Final Project Action Plan

I don't actually have anything as decisive as that title yet for my project. I want the process of this to be almost stream of consciousness as I reflect on topics of celebrity, femininity, limitation, and control. I am going to create digital images– still images, animated gifs, and perhaps video as well– about celebrities and public perception of famous women. This is something I think about a lot (I even wrote a paper last term about how Marie Antoinette never existed as a real person because we know nothing of her real life or personality based on her public personas!).

I want to bring the women I study into the lens of metacognition and get people to think about how all we know about these people's lives is a media construction. Having a well-groomed public image is an essential part of commercial success for female celebrities. They must be collaborative multimedia artists. I want to bring their art out of the woodwork and make them look as flattened and constructed as they must be for a public that still can't comprehend women as complex beings.

Here is the series of mononym "icons" I showed today in class, taken from 128x128 pixel icons. They would probably look best Really Big:

Bjork

Beyonce

Cher

Oprah

Madonna

Rihanna