12 hours til our flight back home, just chillin’
— see you on monday 
Archive for the 'Places' Category
According to the students at NID, Seb is really Bill Gates in disguise. And Ross, obviously, is Tom Cruise. The boys seem to have survived their stomach bug and are back in school, hopeful they will be well enough for the eight hour bus ride to the desert tonight
highlights so far:
beth – cheap fags
lydia – her cheese sandwich
callum – photographing EVERYTHING
seb – becoming recognized as the worlds richest man
ross – becoming recognized as a worldwide heart-throb / scientologist
yours truly,
bill (seb) and tom (ross)
A small group of students and staff are currently visiting the NID in India. This is the first in an occasional series of digital postcards.
We’ve had constant sunshine since we got here,
hope all is well back up north.
(Film by Lydia)
1st Year VisCom students have been out and about this week invading The Mackintosh Building with an army of plastic soldiers, holding a vigil for Olivia the dead pigeon, promoting a manifesto for foxes in fashionable Hyndland, challenging perceptions of fame at the Buchanan Galleries (sorry Justin Bieber) and welcoming Nelson Mandela (or at least his shirts) to Nelson Mandela Place.
The group of Gunnar Ofeigsson, Ellie Sharville, Luisa Casasanta, Rachel Thomson, Ailsa Sutcliffe and Sol Lamey discovered a disused railway station beside Kelvinbridge. By adorning a tree with mirrors, they created a poignant reference to industry, science and art as the station once brought the public to the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901.
http://kelvinbridgestationreopening.tumblr.com/kelvinbridgestationreopeninfo
A vote of thanks is due to Lizzie, Thomas, Dimitri and all at Lust, and Susana and Kai at Atelier Carvalho Bernau for being such welcoming and informative hosts when we descended in (possibly greater than expected) numbers last week during a field trip to the Netherlands. By friday, and back in Glasgow, thanks were also due to Momus for delivering a fantastic lecture called 27 Lies about the Mackintosh Building, a ‘delirious’ and distinctly non-pragmatic detour of the mind into many parallel worlds.
A more detailed post to follow about the Amsterdam trip.
Documenta 13 is the latest incarnation of the renowned art festival, which has now become, as many art festivals have, a “county fair for intellectuals“. Manifesta is a more itinerant version of its sound-a-like equivalent. Unitednationsplaza is what happened when the Greek/Cypriot government cancelled Manifesta in 2006, its video archive is now online. UNP was organised by (amongst others) Anton Vidokle. Open 16 investigates the phenomena of the art biennial, with some fascinating and critical writing.
The Foulis building (along with the Newbery Tower and ref) is coming down in the summer of 2011 to make way for a brand new “striking and inspiring world-class building” for The School and for Glasgow. I’m gathering and recording memories and stories of the Foulis, so if you have any recollections or anecdotes (no matter how mundane or random) please leave a comment or email me at walterhamilton [at] hotmail [dot] com. You can find me in real life in the Graphics studio, 1st floor, Foulis building, 158 Renfrew Street, Glasgow if you want to have an analogue conversation about it.
Also, please let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas for what the new building could/should be called.
Thanks.
I don’t often write posts about the book and website of the week (see right), but these two are worth a special mention. Uncorporate Identity, if I may be subjective for a moment, is the current book to read about visual language, identity (crisis), urbanism, politics and design – erudite and far-sighted, an awkward and exhilarating ride. DxCrit is a very useful design criticism resource, allied to the design criticism course at SVA in NYC. A video from that below, on failure and design.
Crossing the Line: The 2010 D-Crit Conference: Peter Hall from D-Crit on Vimeo.
‘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.
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.
Whilst cautious of sounding like a right sad-bastard, this augmented reality iPhone application seems like an interesting way of giving archives and collections a geographical context, and taking them out of the museum, via: Creative Review – StreetMuseum iPhone app.
Glasgow based creative agency small-media-large are hosting space made live – a visual artists take over of a Category A listed building as part of the West End Festival.
A call for submissions is currently underway. If you are interested in exhibiting and would like to know more about the project, visit http://www.small-media-large.com/space-made-live.
You may have heard about the recent funding problems at The Lighthouse. The Lighthouse—Renewed is a place for constructive ideas for a renewed centre of Architecture + Design.
A couple of weeks ago, in a bit of a small-world scenario, I found myself sharing a hostel in La Paz, the Bolivian capital, with another Vis Com graduate – Kat Carter.
Kat graduated from GSA in 2004, having specialised in photography, and is currently backpacking around South America for a few months, documenting her trip using a photo-blog as she goes. Some great shots and a simple, effective format for this kind of visual diary.
A couple of things relating to the history of art and design education on the other side of the Atlantic: Firstly, the School of Visual Arts Archives, featuring work from the likes of Milton Glaser, Paula Scher and James Victore, plus its accompanying Container List blog.
Secondly, a thought provoking documentary about Black Mountain College, the pioneering American Art College, which during it’s short life in the mid-20th century, created a melting pot for some of the more interesting characters in progressive arts education in the US and former Bauhaus european refugees like Josef and Anni Albers, to learn, experiment and educate in an open, (kind of) democratic, and largely unregulated environment.
When I arrived in Santiago, the capital of Chile, I wasn´t aware of it having a distinctive visual culture, so was fascinated to discover a thriving stencil graffiti scene on it’s streets over the few days I spent there. To see the full set of images check out the Santiago Stencil Graffiti set on Flickr.
Few buildings in this sprawling city are untouched by graffiti in all its different forms, but by far the most interesting are the examples of stencil graffiti.
The subject-matter of the graffiti is generally political slogans and images with anti-american, anti-capitalist and animal rights themes. Alongside this, there are portraits, images of cartoon-characters and other less-defined subjects.
The stencil graffiti community in Chile has an interesting blog (in spanish but with good images) and a book was released recently called Santiago Stencil, which I believe can be bought using the contact section of the website.
Following up our recent post on the ‘Scotland with Style’ Brand for Glasgow, this Wolff Olins opinion piece states their ideas about what makes a great Place-Brand. In amongst it there seem to be some valid points, (and undoubtedly this is a million miles ahead of what Glasgow is doing), but as always with this kind of stuff, it’s pushing at the borders of credibility, and has a tendency to become lost in a world of brand induced double-speak.
This is the view of the new M74 motorway extension, currently being built through the Southside of Glasgow, looking from Cathcart Road, near Eglington Toll, towards the City Centre. It’s used to illustrate the contrast between a regressive ‘rear-view mirror‘ approach to urban design (above), and some possibly more productive, definitely more progressive, and certainly more democratic approaches to planning, referenced online.
The first is Pop-up Landscapes, a collective of artists and designers using interactive installations to address issues of urban survival, and provide a tactile, hands-on way for people to engage with the design of their environment.
Planners Network UK (PNUK) are creating a ‘disorientation guide’ — a wiki of progressive planning resources — and in a similar vein, this article logs some of the ways online tools can be used in democratic Urban Planning.
While on the subject, likeminds have attempted to look at how cities could be designed ‘by wiki’, and more firmly in the visual communication realm, zucker und pfeffer have created these posters and promotional materials for this conference, the posters being infused with the smell of gasoline.
To round up, Brand Avenue is one of the best blogs I know of, covering the intersection of the design of cities and visual communication, and offline, Carchitecture is an eminently readable introduction to the car and the city, and the problems and delights therein. As McLuhan observes; “The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.”
And this is an idea about what you could do with the M8.
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