TUESDAY TALK - SIMON PATTERSON

 

 

Simon is a YBA in the 80's

If you can survive the first couple of years out of college as an artist then you can make it as an artist.

Simon placed his slides randomly into the projected to encourage him to talk differently about his work.

Public art works are problematic - temporary works are more enjoyable.

His smoke scenes, he made them a spectacle rather than an artwork (smoke grenades)

Spinal tap map with groupies shown at uni, the work was more for the staff as they would relate to it and the students would have to learn about it!

His work is currently in the Holden Gallery as part of the Diagrams exhibition. The chemical periodic table of elements.

Did some work on kites where he would create them to resemble particular artists work and then place their names on the wall around the kites.

Mythologising of the West. His girlfriend has a great interest in the West and she believe that all things have come from this, I.e. sci-fi, fiction etc etc.

Who is the work for? Simon talks to the people in the area he knows a piece will be installed.

Note for Patti, the speakers on the window which transmit different sounds to different areas of the glass pane.

He likes the artist who reads out the football results or games and then relates them to Pantone colours, synaesthesia.

QUE FOR ME - what systems are in use now, I.e. the Pantone book, versus the change in how we are taught to use things. Knitting machine, you would have someone come round to your house to demonstrate the workings of the machine or could buy an instruction video. These days we refer to YouTube for this. What else has technology changed in this way and how can this be adapted to our world now?

Simon designed The Great Bear, London Underground piece. He says it is strange for an artist to have an artwork that people recognise before they know who the artist is.

Que from the audience about art dealers. Simon says that most art dealers he has dealt with are weirder than artists, they were more than likely artists in the past themselves. He says they are domineering.

Simon thinks that it is not good to get caught up doing the same piece of artwork over and over because it works. You need to keep the mind moving. I.e. when he had produced the periodic table it worked and so he continued to create more but slightly varying. His girlfriend told him enough was enough and suggested he tried something new!

JOHN HYATT - THE TRANSFORMATIVE IMAGINATION

 

Mind mapping is a useful technique - Tony Buzan, book on mind mapping.

John is an artist/scientist.

Labels are helpful as they limit you.

John has theories which he then tests.

Knowledge is something until proven wrong.

Imagination is no larger than knowledge as it contains knowledge.

2010 cymatics research.

Johns mum passed away and so he decided to research the science of resonant wave forms whilst he had spare time at home.

Ernst Chladni (d.1827) - visualising sound.

Dr Hans Jenny (1967) - Cymetics book.

Everything in the universe is made of waves and so John tested this.

Vibrator on bed with sand. Sand acts like a liquid. Film - say hello to the sandman.

The sand when vibrated crates feedback loops, systems and synchronisation.

John was interested in how it works as a system, rather than the patterns it made.

The sand made patterns  or turbulence (it formed shapes that resembled nature like arms and toes) it produced chaos and anti-chaos, a biomimess.

The sand appeared chaotic but it has order. Harmonious laminate, organised variety, scripted individuality, life paths in space time.

The fast pieces would move about on the bottom (big pieces? - cant remember the sizes) then the middle would move at a medium pace and the top pieces would be slow.

Simplicity in big shapes, randomness in the smaller pieces.

Aesthetics, the golden section, beauty, Fibonacci sequence which is the structure by which plants grow. It is the law if nature.

As an artist John set himself in front of an empty canvas and emptied his mind and painted whatever came to the canvas. Spiral shapes appeared from which he used this as a grid or template to form his painting on. He looked at the shapes and then compiled a scene from them which would more than likely be landscapes with random context such as a frog playing a guitar.

Marxist.

Looking at a painting is like looking at the structure of the brain.

He also created digital visuals where he would draw circles in photoshop based on his experiments tank then apply a folding technique which you use in say folding dough and re-create an image from the circles. These images would then be transferred onto clothing designs for musicians from his paintings.  

John has an exhibition coming up on feb 2nd called second life.

Creative spiral encourages thinking in bendy ways, non-linear thinking.

John advocates not to think on your course!

j.hyatt@mmu.ac.uk

CLINTON CAHILL - ASSESSMENT - 26.11.13

1000 - 1500 written piece - 9th Dec

- Desktop, objects, mind maps, sketchbooks, bring all in to tell the story.

- You can just use text but also make it more persuasive by using illustrations to show things.

- Find a style of design to match the content.

- Design your words - persuasive through style.

- Reflective and analytical.

- Individuated - it’s not an argument or thesis.

- Thoughts, research - reflect on these things.

- Can include the practice intentions sheets.

Presentation assessment - 12th Dec

- Articulate your ideas clearly and the relationships of the course units to their own research or professional needs or practice.

