Communication Design Department Blog / Glasgow School of Art
Vis Com person Lu SiSi features as one of 5 to watch in this month’s Creative Review Graduate Special. A nice wee feature on one of 2011′s top graduates.
(It’s obviously been a long time since I paid money for a magazine – five pounds and ninety pence it was!)
Highlights symposium I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I Want To Be There from Graphic Design Museum on Vimeo.
I was planning to write up my trip to the ‘I don’t know where I’m going’ conference, but find myself in the strange, (but not unsurprising if I thought about it), situation where the whole thing has been recorded and documented online in great depth. Therefore what I think I’ll do is a personal travel diary, with some vimeo clips in the middle to represent the proceedings on the day. This may or may not work.
5.45am, Glasgow Airport: The plane boards, only 1/4 full as most flights back out of Schipol are cancelled due to yesterday’s snow. Wonder if I’ll make it back tomorrow, but I’m doing this for Vis Com, and plough on regardless.
A 45 minute delay to take off, they’re spraying de-icer on the wings. Worried, I wonder why the illuminated ‘no smoking’ and ‘seatbelts fastened’ signs look so similar from a distance. I wonder If anyone else wonders this.
Take off.
The strange but strangely enjoyable sandwiches (egg and cheese) are brought round with a cup of tea, a tiny spoon and a paper napkin faked up to look like a gingham tablecloth.
Mid-flight the guy next to me gets out to go to the toilet, stopping to do up his hiking boot laces. They were presumably unfastened to get them off going through security, but have inadvertently created a terrorism-related mise en scène, as he bends down in the aisle and starts fiddling about with his shoes, somewhere over the North Sea.
As we head east, the sun is coming up in front of us, more coffee and tiny spoons appear.
Amsterdam, a light southerly breeze, -5, snow.
We arrive slightly late at the conference, having completely misjudged the distance from the station to the venue. The talks proceed as follows, and you can pick up most you need to know from the following link.
Lunch, improbably long queue in bagel bar next door. In a moment of serendipity for any terminal name-dropper, we stand next to Danny van den Dungen from Experimental Jetset while we wait. Sure he’s written a similar post about how he stood next to me and Lizzie.
Afternoon highlight (for me) is Metahaven’s Wikileaks talk, and the ideas of ‘image economies’ (as relates to someone’s or something’s identity in a digital networked environment) and ‘agency’, doing only what needs to be done, and being prepared to do, or design, nothing.
Daniel van der Velden – Metahaven | Symposium I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I Want To Be There from Graphic Design Museum on Vimeo.
Post-conference beers, shop/gallery opening, pizza, freezing, good deviating conversation. Hometime. Semi-drunk late-night check-in at a hotel where the room is approximate 30cm2 bigger than the bed that’s in it.
Return via Schipol airport. A modern Bosch-esque scene of travel infrastructure overload, make the gate with 5 minutes to spare, this is how I like to operate.
Sound in Context (Full Film) from Sound and Music on Vimeo.
While the film above is talking about sound in an ‘art’ context, its useful to translate some of the discussions across to its use in design. The following outlines an interesting position; “In fact, music is never just about music: it is always the product of its wider situation[1]. Some musics reinforce the status quo[2] . Other musics try to affect the collective conditions of existence. We’re interested in the later: not once radical, now stagnant scenes, but musics that continue to develop useful ways of acting and thinking outside dominant ideologies; musics as part of that wider situation, with something to say about and offer back to it.”
The video features Barry Esson, co-director of arika, who will be speaking at one of the forthcoming GSA open events on the 10th Nov.
[1] Isn’t music always produced through interacting social, cultural, philosophical and ideological factors. (Is it cowardly/reckless/naïve to abstract away from these?)
[2] Don’t you find that most music (incl. most experimental music) simply fortifies false notions of freedom and possessive individualism, of art as lifestyle choice lacking the will/ ability to say anything other than the simply musical?
Arika have their nice brochures available online. They also have an interesting festival coming up next week. (Some of which outlined below by David Kerr).
Image by Jez Burrows: http://www.jezburrows.com
A while back David Coyle sent me a link to some footage of American composer Robert Ashley, performing excerpts from his early 1980′s ‘TV opera’s’. I was quite amazed by them. You can find out more about Ashley here.
Sorry for gap of epic proportions between posts. Very good documentary from Melvin Bragg on In Our Time about the Frankfurt School of theorists which includes Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Well worth a listen.
Central Station, (a community for art, film and design), launches (in beta, but aren’t we all) today. Log-on, look around, sign-up, tune-out. GSA Visual Communication is on there, so you could even become friends with the course.
The BBC World Service is running a project called Save Our Sounds, a place to archive the disappearing sounds of the world, such as the call of the kookaburra, or the call of the olivetti typewriter, either dying out or obsolesced by new technologies.
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