Awesome Tapes from Africa does exactly what it says in the URL. A lucky find, thanks to Sarah Usher. The covers require no comment (other than awesome).
Author Archive for Neil McGuire
“The Wilderness Downtown” is not a phrase that you’d readily use to describe Kenton Lane in Newcastle, the street where I grew up – the most exciting thing that happened there being an occasional crash at the traffic lights. However it is given a different slant in this video for the latest Arcade Fire release which brings to the mainstream a lot of experiments using interactive media, geo-locative data and re-interpretations of the pop-video format. As an aside, we are told that this is the year of ‘geo-location‘ and the death of the ‘web‘ (as distinct from the internet). Beware false prophets*? Endism anyone**?
*or possibly opportunists using the well trodden “x is dead” tactic.
** “At the center of their argument is the observation that popular thinking about technology today is ruled by a kind of relentless “endism,” which forecasts the death of everything from mass media to the nation-state, government to politics, universities to regions, even distance itself.”
“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.”
Highly Recommended.
‘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.
Via Department 21, (An experimental interdisciplinary workspace at the Royal College of Art), we’ve come across this intriguing one-day free conference on Art School Alternatives, co-ordinated by Derek Horton, and taking place at Liverpool John Moores University on the 7th October. It may be that I’m just pro-actively looking for these things, but between this, the parallel school and the ‘educational turn‘ currently being debated, there seems to be a groundswell of interesting activities around informal, augmented, and creative educational experiences.
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.
This post on manystuff.org — a research project of the Jan Van Eyck Academie — seemed like good cover to link a couple of other recent finds regarding type, the city and the citizen.
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.
Marker himself is a very interesting filmmaker and visualiser, a leading exponent of the ‘compilation’ or ‘essay’ film. ‘Notes from the era of imperfect memory‘ is a blog dedicated to him and his work.
Thanks to Gordon Hush for the link.
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;
Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas
and
ABBA.
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
If you’re in Edinburgh or the general Scottish environs on monday ‘Investigating Premodern Futures’™ : 9th August 2010 will investigate the following questions:
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.
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.
If you’re interested in network cultures, web design (history thereof), or eyeballs and attention, this post might be useful. It has lots of good links, uselessly hidden in a rambling text.
The Anti-Design Festival call for entries looks quite slick to me, and there-in lies the catch-22?
Congratulations to Abdi Adam and Fang Zhou who won the coveted Student Yellow Pencil at the annual D&AD Student Awards in London’s Old Spitalfields Market. Abdi and Zhou won in the Animation category for their short film ‘Design Intervention’ (see below), in response to a brief set by the Design Council’s Alliance Against Crime. Their work will be published in the D&AD Student Awards Annual along with their fellow winners.
Two money related links – the first to an enlightening excerpt from an RSA lecture by radical geographer David Harvey, with helpful accompanying animation.
And secondly, a conference (with some interesting speakers) that asks the following questions: “Data visualisation – a genre within visual culture that depicts data streams in provocative, poetic or insightful ways – has been booming, thanks to the growing availability of large amounts of data and the desire to grasp ever more complex realities by visual means. But is it always a good idea to assign such an important role to numerical information? How can we best interpret various data in relation to the values we consider important? And which new forms of storytelling does data visualisation have to offer us? Will the data film be the new documentary form?”
(and point 2.1, if you’re mad for data, the following set of videos from the gov 2.0 conference in the US)
This archive contains some interesting talks, such as the one above featuring 5 middle-class white men talking about atemporality, which sort of links to lizzies previous post about power-browsing (i think): from the Video Archive | transmediale.
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