Tool: Week 1 (18 Jan 2022)
After discussing in the first tutorial class, there were a lot of ideas flowing around. The direction I think I could extrapolate from unit 2 is to explore Graphic Communication as Humour/Irony. Though unit 2 was initiated with politics (grandnarratives and news media), it shfited to explore typography with similar postmodernistic attitude. As my position in encompassing in the metanarratives world is to be sarcastic about it (as shown in the case of my affinity towards Comic Sans), it makes sense for me to explore what does it mean to be funny in graphic communication.
Metahaven in the book Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?: Memes, Design and Politics described jokes as an “active, living and mobile form of disobedience.” The memes can be a political tool on the internet that unites people to rebel. Though politically aware, I am not that keen on provoking a sort of movements in the circulations of memes. I enjoy the humour and unhumour of memes on the internet, as the text and images are substituable and interchangable that it creates a format for people to communicate while having fun with the funny faces of celebrities, spongebob images, or cute animals surprised expressions. This is a form I found that it is both funny and unfunny. The unfunny part came from the fact that some of the images were not that well relatable or hilarious per se, it however act as a medium that people feel like they relate to; or simply the text on the meme is relatable that it makes the memes relatable. And that is what makes meme interesting. It is not that easy to have a lot of thoughts and reaction towards the still image of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka as in the Condescending Wonka meme, the entertainment only works when the text is portraying familiar situations that you wish you had put on the same facial expression as Wilder.

Putting text on image is a process. A meme is graphic communication, and with well thought decisions, it can be good design. I picked tool as the first body of work to commence my unit 3. I am yet to rationalise why I picked Letterpress. However, I think it could be a meme making process. By collecting random items (memes in download folder, newspaper and magazines). I want to find out if the process of performing letterpress on them could be funny, hillarious, ironic, or even sarcarstic.
To be more conscious about being funny. It is important to frame the type of humot I am trying to portrait. Irony can be divided into 3 different kinds: dramatic irony, verbal irony and situational irony. They all embody mostly the similar idea, which is against expectation. While dramatic irony is rather framed in the forms of theatrical play, film, or even comic books, as they require audience from the 4th wall. Verbal irony and situational irony meanwhile can appear almosy anywhere (maybe except for premium cashmere cardigans…please do not ruin top quality wool).
And eventually, I made up a meta joke about using letterpress as a tool to explore graphic communication as humour:
Lucas: Okay I’m going to come up with a tool to explore Graphic Communication as Humour.
Matthew: you need to support your means and approach with reference, criticality and the sacrifice of a virgin goat.
Lucas: What if I just do letterpress on random stuffs, to see if something funny can happen? It would be IRONIC and imPRESSive if it does.
*the conversation is completely fictional, no animals were harmed during the process.
I went to the letterpress workshop for a few days. There was a learning curve and I could not even finish the whole conversations before the second tutorial class.




To frame it well, this is the question I am currently on inquiry: What is letterpress as a tool for exploring graphic communication as jokes?

Several memes were tested on, turns out the cat and the lady meme suits the situation so well that I might just take it to the next level.