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Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) Or how my I managed to see at lest one major exhibition in 2020 I am quite sure it was long before pandemic times when Tate Modern announced that they are doing their first in 20 years big exhibition of Andy Warhol. I find him fascinating as a person and a life story, as much as an artist, so this was no brainer. I knew this is one event I am not going to miss. Then Covid-19 decided to have its own say about all of our lives and any and all of the plans I have made got pushed to the back of my mind. By the summer things were looking a bit more optimistic. While we were still mostly staying at home, dismissed any idea of international travels, and local travels to be honest as we barely left the suburb we live in, I felt like I needed to at least try and escape the lockdown routine. Safety first, of course, but something had to be done. The exhibition was set to open at the first half of March 2020. We all know how this turned out. At that time, we have just en...
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Podcasting Done Right My year through the best podcasts I listened to This blog, apart from exploring the immediate topics we covered in class and focusing on the projects we did for that module, should also be about the different media we consume and engage with in our everyday life (or so I understood it 😁). For a while now, and especially in the last one year, I have been listening to a lot of podcasts and it was only fair to make a post about that as well. Once quite a niche industry, podcasting has turned into a force in the streaming world in the last, let’s say 10 years. What I like about it is that I have a say in what I listen to. It is my choice, based on things that I am interested in. If I don’t care about celebrity gossip, I don’t have to scroll endlessly or turn pages in vain in order to escape that, which is often my reality with other media outlets. I have to admit that I don’t have the patience to browse for podcasts, read descriptions and start listening, only to fin...
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Places to go, things to do, photos to take In this post I have decided to share some photos I have made, alongside my family, in a place that shouldn’t need an introduction, yet I still meet people in London that have never heard of it. The last one year has been tough on us. It has been tough on everyone. Being restricted mostly to our homes has brought new appreciation for all those times when on a Saturday morning, in the spur of the moment, we have decided to go out and visit a museum, theatre, parks. And while everyone knows The British Museum, The Tate Galleries, Richmond Park, etc, one of our favourite places in London is often overlooked and rarely recognised for its significance and beauty. WWT London Wetland Centre is  an extraordinary place, with The Slimbridge Wetland Centre considered the birthplace of modern conservation and the London project acknowledged to be one of the most important efforts in that area for the past century. More about them you can find here:...
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  KING QUEEN OF THE WORLD!   Or how without me realising board games have made their way into video gaming. When it comes to the media I often consume, let’s talk about video games. I have always been more of a stranger to gaming than most, but I don’t know a single person of my generation that haven’t owned the vintage Nintendo console with those abysmal graphics or that have never played ‘Dungeons and Dragons” (I am quite sure that I have somewhere around the house an ancient CD with early version of the game, that has been changing flats, houses and countries with me). To this day every once in a while, I can spend hours playing ‘Heroes of Might and Magic’ III which with HoMM II is considered classic already and was never topped by the later editions of the game. But this post is not about that. It is about board games and how they made their way into video games and I somehow missed it. I have always loved board games. I still buy those, and I still associate them with go...
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Last but not least (Photo by Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection. Thumbnail: DreamWorks SKG, Buena Vista Pictures, Fox Searchlight, Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett  Collection) Finally, for my Client Brief I had to create a stop-motion animation. I struggled with this one. Not so much with the execution of the project itself - the lectures we had were quite informative and the whole thing seemed pretty straight forward if you were there and paying attention. Take the images, go through Photoshop and export the files into Premier. Make the adjustments you want and you are done. But I was having a hard time coming up with an idea. While with the previous parts of the project it came to me right away and I just had to put some more thought into the concept and what to include, this one was a blank page in my mind. I had nothing. At one point I had the crazy idea of making it about my cats. Then I was considering doing a Lego figurine 30 seconds animation. Then there was the...
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To record or not to record Now, for the actual recording I made. The idea behind it comes from the overwhelming feeling I have that we live in a dystopian world. We talk about progress, evolution and going forward, yet, for me, in more ways than one the world and societies are moving backwards. There is a division between us like never before. Once again, we are building walls - real and metaphorical. Ideologies of all kinds are pulling us apart. Under the illusion that, with all that information out there, we are all full of knowledge and possess critical thinking, each and all of us feel no choice but to take a side. And this stand, this having an opinion, this expression of a certain position, we share everywhere and with everyone for the sake of finding approval, ‘likes’ and ratings. For a while now I have been saying that the public sphere as such is dying. Jürgen Habermas has always been a favourite of mine, even before I decided to study Media and Communication. I do believe ...
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      Old Dogs, New Tricks and Audacity!   Back on track now with my Client Brief. Once I managed to get somewhere with Photoshop it was time to figure out what I am doing for the next part of my project. Ideas I had plenty. Once again, what I lacked were technical skills. I want to be very clear about something. I love learning. I read a lot. I constantly try to expand my view of the world. However, the last time I was in a classroom was more than 20 years ago. Back then my 'Computer education' classes consisted of me being shown what a computer actually is, how this piece of hardware is put together and how you make it do anything by entering commands in the black DOS screen. These days I consider myself quite on par with the modern technologies, in terms of hardware and the usual ways we waste time using them. The point is that what kids nowadays are taught at school, in terms of software that allows them to work with photos, audio-files, animation, programme code...
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  The comeback of vinyl and consumer culture   Before I go into the audio software I had to learn in order to finish the second part of my Uni project, I decided to dedicate one more post to sound and how we consume it these days. In the way digital media technologies have become such an essential part of our lives, one might think analog tech is so not relevant that it is already something clearly in the past. And yet one piece of analog tech made the strongest comeback in the last few years, with sales in 2018 marking a 30-year high! All hail the mighty vinyl and how it once again became important. First of all, I want to touch a subject that vinyl collectors, like me, try to stay away from - sustainability. Let’s face it. There is nothing like the feeling of impatiently waiting for your new vinyl to arrive (in the pandemic reality, at least) or when you browse through the stacks in records shops. It is really easy to become an addiction and, for me at least it resulted in ...
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  24/09/1991 and what turned out to be one of the greatest months/years in music history Deviating a little bit from the main purpose of this blog I decided to dedicate a post to one of the greatest days/months/years in music history. In all honesty I came to appreciate it a few years later as at the time I was still shaping my taste in music and the bands that made history were not the first choice of the 11-year-olds population segment. There are plenty of articles about the releases that hit the world on the 24 th of September 1991 but in all honesty this whole month and year are so significant I wouldn’t know where to start. 1991 was an incredibly productive year for music with the new heroes taking over from the old guard in all kinds of genres and some already accomplished artists bringing out yet another great album. The year saw the last Queen album released in Freddie Mercury’s lifetime - ‘Innuendo’, ‘Diamonds and Pearls’ by Prince, ‘Dangerous’ by Michael Jackson, U2’s ‘...
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