Anna Perronnet

Tag: written response

  • Written response 5.0

    Group project

    Sarah, Doreen, and I began this exploration with very different perspectives and levels of knowledge, shaped by our diverse backgrounds, countries, and education about sustainability. When we started working with data, we encountered countless models and visual systems, each claiming to represent reality. The variety, and sometimes contradiction within these representations made us question their objectivity, so we chose to critically examine how maps constructed and communicated.

    Our conversations gradually shifted toward textiles and threads, a shared interest that felt both intuitive and meaningful. Textiles are closely tied to global systems of production, waste, and labor, making them an interesting lens through which to reflect on sustainability. They are also widely used by UAL students across disciplines and for diverse purposes, which made the material context feel relevant to our own environment. 

    Embroidery, traditionally being a community activity shaped the way we worked as a group. It became a collective practice where we exchanged skills and learned techniques from scratch throughout the process. It also facilitated decisions, tasks distribution and experimentation. Embroidery was the best way to work with waste materials and translate data into a visual language.

    References from the reading list

    • Blauvelt, A., Maurer, L., Paulus, E., Puckey, J. and Wouters, R., 2013. Conditional Design Workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz.

    Echoing the example of the imaginary city of Zhiango from the Conditional Design Workbook, built entirely through a defined set of rules, we established our own framework to construct the map. One of our core rules was to work exclusively with waste materials, turning limitation into a generative constraint. We selected specific types of pollution and translated them into visual references, but instead of transferring exact numerical data, we chose to interpret it through personal perception and understanding. 

    We established a frame with the embroidery hoop and created a key that assigned different stitches, colours, threads, and fabrics to particular forms of pollution and locations. This system guided our process while allowing space for subjectivity. The reused materials themselves carried meaning, reinforcing the theme of sustainability. As the three of us worked simultaneously within these shared rules, the outcome was even more unpredictable and started reflecting the complexity of data representation.

    • Anderson, B., 2006. ‘Census, Map, Museum’. In: Imagined Communities. London: Verso, pp. 163–185.

    This text compares colonial cartography and Siamese mapping traditions reveals how differently realities can be constructed through maps. The widely used Mercator projection, developed during European expansion, reflects a colonial worldview. In contrast, historical maps from Siam (present-day Thailand) operated within entirely different frameworks and didn’t show any invisible borders formalised by colonising powers. One form, the “cosmograph,” symbolically represented the Three Worlds of Buddhist cosmology, depicting heavens and hells rather than territory. And other maps functioned as guides for military campaigns or coastal navigation, combining multiple perspectives and lacking a fixed, unified geographic scale. They were relational and purpose-driven.

    These examples demonstrate that maps do not have to reflect reality to be understood, they can construct it. Recognising that the world map we commonly use is rooted in a colonial logic, we chose to distance ourselves from the Mercatorian view. Instead, we worked with the Dymaxion map, folding and cutting it, layering information to disrupt habitual perceptions and propose alternative understandings.

    References outside the reading list :

    • Leach, A., 2023. The World Is on Fire but We’re Still Buying Shoes. London: Profile Books.

    This book examines our collective addiction to fast fashion and the contradiction between awareness and action. Even when we know the environmental and social damage behind clothing production, consumption remains normalised, convenient, and emotionally driven.

    But the thing is, we never really know what happens and to what extent. The book explains the lack of information and questions responsibility in sustainability, particularly the role of major fashion brands. Labels that proudly state “Made in Italy” often refer only to the final stage of assembly, while the materials may have traveled across multiple countries before reaching that point. The earlier stages from raw material extraction to sewing— are frequently outsourced to places where labor is cheaper and regulations weaker. By shifting production to wherever costs are lowest, companies avoid long-term accountability for workers’ wellbeing and environmental impact, while still marketing an image of quality and sustainability. 

    This is why we chose to represent all this data that is not explained on the labels. We highlighted the hidden complexity of the textile life cycle, exposing how global supply chains obscure responsibility and distance individual consumers from the true cost of what they wear.

    • Pater, R., 2016. The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

    A chapter of this book explores how world maps are never neutral representations of reality. Modern cartography developed alongside colonial expansion, when European powers mapped territories in order to control, divide, and claim them. Choices of projection, colour, scale, and even font size can subtly reinforce hierarchies, highlight certain regions, and marginalise others. A map may appear objective, but it always reflects particular intentions and ideas to the point of having an impact on world politics.

    Because it is impossible to accurately project a spherical globe onto a flat surface without distortion, every world map involves compromise. The Dymaxion map, developed by Buckminster Fuller, attempts to minimise these distortions by unfolding the globe, challenging conventional dominant countries and putting into perspective the distance between them. So we started using this map, but continued deconstructing it, transforming it into something abstract, that doesn’t correspond to geography standards anymore.

