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).
Archive for the 'Web' Category
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Design Interactions Show 2010, online. RCA Show 2 on till next weekend.
As sure as a brand isn’t what the company says it is, it’s what ‘you’ say it is, this logo competition from greenpeace shows how little ownership a company has over its own (supposed) most prized and valuable asset — its corporate identity.
GSA’s second most prolific bloggers have launched a great new blog with the distinct theme of the Treasures of GSA Library, to highlight the special and rare book collections.
Visually *sparky* design (for the European Design Festival in Rotterdam) from StudioDumbar(1), makes me want to move to the Netherlands, where people generally seem (to me) more relaxed about this sort of thing.
(1) Their Performance of ‘Sniff & Kiss’, a portrait of Studio Dumbar, at Typo Berlin 2010 Saturday 22nd of May, sounds interesting.
OFF THE WALL by the Yale Graphic Design 2010 MFA cohort, is energetic but employs a visually difficult navigation (in execution, not necessarily in concept), which fails to show the work at a meaningful scale (i think).
The same but different. Play these videos at the same time.
Most comments sections online are full of feckless idiots, shouting into the ether, but not Typophile. Whilst doing some research for a current project, and trying to find out about whether there have been any successful typographic projects based on Esperanto, I came across this mine of useful and interesting information:
(from the comments section)
This is one of my favorite topics ever! Herbert Bayer designed a context-sensitive alphabet called the “basic alfabet”, which can be found in the April 1964 issue of Print. Interestingly enough, there was an article called “Towards an International Language” that shared many of the same ideas in a Print from just a couple months earlier (also 1964), and these ideas were eventually formed into the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet (I think Hermann Zapf was involved in this).
Jan Tschichold (Universal), Herbert Bayer (universal), Bradbury Thompson (Alphabet 26), Brigham Young (Deseret alphabet), and many others developed single case “universal” alphabets that sought to further some purpose in their day, all of which are fascinating, but limited. Bayer went from advocating a limited-character system (universal) to a more complex, vocal-inflection oriented system (basic alfabet), and I think most of the old modernists (Tschichold most famously, in the same early-1964 issue of Print as “Towards a Universal Language”) backed away from their earlier claims as being inconsistent with humanistic principles.
That said, there’s a certain “flattening effect” with computers, where at the root of all programs are Roman characters (Jon Wozencroft wrote about this in a great article called “It May Be Wrapped but Will It Warp?” — the line went something like “We all use electronumeric US English now… Ours is a translation game”), and of course all airports use English. If you really want a single alphabet, of the “less is more variety”, working to crush all non-English (or at least, Roman-based) languages is probably your best bet, even if it is a distressing enterprise. Many countries – like Azerbaijan – are choosing to ditch their historical alphabets in favor of romans.
If you’re interested in Networked/Digital design, art or architecture, sign up to this group for no apparent reason. Something interesting may come of it in the future.
Venez découvrir, autour d’un verre, Manystuff #1, One possible catalyst, publication de design graphique.
Avec la participation de/ With:
Christian Brandt, Lorena Cardenas, Change is good, David Conte, Pinar Demirdag, Neil Donnelly, Laurent Fétis, Kees de Klein, Wayne Daly, Bear Demen, EventArchitectuur, Experimental Jetset, Robin Gadde &team, Rob Giampietro, Hannes Gloor & Stefan Jandl, Catherine Guiral & David Cluzeau, Arnaud Daffos, Vincent Lalanne, Aurélie Guérinet, Rikard Heberling, Hey Ho, Hyoun Youl Joe, Julia, Konst & Teknik, Sacha Leopold, Olivier Marcellin, Fanette Mellier, Pipi Parade, Please Let Me Design, Thibaut Robin, Grégoire Romanet, Mathias Schweizer, Maki Suzuki (Åbäke), Pierre Vanni, Karen Willey, Ivor Williams
Typographie: Jean-Baptiste Levée, Émilie Rigaud, Damien Fauret
Design graphique: SA|M|AEL (Samuel Bonnet & Maël Fournier-Comte )
Hijacking this blog in the name of charity! Jackson TL and Alex Misick are riding an ice cream van to Mongolia all in aid of charity… if you can, please pop over and donate a pound or two… it will make their grins cheezy. you want sprinkles with that? http://www.mcwhippy.com
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