiff and incomprehensible language”, although there was concern that this campaign would not mean anything once taken out of context of the speech in which it was made, a fear that appears to have been justified since ‘What is ‘it’?’ was scrawled upon posters.

Extracted from undergraduate dissertation and PhD thesis. Check out the production numbers here.

Loire Valley, Here I Come

Dear all

I hope that you have a great couple of weeks. I have set up a number of artist biographies to auto-appear over the next 2 weeks, as I’m back on 12th August, and thanks to my landlady who will be keeping calm and carrying on back in the UK (now the term is over!).

I will be wearing my “Keep Calm and Carry On T-Shirt”, and “Keep Calm and Carry On Apron” whilst I cook for 82 people on a campsite in the Loire Valley with Oak Hall, and as I then bike-sit, and drive down to Provence on the wrong side of the road, before coming back to get back on track with my projects.

I have realised that I haven’t double-checked those links, as I seem to be moving information across from my artists information on my website, so I should do that at some point on my return, when I also have a number of Google Alerts for KCCO to add! Always lots to do, and I have been appointed on a 0.4 fractional contract as a Lecturer in History at the University of Winchester from August, so will be teaching a lot of new material!

Bex

New York Times article in print…

Christianity in the Digital Space

Monday-Wednesday this week I’ve been at a symposium in Durham, looking at Christianity in the Digital Space. As this included meeting up with people I’d only ever met on Twitter and Facebook, and as my avatar for those pages had changed to this image (see right) over the past couple of weeks, I decided the easiest way to identify myself was to wear the KCCO t-shirt at the conference, and it certainly worked well! Wearing a LOUD slogan on your t-shirt, particularly one that so many people have heard of, makes it very noticeable, and I got many questions as to the significance and history of it!

New York Times

Well, you can’t really have missed that I was in the New York Times on 5th July, but I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to see the real thing, rather than just the online version. Much as I live much of my life in the digital world, there’s nothing quite like “dead-tree” publications! So here are pics of the front cover/the article from the NYT, which my landlady’s beautiful friend in New York saved and posted to me!

Competition

Don’t forget that there’s a competition to win one of 10 copies of ‘Keep Calm and Carry On‘ by 20th July (and hopefully my Twitter account @drbexl will be unsuspended by then!), so enter, and tell your friends! Good book!

Super Fun Days Out: Love Life… Live It!

Recently, I have been appointed as a partner, and the New Media Strategist for Super Fun Days Out, covering the blog (coming shortly), Twitter, and Bookmarking, starting with Delicious.

Super Fun Days Out is a free online adrenaline-directory, covering more than 2,000 UK companies who provide adventure sports. Rather than taking commission, SFDO (#sfdo) provides links directly to the sports providers, thus making it more affordable for those who want to participate in adventure sports, and giving the UK economy a boost as we continue to “Keep Calm and Carry On”, for which we have substituted our company slogan: “Love Life… Live It”!

Adventure Sports Include:4×4 driving; abseiling; airsoft; archery; assault course; banana rides; blading; body boarding; buggies; bungee jumping; bush craft; canoeing; canyoning; caving; clay pigeon shooting; coasteering; cycling; dinghy; dragon boating; duckies; fishing; flying; golf; hang gliding; helicopter; hill climbing; horse riding; hot air balloon; hovercrafting; ice skating; jcb driving; jet ski; karting; kayaking; kite surfing; land yachting; laser clay pigeon shooting; laser combat; laser tag; military driving; minimoto; mircolight; motocross; mountain biking; mountain boarding; outdoor pursuits; paddlesurfing; paintball; parachute; paragliding; paramotoring; performance car driving; powerboating; quad biking; raft building; rafting;rally driving; ringos; river bugs; rock climbing; rowing; sailing; scuba diving; segway racing; shark diving; shooting; skiing; skim boarding; skirmish; skydiving; skydiving freefall simulator; sleddog; sledging; snorkelling; snow; snowboarding; sphereing; surfing; wakeboarding; wakeskating; water sports; waterskiing; waveski; white water rafting; windsurfing; yachting; zip wire; zorbing

• Follow Super Fun Days Out on Twitter.
• Watch as we start to build links on Delicious
• Look out for the blog which will be linked [here], when you’ll find out more about our team, and the sports we love to get involved in!
• Join our Facebook group!
• Read the Daily Echo article.

Image generated by Keep-Calm-O-Matic.

Dr Bex Lewis in a Keep Calm and Carry On T-shirt

This morning I had this photo taken for another press release (after the NYT article) … we had some fun taking them – trying to make sure the slogan was on view! Nice, eh?! One of the first comments I had as I walked in was “ooo, I saw Katie Price wearing that the other day”, and it has generated quite a lot of other comments too – people are just so interested in it… I met a super-fan (Jas) at the Winchester Web Scene last night, who said that he owns most variations of it (that’s us having a chat in the background)!

Thanks to Tim Griffiths at the University of Winchester for the photo.

I purchased my t-shirt from Barter Books (only £12.60 +p&p).

London Transport Posters in Wartime

London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design OK, so maybe I’m going for the easy entries over the next few days, but I’ve got plenty to add on bits and pieces. I tried to get my original research material out from storage today, but it’s going to have to wait…. I have lots materially digitally stored!

London Transport Museum’s Exhibition ‘The Art of the Poster‘ finished last week, and was accompanied by the book London Transport Posters: A Century of Art and Design, for which I wrote a chapter (finishing as much as I could do in an internet cafe in Melbourne, Australia!). London Transport Museum are notoriously protective of their copyright, so it was a great chance to continue some research on further posters… I still get excited when I see a poster I’ve not seen before, or even one I have seen before making it’s way into the modern public domain… such as the Keep Calm and Carry On posters! My thesis focused largely on posters produced by the Ministry of Information, but they called upon the expertise of organisations such as London Transport and Shell in the formation of the Ministry of Information, as these organisations had demonstrated a proficiency in publicity. It was also interesting to study First World War posters, to which I’d referred in my thesis (noting that they were far more King & Country whereas the Second World War was a much more democratic effort), as the chapter was about wartime posters, not just the Second World War. LTM had been working on digitising their poster collection whilst I was doing my PhD research, and the materials launched online whilst I was writing this chapter. My PhD research had turned up some really interesting information which the London Transport archives didn’t have (and I spent some time both in Covent Garden and the main archives, along with the V&A, and we had meetings out at Acton… some great materials stored there), so really felt I made a good contribution. My chapter ended up as a joint publication as David Bownes completed it whilst I was hopping around New Zealand, before I proof read it in the midst of Bolivia, after a great day blowing up dynamite in the silver mines, before returning in time for the book/exhibition launch in October!

Further Resources  (in no particular order)

• New Statesman: Mass Market Modernism, November 2008
• The Guardian Gallery, November 2007
• The Museum of London: Exploring 20th Century London (undated, but clearly a summary of the book)
• Comparing BART and LT, April 2009
• The Design Museum: London Transport
• Suite 101, January 2009
• Culture 24, December 2008
• Flickr: London Transport posters throughout the Years
• Flickr: London Underground cluster
• If you want a chance to buy some originals, there’s always Onslows