- Convey a good sense of the intellectual and/or practical motivation and know why the areas in which they want to work are especially interesting or challenging.

- Are able to articulate how they will build and extend work they have already done, e.g. from you Ba or professional experience.

- Present a clearly focussed statement when using complex concepts or language, make them clear and concise.

- As you write you think, so to not write you are denying another level of thought.

- Doesn’t need to be a curated piece.

- Pieces are grouped or clustered for a reason.

- Arranged right and they could be used as a good visual aid.

- Mood board of other peoples work.

- Arrangement of mood board should reflect their style of work, very visual, write some text and quote them, by doing this it shows that you are understanding their work.

- Practice being a designer by arranging someone else’s work, absorb what’s important about them.

- Branding your own project. It has the info and identity.

- Influences, proposals, the branding of the work, show experiments in the workshops, conclusion? Bibliography (where is your info from?) books, websites, list of figures.

- Make a piece of work by writing about your project.

- Include things that are pictorial to your thinking, show how ideas led onto other things. Don’t need to pack everything in.

- Testing our ideas and experimenting

- Trying things that are unfamiliar

- Broadening research methods.

- Blogging is a method - might need advancing if we are comfortable with it.

- Ok to be lost! - Am I doing the right project

- Collaborative practice - what is your rolled? How are you managing problems?

- Show development of ideas, investigation, prototypes, initial reading/thinking, capturing system, sketchbooks, mind maps etc

- Apply teamwork and leadership skills, you taking decisions for your own practice. Manage your own developments reflectively.

Sketchbooks

- Allow you to: speculate, think wildly, develop your own exterior language to get ideas down and moving them around.

- Diaries, list making, bullet points, poems, feeling relaxed and not pressured.

- Personal space to empty your head and to show your thought process.

- Try out different ways of using a sketchbook - digital?

- Capture everything, smell, feel.

- Re-call and record everything, conversations, work from memory.

- Scraps of paper - Annie Shaw uses scraps of paper to note things on and then puts them together later so she can easily move things about, they are what they are, just clipped up - being honest.

See note book for references:

Sarah Howarth.

Nichola Wood & Harriet Rodgers.

Hillary Judd.

Ming Yi Weu.

Sara Cullen.

David Molloy.

Brent Hardy-Smith.

Alice Smith.

John Astbury.

Q&A (Example from previous student about his own practice)

- What is my project?

- Do you like what you have found?

- Is this proving difficult?

- How close is my practice to me?

- Do I hide behind my work?

- What are my real influences?

- Is it ok to copy?

- Do I feel comfortable using other peoples work in my own?

CLINTON CAHILL - APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE - 19.11.13

• What is narrative? - narrative models, narrative and design.
• Telling a story. An account or story, as of events, experiences etc. That part of a work that relates events. The process or technique of narrating.
• Jonathan Culler - Literary theory: A very short introduction.
• Scientific logic, A + B = C Reading fiction feels more real than reading history. History is facts.
• It is sometimes better to leave out things in your designs so the viewer has to fill in the gaps themselves, it engages a sense of imagination.
• Illustrations where you see everything but it doesn’t really explain a lot, we want the whole story and to know what is happening.
• Tick-Tock. Gives the noise of the clock, a fictional structure, differentiating between physically identical sounds.
• Humanising time by giving it a form.
• Tick-Tick is not a story
• Tick is the beginning and Tock is the end. It is the model of what we call a plot.
• Structure, shape, transformation, resolution.
• Narratives are transferable, they work in different media.
• Stories - myths, legends...
• Moving Image - Film, Video...
• Sequenced image - Graphic Novels, Custom stories...
• Static Image - Narrative Painting, advertisement...
• Display - Museum design, exhibition, visitors centre...
• Performance - Theatre, dance, readings...
• Abstract narratives - Process of reading, immersing ourselves in a painting.
• Dealing with time:- capturing events (e.g. as video/film footage or recorded sound) Streaming real time and/or the manipulation of time through editing.
• Still image compositional devices: Stop frame, multiple exposure.
• Temporal Separation and sequencing of related images/information.
• Interactivity and user choice: Web navigation, open print layouts, maps, game design.
• Time is and ingredient in composition. It is one of the materials that you work with in a narrative.
• how time changes the way we read illustrations from the knowledge we have of shapes and objects. As a modern audience we can keep up with the editing because we have learnt how to do this.

 

Examples of narrative models in film making.

• Designing narrative still isn;t the same as writing the story.
• Narrative models - Archetypes
• Joseph Campbell - The hero with a thousand faces (1975)
• Shake up the form to look at what you are trying to say.
• Single frames might not make sense without it being in the context of the others.

See notebook for more references and notes.

