I’ve added the links from Friday’s project briefing to the Com Des Tumblr, including this video profile of Karel Martens.
Archive for the 'Research' Category
“You are sat in a pitch-black room. Your head is gently buzzed with whisky. Out of the darkness you hear a recording of my voice.”
Some interesting podcasts, via The Serving Library.
This BBC Imagine programme - Books – The Last Chapter? – is available to view until Wed, 28 Dec (at 12:39 to be ultra precise about it). Highly recommended as an overview of a pertinent topic which is also covered here (Form of the Book Book) and here (The Unbound Book), and the subject of this book and this book which were recommended to me by Edwin. And also relates, if you’re really really interested, to the ramblings of an armchair enthusiast.
And as it’s nearly Christmas, if you’re looking for books to spend book tokens on, a quick reminder that the book of the week archive is here, for perusal.
“The machine is accepted as the essentially modern vehicle of form. Our designs will therefore be essentially designs for mass production, but at the same time we hope to rescue mass production from the ugliness and aesthetic emptiness which has so far characterized the greater part of its output”. —Design Research Unit, 1943
Another post-talk train ride, another blog write up. Again, seizing on the time allowed by this journey, I’m going to try to condense an interesting talk from Martin Boyce, and an interesting peruse around the Design Research Unit exhibition, currently at the Cooper Gallery in Dundee, into a succinct and coherent blog post.
The talk for me raised some pertinent issues which were hinted at in an earlier post covering an interview with Metahaven, where the politics of aesthetics raised their head, and the point was made about how the politics of a design piece can fade over time, (or at least not be directly replicated in a different place and time). Boyce’s work heavily references, and in some cases perhaps directly appropriates, design forms of various types. And he talked eloquently about about how by processing and representing these forms in a contemporary art context, their meaning is changed, “distorted by the process of recollection”.
While it might be possible to question this appropriation of accepted ‘well’ designed objects – is it primarily for their forms and aesthetic value? – he pre-empted this by talking of his lack of ‘academic’ insight into his work, and interest in “wild knowledge”. He talked about following his eye and instinct, and this reminded me of an idea of Brian Eno‘s, where he talked about the “intellect catching up with the instinct”. I think there’s probably a studio project in this, and the same could be said for his approach to his typographic pieces. It was interesting to hear how these pieces came into being and how they then went out into the world, with seemingly little reference to typographic history or conventions which we perhaps get a little fixated by.
The Design Research Unit exhibition which this talk ran alongside was a concise and functional display of some of the projects undertaken by that design organisation between 1942 and 1972. Again, the key thing it raised for me was that the politics of the time, while implicit in the work, often get overlooked by designers who seem fixated with this orderly way of working in terms of stewarding design and identity today. It’s difficult to put my finger on, but I’m fascinated by why the template laid down by this early move into corporate compliance is so resilient. Maybe it connects to ideas about why a particular way of looking at design, productivity and manufacturing, (and I guess by all this we mean the free market economy in its many facets), achieved such traction in the post-war years. Definitely a subject for further thinking, and a very good exhibition, well worth a visit.
N.b. Apologies for the use of ‘Boyce’ during this post. ‘Martin’ seems overly familiar, while ‘Boyce’ sounds a bit pompous. Rock and a hard place.
There is currently an Exhibition at DJCAD on the Design Research Unit, a pioneering organisation responsible for some of the most prominent design produced in post-war Britain. There’s also a talk in relation to it by Martin Boyce on Thursday 1st December. Was wondering if anyone fancied a mini field trip to dundee to see the exhibition and hear the talk? Would need to leave Glasgow about 3pm, and would be going by train, at least I would, (1st class). If you fancy doing that, drop me an email or reply in the comment thread here.
Click here to book (free) tickets.
Disclaimer: Make sure it doesn’t clash with anything you’re meant to be doing in the studio.
Trend List is a bit like every design blog you’ve looked at, viewed through different goggles. Possibly interesting and cynical in equal measure, its that troublesome burden of history again, magnified through the internet vortex.
History+Internet=Paralysis.
(And I’m not sure that centre-aligned is a trend, so much as one of 3 or 4 standard ways of aligning text).
Image: Christopher Clark, Web Typography for the Lonely (2011).
A good overview of the current Walker Arts Centre exhibition, ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’, can be found on the Eye blog. Possibly functions as an antidote to this kind of polarised thinking, and interesting to see the ‘both/and‘ pluralist outlook in mainstream design discussions.
Just did a shit tweet on Twitter about how I’d just put a ‘shit-load’ of links on recommends.tumblr.com/ for current 3/4 graphics projects, based on our discussions of past days/weeks.
Recommends is a work in progress, currently in beta, soon to progress to ceta. It’s a kind of digital ‘dump’ for references (links, pictures, quotes, books etc etc) pertaining to projects. You too can add to the dump by using the ‘submit‘ button on the site, or mailing stuff to 905smaprok[at]tumblr.com, where it will magically appear on the site (about 2 hours later).
From Rob Walker, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Googled Reproduction‘. Connects (in my mind) with this (or this). (And this).
While London burns, (hope all friends of Vis Com in the capital are ok), I am wondering where (if at all) this connects with recent activities of the Deterritorial Support Group (DSG). A friend brought this to my attention, and has recently posted an interesting article on this here. On an equally interesting, but lighter note, Type Tuesday is a very good recent (I think) addition to the Eye Blog. So two things happening on a tuesday.
Talk to Me is the latest exhibition from Design and the Elastic Mind curator Paola Antonelli. This coincides with a recent purchase of mine, a HP desktop printer/scanner which not only talks to me (giving me printing ‘tips’ via its built-in lcd screen), but via its own I.P. address and a wireless connection to the network, talks to Hewlett Packard HQ… about me? about what I print? about how I’m not very good at loading the paper? The Internet of Things is well and truly here.
A Domus review nicely summarises some of the key questions;
“In the catalogue text, these changes are read along the long wave of opposition to cold 20th century rationalism: “The clichés of the twentieth century, such as ‘form follows function’, the modernist motto borrowed with some variation by Louis H. Sullivan, and ‘design means solving problems’… have been responsible for soulless and lobotomized architectural design.” On the contrary, the experiences shown in Talk To Me go back to the 1960s and the fruitful experiences of the radicals with their first ideas regarding cybernetic, mobile and interactive architecture.”
“Tristram Shandy is not only significant in the cultural canon as a non-linear forerunner to Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Godard, Eno, Greenaway and Tarantino, but playfully and brilliantly constructs and deconstructs the conventions of narrative. It makes use of multiple media as devices to tell its stories, and, in actively soliciting a dialogue with its reader, it demands a creative participation from its audience. Tristram Shandy is the direct antecedent of contemporary hypertextual and non-linear, convergent media experiments”.
The Serving Library is online, and the first edition is out in print. Making the articles available online as PDF’s, and by print then post distribution, in parallel, (and with an online document of those recently ‘served‘) questions are raised about the false dichotomy of analogue vs digital. On a purely practical level, students (or others) with zero budget (but a functioning network connection) can download and read/print some very interesting design/art/media documents. Below is a beautiful picture of me interacting with the Serving Library through the arcane/bizarre/logical aesthetic and anti-perspective quandry that is iBooks.
More on the Serving Library statement of intent here.
Loads of interesting reports now online from the Unbound Book conference. Some in Dutch, some in English. Dare-say video’s may follow.
Manystuff offer some very comprehensive coverage of the first Amsterdam Art/Book Fair. The kind of place where I could bankrupt myself. They also do the animated gif meme.
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