LCC Degree Show — visual siesta and bit of boredom

Well, it seems like London got proper sum­mer for at least few days, best time to go out, catch up with friends or just relax out­side — poor foot­ball fans who have to watch their matches indoors! Not being one, I spent this even­ing wan­der­ing around London College of Communication, which was explod­ing with dozens or even hun­dreds of stu­dents’ works! Occasion quite clear — the open­ing of Graphic & Media Degree show 2012. Ok, let’s jump to my short overview!

So, first of all the good points. Would say that the exhib­i­tion is worth vis­it­ing, if you are inter­ested in illus­tra­tion, graph­ics and visual lan­guage, you will find at least few inter­est­ing pieces. In gen­eral the level of the show is higher than aver­age and also very diverse. In one place you can stumble upon trendy comic books, anime char­ac­ters, pen­ises on the walls, inter­act­ive sculp­tures, sound art install­a­tions and cop­ies of Duchamp con­cepts locked in glass boxes. There also were enthu­si­astic girls present­ing per­form­ance about some­thing ‘deep’ and overly dra­matic, but I did not get what they wanted to say in the end. Am not sure if they going do it again, so you have to check before vis­it­ing. I found gam­ing and digital media corner quite inter­est­ing as well, but because we had just a few hours to see everything I only man­aged to play a few games, was fun though!

Well, and the weak points? Somehow, liv­ing in the era of digital explo­sion and mov­ing image, I really missed more inter­act­ive works and art­works. It is fun to see 10 or 20 purely visual static illus­tra­tions, books, posters and vari­ous tech­niques, but after two hours my eyes just began to burn and I really wanted to play, touch, inter­act and exper­i­ment. I would really advice artists and gradu­ates to think about imple­ment­ing and using their skills in richer media formats. Audiences are get­ting bored very rap­idly nowaday so in order to get atten­tion you either have to be really out­stand­ing and eye-​catching or use some gami­fic­a­tion and inter­ac­tion in your pieces. Especially when the venue is so packed with dif­fer­ent artworks.

However, there were few inter­act­ive pieces and install­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly nicely built one com­bined music, move­ment, col­our and artist him­self VJ-​ing live. One guy also organ­ised a work­shop about selling your­self using social media and net­work­ing, but as we found out not so many stu­dents worry about it, or at least not yet!

Enjoy the visu­als and if you vis­ited the show your­self, I will be glad to hear your opinions!

About author:

Gintarė Žitkevičiūtė
Gintare Zitkeviciute is Art Pit’s thinker and doer. In her work practise, she values lean approach, creativity and quick decisions. She doesn't like working with random people and thinks that a team is a heart of successful project. For that reason, she carefully picks people she works with on everyday basis. She is mostly interested in innovatio... Read further >