STRATEGIES OF THOUGHT - MEMORY & FORGETTING

The Eiffel Tower wasn’t a popular piece back in the day and was only meant to be up for the expo. People got used to it and quite attached and in the end didn’t want it knocked down. One fellow went to the Eiffel Tower every day to have his lunch, he hated it that much that he did this as he remarked that it was the only place he could have lunch and not have to look at the Eiffel Tower. It was used as a radio mast but it didn’t need to look like that and so took on a useless function. Symbolic power of something. What the Eiffel tower has become is a ritual, a ritual to go up to the top of it to see the views of Paris. Las Vegas, Paris, Venis + gambling, it’s what it generates and produces not the thing itself. Blackpool tower was modelled on the Eiffel Tower but it wraps buildings around it in the form of amusement arcades as it cannot exist on it’s own.

Rodchenko’s tower design - overly literal, overly determined. Material, functional, symbolic. Important in sights of memory, embed memory - how these things come together, they have to co-exist at the same time. Memory and history interact, the creation of memory. Overdetermined because of this interaction.

Rachel Whiteread memorial - temporary and eternal at the same time. memorials preserving, immortalise death. What happens around that? One artist (annoyingly can’t remember who) created an art piece which was a blank memorial. This didn’t matter that it was blank as it was symbolic, people still attached memorials to it, it’s the symbolic language of things. Automatically geared to inscribed things onto the surface of things.

Events themselves are not as important in terms of memory, its what attached itself to the event, i.e. the memorial.

memory - sights

history - events

Barthes writing a biography, not an autobiography for himself. Biographine, made up of fragments, his choice for images was a treat to himself.

DIGITAL IN DESIGN

Code Creatives (http://www.codecreatives.info/) project which is a part of MIRIAD. Projects are based around skills development. Year long project to look at how to use computer coding in creative projects.

Derek Trillo - http://www.insightimages.co.uk/

The flow of life: Architectural photography as populated spaces.

Produces pictures which are aesthetically pleasing.

Cross over of architecture and urban design.

Light trails photographed of people walking.

Justin Quinell bridge - long exposure, Terrence Chang 2010.

Derek combines several takes of the same space with people moving mourn the space and makes them into one images - Is it a true representation?

Oscar Ryalander (?) image made up of 52 negatives in 1857 - this is an old concept.

Digital constructions showing the flow of people challenges the notion of photography.

Sally Morfill - http://www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/profile/smorfill

Cerebral

Interest in movement and space

“I’m wary” collaboration with Mary Maclean 2001

• Movement of the viewer in the space is what is important
• 2 viewpoints to move between to find the right and wrong way to view it.

Sally asked 2 people a question and they had to discuss this whilst they had motion sensors on which recorded the X and the Y axis. From the information gathered she creates a vector image and reproduces into vinyl. The motion monitored that Sally is interested in is the hand gestures people use whilst talking. The vinyl is displayed as the final piece with the text discussed next to the vinyl.

David Ogle - http://www.davidogle.co.uk/

The value of site and technology drive to abolish distance. Fundamental to his research is value. Artworks and buildings, the experiences of things. The telephone and aeroplane shrink distances and have conquered space. “ All distance in time and space are shrinking” Technology shrinks distances but does it bring value to the experience of something? To look at an image of the Sistene Chapel on your computer, what is the value compared to experiencing the real thing? Things which are scarce and hard to reach are the things we most value. What we struggle to conquer elevates the worth for instance climbing a mountain. Kittler 1999 german, “any medium can be translated into any other”. Site specific installations based around the idea of drawing - quite ephemeral. Walter Benjamin 1935 “In even the most perfect reproduction...”

Ben

Uses a non-visual way of communication data to a user. Arduino tongue - plate put onto mouth which sends data to your tongue and creates visuals in your head. Audio scanning - 3D environment, 1D sound - you can make anything into a button. He records a space using a ball which links up to the computer which the software remembers, then if anyone moves near this space it makes a sound - i.e. it is a button. the user knows through audio where the space is and so is being fed information through a non visual form. 3D sound - 3D world - is the current project he is working on using 2D dots as the visual. the blue dot is your ear and you move this around which changes what you would normally hear if you were in this virtual 3D environment.

Genevive Say - http://genevievesay.com/

The stream project wired - dancer and choreographer. Interested in exposing the inner workings of the body and brain through dance and performance. Neuro feedback - brainwave data, heart rate and respiratory volume. This info is fed back to the user so they can respond to it and help. i.e. reduce anxiety etc. Footballers use it to get into the zone before a game. Initial experiments proved not to have good relationships between the art and the science, the equipment was restricting for the dancer, the sounds weren’t very nice to respond to and there was probably too much data. They introduced a new technology, the mind wave headset.

