late late LATE update.

It's a bit late in the day to be making a post about my work now BUT better late than never.
For anyone (Jeremy) who's been wondering what I've been up too I've been exploring the idea of propaganda as an artform, a political tool, and as a modern fad. I had been stuck for a while on how to present these ideas, but am now combining political propaganda of Australian politicians with stencilled graffiti of heroes and villians.
I create the stencils in photoshop overlaying the poster I intend to graffitti, save that psd, and then remove the layers indicating the stencil and create a new document with them, and save that as a jpeg also. The idea being that it will be in scale when eventually printed.
As a happy side effect of that process I can use the psd from which i create my jpeg as a mockup, before i remove the stencil layers yay!
have a look at Tony Doom:

Low qual and small dimensions yuck. Promise the real ones are decent quality this is just bad so it was quick to upload and i could put it on the blog.

I think it's pretty successful! Doom is a proud, classist, sexist villian who is overwhelmingly confident in his own intelligence (not the perfect metaphor bc Doom is actually very intelligent). (are my political biases showing? Sorry guys!)

I think it's quite visually effective, regardless of political oppinion. My interest also, is taking the propaganda of the government, and combining it with this stencil graffiti counter culture, which I kind of reason to be a propaganda of the people. See Stencil art by Meek, Melbourne street artist. I feel like it's important to acknowledge the propagandistic levels of both of these two "formats" of social advertising. Neither creators, I feel, would be happy with, or agree with the idea that the election poster and the stencil art are modern propaganda, but they are mass produced visual media, with slogans and simple memorable visuals, and either promoting or devaluing particular social constructs (such as government, "officialdom" etc) by their very nature. There is no denying the political nature of an election poster or promo shot, but the issue of stencil graffiti, as with all graffiti, is that politics is the choice of the artist, and while I associate this form of graffiti with counter culture political statements, this is not always the case.
I argue that graffiti by it's very nature is a political choice though.

From this villian/hero v. political figure theme i decided to follow with this poster making, I thought about how I could express political narratives, such as the mining tax, or recent budget cuts. Instead of following heroes and villians, i chose to persue "nerd culture" as the idea of combining politics and nerdy themes is a) super amusing and amusement is something I try to aim for, and b) contextually shocking, and a bit on the nose. I'm kind of making fun of the news media and how politics are presented by them, but it's not entirely a clear enough concept, I may have to write a short description of each piece to include when showing, or work well known motifs of news into the presentation.

It's also motivated by nerd culture itself, and while perhaps not in the "fandoms" which I've chosen bc im a casual fan of LOTR (which is the element of nerd culture ive chosen) and am not involved enough, it's been my observation that a lot of people who are involved in the nerd culture i DO engage with are highly politically motivated and involved, and  also highly critical of both the media we consume, and the ways in which it is consumed by us, and the people we see around us. It's kind of a hint that this culture that's sort of viewed as vapid and obsessive, and ignorant of the real world may have it's ignorant pockets, but it also has pockets of people who are super DUPER engaged in the real world, and are using this culture to push social movement, express their political opinions, and critique the media they're given, among other things. 

Also, taking dramatic moments and setting political themes in a visual of a fantasy landscape with monsters and wizards, and crumbling ruins adds this element of otherworldliness, and displacement.

I decided to gif these narratives to Gandalf fighting the Balrog (mining tax), and smaug guarding gold (budget cuts). They're a little fast, and i decided to keep that, it gives this benny hillesque tinge to everything, implying that yeah, it's ok to laugh at this, it's dumb. 

The gifs are coloured, sharpened, with added moving bits, and subtitled mimicking the subtitles that come with your movies, changing the dialogue of the original scene.

I can't upload a gif bc i made them big and they're so much hard work i dont want to accidentally save a low qual one over a high qual one and have to start again!