    The chapter also highlights ingenious mapping traditions from Indigenous communities, such as navigational charts based on ocean swell patterns, which questions Western standards of accuracy. Ultimately, maps and graphics shape understanding: altering scale, movement, or physical form can dramatically transform how data is perceived and interpreted.

    Design practices :

    • Deutinger, T. (2019) Ultimate Atlas: Logbook of Spaceship Earth. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers. 

    This book demonstrates that almost anything can convey information when framed within a clear context. Using only lines and brief texts, Deutinger creates complex visualisations that communicate diverse forms of data. His minimalist, black-and-white graphics represent topics ranging from the size of countries to the distribution of crops across the planet. Rather than relying on numerical labels, many of the graphs operate through comparison and proportion, encouraging an intuitive understanding of scale.

    The book proposes a new logic of reading, distinct from conventional cartography. Instead of prioritising geographic accuracy, he prioritises narrative logic. He completely changed the standards of graphics we are used to and took the approach of simplifying information as much as possible into different images. On the other hand, we chose to show the complexity of the world by selecting one single article from the shop to show full extent of its lifecycle, even if it means not representing the figures mathematically. We layered all the data we could find around to show the whole scale of its impact.

    • Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project, 2009, Mixed media interactive installation. Tables, chairs, thread, fabric items. unique (1/1) + 1AP

    This project is an interactive installation in which the artist employs simple elements like thread, colour, and sewing as starting points to explore relationships between people, objects and their environment. Visitors were invited to bring damaged textile items to be mended during the exhibition, transforming repair into a performance and placing textile in the center. By encouraging participants to care for the garments they valued, the project directly addressed waste and responsibility within textile culture.

    The threads used for each repair were left uncut until the exhibition ended. Over time, they accumulated into a layered web stretching across the space. This entanglement visually mapped the complexity of connections between people and their clothes.

    In our own work, we also used thread as a connecting device, but to trace global shipping journeys between countries. By linking locations with stitched lines and reusing textile waste collected from bins across the school, we highlighted the environmental impact of production and disposal, exposing the layered consequences of textile consumption.

  • Written response 4.0

    FINAL_DRAFTDownload

    I printed this picture while writing on a transparent paper with a black opaque marker. The sun imprinted the paper while writing so the top part is more contrasted because more exposed and tho bottom part more blurry because more recent. My Text was a performance .

    Draft 3 rendering

    I made this publication completely analog as a part of the performance : the pictures are not fixed and will continue fading when looking at them.

  • Written response 3.0

    A poor image is the ghost of an image. It is an image that followed a process at the expense of its own meaning, changing its focus. From being uploaded to downloaded and shared, images undergo systematic modifications where the outcome is uncertain and uncontrolled (Steyerl, 2012, pp. 31–45).

    I chose to explain Hito Steyerl’s In Defence of the Poor Image according to the Conditional Design Manifesto from the Conditional design workbook . This manifesto explains the concept of conditional design where the approach is more valued than the chosen media, where graphic design becomes a tool or an instrument. Because conditional design is about designing design, workshops are described as games, with a set of conditions and rules.

    I translated Hito Steyerl’s text into a workshop game to demonstrate the transformative and collective method of creation of poor images.

    Workshop
    IN DEFENSE OF THE POOR IMAGE

    X Play with multiple participants. X The game takes place in a world that idolizes high-quality images

    1, • Preparation
    1.1, Choose an original, fixed image.

    2, • Circulation
    2.1, Make it circulate outside official economies — on file-sharing platforms, torrents, or social media.
    2.2, Make it mutate : copies, downloads, and reshares add layers of translation and context.
    2.3, Challenge aesthetic and economic hierarchies : poor images are democratic in access but highlight global inequalities.
    2.4, Encourage collective circulation rather than fixed ownership, like artworks confined to museums.

    3, • Transformation
    3.1, Each copy may alter contrast, color, or size.
    3.2, Every degradation or glitch adds history, authorship, and survival value.
    3.3, Resist the art world’s obsession with perfection, and exclusivity.

    4, • Hierarchies of Resolution
    4.1, Prevent high-resolution images from dominating the space.
    4.2, Prioritize communication and movement over perfection.
    4.3, Bring marginalized or radical visual cultures to light, instead of relegating them to the digital margins.
    4.4, Defend access, democracy, and the right to visual culture against corporate and institutional control.

    5, • Politics of the Poor Image
    5.1, Mirror the precarious conditions of cultural workers and the commodification of media.
    5.2, Make the images migrate: cross borders, languages, and formats freely, like displaced or fragmented communities.
    5.3, Make it visual form of resistance — preserving political cinema, marginalized histories, and ideas excluded from mainstream distribution.

    6, • Endgame
    6.1, The game ends when the original is untraceable.
    6.2, The poor image survives through circulation and movement.