Brain - Mind wave - wifi - laptop - midi interface - lighting desk

So the computer controlled the lighting desk with the signals given from the dancers brain. Various lights were used in the performance, fairy lights, light bulbs, theatrical lights etc. When the dancer went into a meditative state it was an alternative focus so the lights would change accordingly. To control the cognitive states the dancer was given certain tasks to perform like reading a newspaper, doing some mathematics etc. which in turn would change the lighting in the performance.

Ralph Mills - http://theantimuseum.wordpress.com/about/

Field archeologist and writer. The anti-museum. The land of lost content in Shropshire has lots of everyday things. The museum has no labels so the viewers can make their own experiences up. The problem is we don’t capture the stories the viewers think/make up when they see these things. We are all curates. Ralph has done his phd research into things/objects. Museums how things in glass cases what value do these objects have. They all have meaning to the people who put them there but what do they mean? Everyday narratives - Crookshanks. Ralph has begun to create a virtual museum in which he records objects so that they can be viewed in 360 degrees (he did this with his iphone!). He is looking into producing photo kiosks which you can go to use to record your own objects to be stored in the museums and galleries. Trying to capture the personal values in objects. In the Q&A it was brought up about Oxfam, where people would write narratives about the objects they donated to the shop.

Anthony Rowe - http://www.squidsoup.org/blog/about/

Founder of squidsoup.org His particular interest lies in mixed reality immersive experience. He has looked into combining the digital world into a physical space. A programme he has developed which people can interact with brings digital animals to life, if you stick your arm into the projection they walk up it. If projected into sand, the software can detect of people have made a high barrier that the animals can’t walk over and so have to walk around. If two bugs meet they would magic up a bigger bug. The software was used at Glastonbury, one of the animals was invincible, kids get quite physical with the interactions, young adults too. In the Infestation project where a room was full of digital bugs and real bean bags, kids would try to demolish the creatures whereas older people would have a more calming effect from being in the room. squidsoup.org/infestation No one really went in and looked out for the projector, all people would instantly start to interact with the projections.

Ocean of light - Uses light, volumetric, it has volume in the space. The piece is an environment that you can walk into. the creation was influenced by a modular system found at the Zurich Train Station. They were able to lend the prototype to experiment with to inspire their creation. However people saw the object rather than the context as it was beautiful and intriguing. their invention became more organic and allowed you to interact by walking into the piece. Ephemeral space can be created and destroyed there and then. Submergence

JONATHAN BARNBROOK - 11.11.13

 

I’m a big fan of Barnbrook’s and I am lucky enough to say this is the second time I have heard him give a lecture.

- Hasn’t had a job as thinks design studios produce shit work.

- You can do what you want if you stick to it and make sacrifices.

- Where is Graphic Design in society?

- Economics and digital have forced us to blur the boundaries between skills, graphic designers are expected to be good at a few things.

- He was once told “You are a citizen first and a graphic designer secondly”

 

Political Work - Occupy London

Barnbrook was asked to re-design the Occupy London logo, although it had to be put forward to a democratic vote against 5 other. Barnbrook’s logo was chosen! the other logos contained images of people marching and clenched fists which is something we need to move away from. Barnbrook chose to use simple graphics to translate a clear and concise point, through using a circle and an arrow in red and black. The newspaper for Occupy London uses one of Barnbrook’s fonts called bastard. It is a blackletter typeface designed in 1990. which was intended to be used by corporate fascists.

Olympukes

If Barnbrook doesn’t reference other designers, why does he think it is important for students to have practicing guest lecturers like himself do lectures? Barnbrook said that he doesn’t do any work for the likes of coca cola as it would be hypocritical for himself and towards students. In the past he has worked a lot with Damien Hirst and most recently with Bowie. Barnbrook commented that record covers don’t get discussed anymore like they used to, people just tend to say whether the design is good or not. The album cover he designed for Bowie’s The Next Day album took 2 months to arrive at a final design after going through various ideas. The project had to be kept a secret until it’s release and so Barnbrook had to use the codeword table whenever talking about the album cover design. Several attempts later on the design and things still weren’t working, Bowie suggested turning the image he had chosen to use from a few years back upside down. They decided to settle on using the album cover from the Heroes album which represented Bowie in his youth looking forward. Inside the album cover, Barnbrook intentionally chose the colours to clash with regards to the lyrics as he said you can get all of that kind of information online these days, and so the print inside was just a nod to them. Some of the lyrics were chosen to stand out (and the next day, and the next, and another day) which Bowie had referenced from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow). It’s the why not the how that is important. The vinyl label is a white square and as there’s no right way to hold a record up the text is printed all around the square. The white square was very important in the design as it was translated into all of the advertising for the album release and was applicable to any format, fast food, perfume, consumer desirables, luxury hotels poster, it was anti advertising.

“Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming”

Online the campaign continued for the album where by the public were invited to create their own versions of the album cover.

Why design a new typeface?

1. Expression of language. Double think - George Orwell 1984. Anthony burgess - Fuck it!
2. To improve society. Modernist utopia.
3. Using our past to create something new.
4. To create beauty. Mason 1992 (Originally Manson after the serial killer) letterforms taken from architecture

PART 2!

You shouldn’t work for who you think you should work for but with who you want to work with, if you don’t ask you don’t get.

Barnbrook was on the curating team for the V&A show “Bowie is...” He said it is difficult to show music in an exhibition without it looking like all other exhibitions about music. The level of design that needs to be used, needs to show that you care about the people who like Bowie. Not everyone will get the design but it’s important to those who will. A phrase was printed onto all of the exhibition tickets which changed every three hours, the V&A didn’t understand why you would need to do this but it was important to make the show become something different. The exhibition was designed by theatre set designers who also worked on the opening of the olympics

If you work in another language you have to understand how to play with it. Hirst books 1997 - Barnbrook explained flicking through it like flicking through the tv channels, there’s no right part of the book to start with and that every page was like it’s own record cover, each had it’s own design.

People tend to commission what they can see, so you have to show them what you can imagine. The Barnbrook studio tend to work on about 70% commission work and 30% their own personal work.

Vernacular design - use the things around you to create design.

First Things First Manifesto 2000 Various authors This manifesto was first published in 1999 in Emigre 51.   We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it. Encouraged in this direction, designers then apply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Commercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profession's time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential at best. Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse. There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, social and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educational tools, television programs, films, charitable causes and other information design projects urgently require our expertise and help. We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design. In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart. Jonathan Barnbrook Nick Bell Andrew Blauvelt Hans Bockting Irma Boom Sheila Levrant de Bretteville Max Bruinsma Sian Cook Linda van Deursen Chris Dixon William Drenttel Gert Dumbar Simon Esterson Vince Frost Ken Garland Milton Glaser Jessica Helfand Steven Heller Andrew Howard Tibor Kalman Jeffery Keedy Zuzana Licko Ellen Lupton Katherine McCoy Armand Mevis J. Abbott Miller Rick Poynor Lucienne Roberts Erik Spiekermann Jan van Toorn Teal Triggs Rudy VanderLans Bob Wilkinson

CLINTON CAHILL - THOUGHTS ON DRAWING - 12.11.13

• Consider the role drawing might play in your design, typography design, sketchbooks.
• Writing is thinking. Drawing is thinking differently. Language isn’t thought out - it happens in midflow/action. Thinking writing can almost be back to front.
• Aims: To foreground drawing as a useful aspect of design thinking.
• To draw = to depict or sketch, to chose at random (Photo captures everything), to induce a draft to carry off smoke, to take or receive from a source - money from a bank, to cause to flow - to draw blood, to attract - to draw attention, to extrude or pull or take out, to cause to move forwards or pull away by pulling, to disembowel, to bring, take, or pull out, as from a drawer.
• To get an expanded view of a subject it is often useful to look at a dictionary definitions.
• Howard Samgala, ‘Creative Drawing’ 2002. Drawing become the closest thing we have to a universal language.
• What is drawing for? Capturing information, capturing thought, a way of seeing, developing ideas, expressing emotion, visual communication, a celebration of experience, making desirable objects. Drawing in different states - happy = happy images.
• Who needs drawing? Designers, architects, plumber, product designers, move makers, fashion and landscape designers, artists, sculptors, painters, scientists etc etc.
• New complexity - drawings long depended on its earliest material forms and processes. Paper is not the only support for drawing - performed physically or electronically in the spaces of architecture, installation, live art, screen and landscape. It is still drawing.
• “Drawing can permit the artist/designer to work in a way that thinking remains fluid and open. Written noted tend to ‘fix’ ideas, introducing a sense of intellectual closure for the writer and the reader.” Rae Smith - Theatre Designer.
• Drawing can reside in the immediacy of the links between thinking, sensing and showing.
• What are you using drawing for? Pulling and pushing. To pull out aspects of reality from observations as the pulling of ideas. Propelling the development of ideas/emotional expressions.

Pulling Images

• A scene or object from a scene.
• John Hewitt illustration staff ‘there and back’ drawings from memory about the bombings. He used writing and drawing. This is what memory might look like as a set of marks.
• Go on holiday and deliberately leave your camera at home - find another way of capturing memories or remembering them!
• From imagination, doodles, start off and follow where the drawing leads.
• Drawing and reading simultaneously. Pulling narrative content.
• Drawing what we see in our minds.

