To follow up on the post about the Carrotworkers Collective I would recommend having a look at the Arts Group website. Very Good resource. They recently made an in-depth report about Internships and Unpaid Work Placements.
“The Arts Group is pleased to announce the official release of our report into internships and policy on improving them, ‘Emerging workers: a fair future for entering the creative industries’
The Arts Group is calling for legislation governing the practice of work experience, internships and placements. In its “Emerging Workers” document the Arts Group puts forward the case that Government action is needed in order to protect students and graduates in the arts and creative industries.
Many arts organisations and businesses are reliant upon unpaid workers, both on work experience and on longer term placements. Whilst the Arts Group recognises that some of these organisations are run on low budgets, it is not in the interest of diversity, equality or creativity for internships to remain as the preserve of the well off.
Kit Friend, Chair of the Arts Group commented “Access to the creative professions should be based on ability, not means. As the labour market is near saturated with those financially able to take up unpaid placements, equal access to the creative professions will not be realised unless internships are regulated by government.”
The Arts Group recognises that the creative sector is made up of a large number of small and medium enterprises, and calls for funding and bursaries to be made available to employers so that they are able to continue to offer internships that are genuine training and development opportunities.”
Test Lab this evening at V2 in Rotterdam, with demonstrations of 4 projects from artists who’ve been working there over the summer. I’m interested to see how the mix between demonstration/exhibition/talk format works. The Lab will be streamed live on V2 website, if it’s a good stream I definitely recommend watching as I suspect the projects will be both progressive and antagonistic. Review to follow!
“Unlike a “pure” printing journal from the printing industry, what we describe here is the relationship between the graphic designer, the printer, and the printed matter. It is also an investigation of the similarities and differences in the viewpoints and attitudes towards printing, and to imagine new ways of collaboration.”
‘Identity Crisis’ is an upcoming exhibition at the Barras Centre. There are a lot of interesting angles to this, and some difficult questions embodied in the project. Some of that can be accessed via here.
Warning: quasi techy post. Learn what it is. Check if your browser is ready and what browsers are currently best. Glad to see a way of embedding video sans Flash…
The Carrotworkers Collective are currently gathering quite a bit of an audience for the issue of unpaid internships. A hardy perennial of the design and art ‘industry’, this topic is also covered in an interview on Central Station. I’m interested in what people think about this. For an incisive and perceptive analysis of the bigger picture of the ‘creative industries’, this compendium by Geert Lovink is a good place to start.
The Wellcome Trust are undertaking a project to digitise the works of James Watson and Francis Crick, two cambridge scientists who discovered the double-helical structure of DNA. An audio slideshow can be accessed here.
The film above by Chris Marker, could be taken as an interesting design research proposition, and way of visualising scenarios. ‘Future Artifacts’ (to which this film could possibly tenuously be said to belong) are a useful way of trying to ‘evidence’ the impact of design decisions, particularly across larger and more complex projects that involve networks, services and interactions.
iPhones can now play Flash content via Frash app that works within Safari browser. Currently only works on phones that have been Jailbroken. Now legal in USA but still resisted by Apple who say it voids your warranty. Maybe this will weaken their resolve to work with Adobe on Flash support.
Sure you have all seen homestarrunner by the Chapman brothers that the demo uses to display flash based content.
This playful installation by Troika, based on the Alan Fletcher original, (and which creates a mechanical palindrome of sorts), provides the perfect excuse to reveal my two favourite palindromes, which I imagine readers will be desperate to know. They are;
Image: Another Shadow Fight — David Osbaldeston (2008).
Digital prints in Vorticist mannerism originated from woodcuts based on
Sidney Noland’s Ned Kelly series (1946-7). Newspaper kiosk design by Herbert Bayer, 1924 (unrealised). Variable dimensions. 3rd installation
Is Edinburgh a ghost city? What future awaits its ‘new‘ quarters (Quartermile, Fountainbridge, Edinburgh Waterfront) areas that have no past and that are yet to be occupied? What fate awaits older buildings that have fallen empty? An Unco Site! is focused on the way in which a fantastic neomedieval ‘history’ is routinely injected into Edinburgh’s Old Town (e.g. Auld Jock’s Pie Shoppe, Frankenstein’s, Armstrongs, etc.) Is there a space for the ‘new’ in Edinburgh? As the future shuts down does the past become all that’s left to sell? ‘Zombie capitalism’ and hauntology are key themes that our panel of experts will explore here.
Part of the ongoing works of the Confraternity of Neoflagellants.
If you’re in Glasgow over the summer, you might be interested in Futureproof at Streetlevel. It’d also be worth taking in Fields, Factories and Workshops by Simon Yuill at the CCA and other venues. Lucy Duncombe (grad vis com 2010) will be performing as part of a sound/music event on the 16th September, alongside a whole range of interesting discussions, film showings and other cultural and political events. In a slightly tangentially linked article (space, politics, sustainability, urbanism etc), other vis com person Alec Farmer and his ‘Nomadic Redux‘ were featured recently in treehugger.
FontShop, while obviously having a keen eye on the benefits of engaging an audience of informed type users, produces some useful basic resources, such as this Education page, featuring amongst other things a handy reference of typographic terms.
John Underkoffler speaks effortlessly on UI (User Interface) for computation. He believes advances in UI have been neglected in the quest for bigger memory and faster processing. Watch out Wii.
Project produced by Rotterdam company V2, where Herman Asselbergh dismantles a brand new MacBook Pro piece by piece. Although the online video is only a clip right now, the still image makes me very exited to see the finished autopsy. Asselberghs comments on the contradiction between how often we see laptops in artworks and the ubiquity of them in our lives.
Looop™ is an interesting endeavour to match designers needing print up with printers with spare space on their print runs, reducing waste and increasing value for money. It’s not overloaded with print offers so it’ll be interesting to see if it achieves the critical mass necessary to function effectively.
Just to add another David Harvey related link to the blog.
Here is a link to a really interesting article he wrote for the new left review titled ‘The Right to the City.’
In it he argues that
“The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”
This idea has helped to inspire the Right to the City social movement that first emerged in New York in 2007 as a unified response to gentrification and a call to halt the displacement of low-income people, LGBTQ, and youths of color from their historic urban neighborhoods. Through shared principles and a common frame and theory of change, RTTC is building a national and international movement for urban justice, human rights, and democracy.
There will be a Right to the City forum in Glasgow on the 24th of July at Kinning Park Complex. Well worth checking out.
Address Details Below:
Kinning Park Complex, Cornwall Street, Glasgow, G41 1AQ (Kinning Park
subway opposite). 12.30 for 1.00 start prompt, until 5.00. Saturday,
July 24th.
Book and Web of the week are on holiday for the summer, reading books and looking at websites, ready to return, super-charged, in September 2010—
Full Book/Web Archive
The views expressed on the Visual Communication blog are at the very most those of the authors, and possibly not even that. Any similarities to hyperlinks either live or dead are purely coincidental.
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