    Outcome :
    The poor image is a low-resolution, often pirated or compressed copy of an original work. Its “poverty” does not diminish its cultural or political power; rather, it embodies access, circulation, mutation, and collective authorship. Poor images become living archives, resisting control while connecting communities and histories across space and time.

    References :

    – Maurer, L. (2013) Conditional Design Workbook. Amsterdam: Valiz, pp. ii–xiv.

    – Steyerl, H. (2012) In Defence of the Poor Image. In: The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 31–45.

  • Written response 2.0

    Michel Foucault’s Preface to The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences can be read as a catalogue in itself — a text that inventories systems of thought, names, and classifications (Foucault, 1989, pp. xvi–xxvi). Often described as a manifesto of structuralism, it stands against a certain form of humanism by dismantling the idea of a stable human subject and instead proposing the concept of the épistemè, the underlying structure that shapes what a culture considers knowledge at a given time (Foucault, 1989, pp. xvi–xxvi).

    In this sense, the Preface functions both as an introduction and as an inventory itself : Foucault lists his predecessors, maps intellectual lineages, and enumerates the methodological orders that have governed Western knowledge. His text mimics the very mechanisms he analyses. It is rhythmically built from sequences of repetition and accumulation :

    394 commas

    44 semicolons

    41 identifiable lists 

    5 repetitions

    punctuate the pages. 

    Terms such as 

    56 order

    8 classification

    6 enumeration

    6 system

    2 list

    recur like motifs, forming a linguistic taxonomy that mirrors his argument, as if self-referencing the structure of the text.

    The repetition of 

    9 Borges

    4 Chinese encyclopedia

    13 other names Roussel, Keynes, Cantillon, Tournefort, Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, Darwin, Bauzée, Law, Véron de Fortbonnais, Turgot

    underscores the significance of his peers in his demonstration. The ‘Chinese encyclopedia’ whose absurd categories destabilise the reader’s sense of logic. This anecdote becomes Foucault’s demonstration of how every system of order is culturally specific, and how each period invents its own grid of intelligibility.

    By analysing the Preface through an inventory, its writing mechanics are revealed as inseparable from its philosophical argument. Each list, each comma, each repetition is not decorative but conceptual. They build a textual space that mirrors Foucault’s archaeology. The Preface is therefore a structural performance, a ‘list of lists’ where the medium embodies the message. Through the enumeration of names, systems, and methods, Foucault shows that to catalogue is already a constructed worldview.

    Reference :

    • Foucault, M. (1989) ‘Preface’, in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge. [1966], pp. xvi–xxvi.

  • Written response

    In Lines: A Brief History, Tim Ingold explores the fundamental relationship between drawing and writing. He states that ‘The engraver was an artisan, not an artist ; his lines were not expressive but reproductive.’ (Ingold, 2007, p. 135) and discusses how artisans who engraved letters and inscriptions were historically considered craftsmen rather than artists. 

    This idea directly resonates with my project, where I focus on tombstones. The theme I wanted to bring up in my project is how engraved texts carry meaning. When I observed the engraved names and dates on tombstones, I was struck by how these inscriptions, that hold immense emotional and symbolic weight end up disappearing. They are not written for the dead but for the living. Inspired by this, I decided to highlight and reinterpret these marks.

    I began to draw the letters rather than simply write them, allowing them to dissolve and merge into my drawings of plants. In doing so, I blurred the boundary between text and image. While the technique of engraving immobilises the letters, I chose, buy drawing them, to make them lively again. Rosemary Sassoon’s assertion that ‘the form and line of a letter is as sensitive and expressive as the line quality in a drawing’ (Sassoon, cited in Ingold, 2007, p. 179) further reinforces my approach. In my work, writing becomes drawing.

    As the stone, a symbol of permanence, begins to crumble and fade, I replaced it with the motif of plants that grow and continue to live. This shift from mineral to organic matter represents the transformation of memory, from something fixed and engraved to something living and evolving. The letters, once static, become part of a living landscape.

    In The Gleaners and I, Agnès Varda investigates in her own way the different aspects of gleaning, from an ancient practice to what it has become today. She brings up a memory from her childhood, she had already seen gleaners in the fields near the house where she lived, and that this image had made a lasting impression on her. She considers herself a gleaner of images and her approach on the subject is personal as she goes around with her camera.

    My approach on this project is similar as I went to a churchyard because of my initial interest around death, with my camera and discovered a whole other aspect of the place. Between the stones and the trees, I saw people. I ended up reading information about unknown families and people based on their names and chose to pay tribute to them through my photographs.

    References :

    – Ingold, T. (2007) Lines : A Brief History. London : Routledge, pp. 120–151.

    – Varda, A. (2000) The Gleaners and I [film]. Paris : Ciné Tamaris.