Pushing Images

• Once the idea is there it becomes pushing - you begin to push the idea mourned, alter the variables.
• Digital drawing using different kinds of software.
• Pushing pixels around.

• Sketching storyboards allows you to draw at the speed of thought. On a computer you are working to the limit of how fast/slow you can use it.
• Post it notes are a good way to describe or plan a website skeleton.
• See sketchbook for notes and references.

OPTION CHOICES

My choice is between Object & Context and Digital Futures.

Unit ends, 6-9th of May, the aim is to create and event to draw students and staff in to see what you have researched/practiced.

Object & Context.

3 projects throughout the option. The tutor, Ian has in the past designed objects for other people. He says it is all about the context. Objects don’t exist without context. Ian designed a compass for children which rather than having specific measurements on it it would just draw small, medium and large circles. Kids are more interested in drawing any sized circle rather than a specific sized circle. You have to design the experience you want the person to have. Freedom ought to make you more creative but limitations/constraints are in fact the things that make you more creative.

Ian is a collector. You have to shift the context to have a new perspective - clay cup = plastic cup. In India, some guy collected light bulbs as he liked the object for it’s aesthetic quality, yet he didn’t have electricity to use the bulb for it’s designed purpose. Ian’s father was one of the illustrators of the eye spy books.

Emotional response is the prime motivation, the value of things is hidden. (Get Your Bits Out - maybe the exhibition is about the stories rather than the objects - see Peter liversidge)

Reading objects - urban semiotics constructing narratives.

Scenario modelling - design user experience / close observation / after dance

Incorporation - modify / practice / feasibility

1 - Photographing things. What is the difference between an artist and a designer doing these things?

2 - In house out of house difference

3 - 3-4 weeks propose a feasibility study

Digital Futures.

Collaborative or individual, but at the end of the option you have to share your work in a digital symposium at the architecture shed which will open in february and will have between 60 to 100 creative business’ in.

• Sustainability is important, cities, communication, craft, development, exploration, narratives etc
• Scaleless, seamless, edgeless
• Staff research, hacking knitting machines
• Preparing you for jobs that don’t exist

Diginmmu - education, business, research.

Alex Russel - Textile Designer.

repeatless.blogspot.com

Printed textiles and surface pattern. Generative practice exploiting randomness using actions in photoshop and illustrator. Repeatless project - coding in processing cloth of gold being generated as we speak.

CLINTON CAHILL - MIND MAPPING - 05.11.13

Things to think about around my work

• Research metaphors
• Body of investigation leading to your proposal, experiments etc
• In assessment show all research and experiments
• Persuasive graphics around my design intention
• Visual treatment for my work to hap others imagine how it will work
• Design project proposal

• Research Metaphor
• Working Words
• Working the form
• Testing arrangements
• Visualising Possibilities
• Mapping as outcome
• Organising research as practice
• Presenting research as practice

Metaphor - Figure of speech in which a word or phrase is used of something to which it does not literally apply. “Trying to describe something by describing something else” Engaging your imagination, almost telling a lie. In greek metaphor means to transfer meaning. Pick a metaphor for your research, planning an expeditions, or just starting out, method = am i drifting or not, do I want to drift or not?

Research metaphors

Mapping, surveying, overview, plan, scoping, terrain, territory, field area, patch.

Journey, adventure, quest - planning, progress, tracing, backtracking, detection, browsing.

Route, pathway, meandering, going round in cirlces

Positioning, isolating, practice

Archaeology, digging, layers, strata, constructing, deconstructing, structures

Fabric, threads, strands, seed, cross fertilisation, nourishment, enrichment

Positioning is important in a phd. Are you really a graphic designer? The word text come from textiles as when writing words it reminds you of textiles. In a labyrinth, when you get lost, your notebook/journal etc become the threads so you can find your way back.

Book - Information is beautiful. Types of visual info, flowchart, fan spiral etc. Use mapping to design the layout of a book. If you do this for all of your projects and then outside links can cross over. Gant chart is a timeline/schedule for projects. Info graphics like Chris Ware book covers. Comic strips. Meta images.

Drawing of content of a book, using the pencil to write what happens in the book

Ian Noble, the research process. research methodology, watt does this mean?

If you were researching along the lines of a Chipshop - to visually represent this idea you would use items found in a choppy, i.e. newspaper, day glo stars, drawing on the window etc

Alison Barnes project - Map shows people living in those areas, the most important thing here are the people.

book about thinking made for people who buy paper, it’s more about the process rather than the paper sample.

“Method in the madness - learning through making” working the words. Mind mapping isn’t about having to do all of the bits in the mind map, it is about just getting your thoughts about your projects onto paper. Keith Tyson - The 7 wonders. Graphic Communication of ideas and thinking. Graphics doesn’t have to be finished for it to be a thing. Malcolm Garrett - Understanding hyper media. Matt Cook - project chart, keywords and phrases and diagram of how it will work. Stages, you can’t do the next without doing the last stage.

What else works rather than just showing your work as a portfolio or on a wall?

 

PETER LIVERSIDGE - LECTURE - 05.11.13

Peter Liversidge is a British contemporary artist notable for his diverse artistic practice and us or proposals. Rather than exhibit a finished piece in galleries, Peter exhibits proposals of work he would like to do. He creates the proposals in his kitchen on a typewriter. The proposals are usually typed onto white paper, whilst coloured paper indicates a piece that has been realised within the space. Process is still key to the proposal. How important is the realisation of a proposal? It doesn’t matter to Peter whether a proposal is realised or not, he wanted to make work that didn’t really exist.

As part of the Edinburgh festival he created several flags about the city which said “Hello”. Whilst putting the idea together he realised that there were a lot of empty flag poles about the city that weren’t being used and flags signify an event or a welcome he thought it suitable to use this as his piece. Much of his work also involves using postal services to post manufactured or made objects. He once posted pieces of wood to his friend, who once Peter had seen them all together as a collection, his friend burnt them as he was cold! Some of his works also involve exhibiting polaroids as a diptych. He exhibits the polaroid that comes out from the film and then the master copy to show the passage of time.

Music has been a big influence in Peter’s life, he said “You are influenced by your surroundings and how they sound, only at the point of it playing can you hear it in you surroundings”. Peter spent a life changing year in Montana where he was tutored by David Lynch.

Another piece of his work involved collecting and curating all of the FREE signs he could find. The type that people put out on the street next to something that they would like you to take for free. Instead of taking the free object he took the signs and replaced them with a facsimile. Peter said he doesn’t mind if things don’t work or not (when talking about a back drop he created for a music gig) it’s about the things taking place.

Creating winter scenes in the summer - psychosomatic. People put their coats on even though it is still warm but they get a sense of being cold because of what their surroundings present to them. Peter collected the elastic bands that he received through the letterbox as he received no post, only elastic bands! Peter collects things not knowing what he might do with them, but eventually finds a purpose for them.

One show consisted of 60 cd’s burnt by Peter and 60 burnt by another artist. The audience were invited to play the cd’s. Peter was interested in the difference in interaction between the different generations. Older generations would put a cd on and listen to the whole thing beefier deciding if they liked it or not, whereas the younger generation would put a cd on for 20 seconds, decide they didn’t like it and move onto another cd. The piece changed depending on who interacted with it.

Some of his influences are Joseph Beuys, Joseph Cornell (Peter said that Cornell lived with his mother and used to invite the local kids around to take some of his boxes away to play with and they would be brought back in a different arrangement), Dukes of Hazard (from which when he was younger he would make model cars from the show), John Peel, Dan Flavin, Fischilli Weiss, Elizabeth Cotton (Freight Train song), The Fall, Neil Young (Old man take a look at my life), The Monks, The Day Today (Chris Morris), Film The repo man. From this film Peter and his brother would take phrases and replace them whenever they wanted to use a swear word when they were younger in front of their parents, they used to say melon farmer instead of fuck (I think this was the right swear word!)

Peter spoke about Ray Johnson and how he was suspicious of systems that show work and so instead he believed that by posting objects, the act of them being posted and being received was perhaps “the show” rather than exhibiting the actual pieces that were posted. What is the purpose of a gallery? Is the postal system a gallery space?

He also referenced an artist who drew dollar bills and tried to pay his way through life by using the drawings, using them as a piece of art that may or may not be worth more than the actual dollar bill itself. One lady refused to have him pay with his art (he also need change n real currency) and her reason being was that she liked art with flowers on!

Peter showed us a video clip of RL Burnside sat outside with a guitar and an amp, after the clip ended he remarked that you don’t need all of the fancy things you are made to think you need to produce good stuff like music and art.

CLINTON CAHILL - IMAGE AND TEXT - 29.10.13

Image & Text, back to basics with visual literacy. Going back to routes of practice drawing letterforms and photography

• Re visit key elements of VL from a graphic design perspective.
• In order to recognise and explore the complexity and mystery of an image and text in graphic communication.
• So that we can exploit a better understanding of graphic composition.

Formal Considerations

All of the bits that make a piece need to be considered, the empty space and the page, balance, symmetry, dynamic equilibrium, contrast, visual weight + recognition (psychology), reading image and text, point and line, Harmony and contradiction, positioning the viewer.

Why?

Fundamentally important to a range of design practices. Page layout, illustration, book design, advertising, film & motion graphics, new media, packaging etc.

Empty Space

Meaning and inherent dynamics.

Image above represents the page or window. Represents potential, the immanent, the void, ‘notional’ or imaginary space, ground (figure/ground), the field, ‘window’ onto other/extended space. Writers blank page represents space of artists imagination. Virtual space to invite audience. How big is it?

Ground = Paper surface

Figure = Goes onto the ground

Field = Paper for the mind map (Paper represents field of knowledge)

‘Window” = Canvas is window into bigger space. Looking through it into artists imagination.

Choosing kind of space to best express idea. ‘A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel’ Page 124 “Terrifying whiteness of the page”

• Use empty space to work with to perhaps to intimidate.
• The golden section, fibonacci sequence - paper sizes
• A-sizes created according to what Westerners believe to be aesthetically beautiful, mathematical and standardised.
• To create unconventional sizes you must change the conventional size of “the book” for instance.
• Paper stock is important, shape and size.

The audience don’t like things close to the edge, it makes us feel uncomfy, our eyes are constantly moving all over the image, from left to right. Bottom right diagram above takes the viewer off the page, whatever is missing we can imagine the rest. Entertain the viewer. These are vital for page layout. Rhythm of the grid, the structure underneath the content is made by understanding page layout.

Once paper is chosen the space is changed/defined by the mark, activated, defined, deformed, disrupted, punctured, polluted, enhanced etc.

BALANCE

Symmetry can be stable but this is potentially boring.

Dynamic equilibrium - the eyes enjoy suspense. Symmetry in faces, we enjoy this initially but after a while it becomes a bit weird. Scales in diagram above right are predictable and give a sense of balance. Scales in bottom right give us a sense of moving as if it were to tip over which makes the composition more interesting to look at.

Compositions above become more interesting as you go down due to composition and colours.

V&A poster - Vince Frost. Symmetrical but there are other twists to make it interesting.

Images we recognise all of the time don’t need to be big on the page unless this is important as we easily recognise even when quite small that the image is of a face for instance.

Barnbrook’s type spec sheets rely on you recognising the symbols from elsewhere (example above wasn’t the one shown in lecture - can’t seem to find that one, it was cyan and magenta and had the symbol of a cross on it!)

Why is the red dot in the above design? makes you feel like you’re putting your tongue to an iron. Hiding or revealing, which is most effective?

Balance - Bauhaus posters stripped down of their layout, i.e. cut all of the elements of a poster up and re-arrange them by hand in front of you as apposed to on screen, it’s more immediate this way and happens at the speed of your thought. How a small piece of text on a page layout can hold the whole composition together, if it’s taken away, the whole composition feels like it might fall down.

The human eye recognises and relishes contrast

We stop seeing familiar things that don’t or haven’t changed. But we can also enjoy the boring as it is denying you change. In portfolios, most people use black text to annotate, why? Why not use 80% black so the work can stand out more. Rembrandt’s painting are mostly blurry, he only used absolute black next to white on the eyes as it anchors us in psychologically to the piece and pulls you in to dwell on a creation part of the piece.

Smaller can be stronger if done well with contrast. Artists exhibition catalogues/books need the work to stand out over the design that the designer is using to put the piece together with.

If the below are identical - > These can change

Shape + Colour - > Size is effected

Shape + Size - > Colour

Colour + Colour - > Shape

How does your graphic information relate to the edge of the page? (See diagram above) The left composition feels stable, 2nd feels like it is nervous, moving, irritated, and 3rd is on it’s way down, it has movement.

Designer Paul Smith’s catalogue breaks the rules as it’s audience are savvy enough to understand that it’s not correct but it is witty with the heads being cropped out of the image frame. The photography doesn’t look like a product shot, it’s almost not real information. Marion Deuchars book covers, again examples of images cropped in “the wrong places”. Upsetting the rules by deliberate odd cropping/clumsiness. Guilty faces, icons (Statue of liberty, coca cola) easily recognised and so are powerful and so they can be decided upon carefully where to be placed.

. Point = static fixed, terminated

----- line = time, duration, direction, movement

However, where is the word? You can imply word through image, when you are directly given the word, you have nothing to do or think about. If someone says refrigerator, you all start to think of a refrigerator, where is the image? In your head, is it the same image you all have in your head?

Sagmeister’s Lou Reed album - The grid is the face. Making the audience engage physically through showing breathing etc, you’ve hooked the audience as it makes the feel it physically.