Archive for the ‘design’ Category
(dis)info
I agree with kottke: very nice infographic:
Much better, anyway than yesterday’s disinfocapiton on the cover of the Evening Standard.
en-lightenment
In addition to wanting to develop my work into the shape of a giant wiki, complete with multimedia links and a three-plus-dimensional structure vs. the linear mode of the traditional book, I have a much more mundane and realistic request: I’d like to teach in classrooms with projectors that I can connect my laptop too. I’m at an underfunded state u – at my grad institution this would be fully doable, but not necessarily here.
I need it to show my students stuff like this:
Fantastic, no? Spike Jonze directed it, and yes, I know what it’s in service of so shush. But what an absolutely stunning performance of multiple logics of modernism. “Make it new,” of course – the “you will become your parents if you don’t chuck your parents’ furniture” meme that is always operative withe Ikea, not to mention a very true psycho-genealogical finding about Americans. But then, also, there is the mimed perspectival shift – we “see” the ad from the perspective of an entity which has no perspective – and the perspectivelessness of the lamp is the point. (This is the old Portrait of the Artist trick, where we identify with Stephen only to find him emptied out by the end, full only of trope, a machine that makes bad poetry and false epiphanies…)
It’s all there: the pastiche of obsolete forms, the opening in medias res, the minimally marked “everydayness” of the setting. And of course the shocking turn at the end which, true to form, is not immanent but comes from an interruption from without, and brings not peripeic catharsis but Brechtian estrangement and consciousness. All in the service of selling you a new lamp, encouraging you to fill the landfills with the old one…
So many of the dangers, so much of the promise, of modernism, right here in a thirty second ad. It’s not an ad without products, for we see the new lamp, if only through a wet window brightly. And we see it only, after the change of perspective, in order to laugh at the misery of the passé, the obsolescent, the nostalgically outmoded. An anti-fetishistic solicitation for anti-fetishistic fetishism.
koan
Design Observer on Kafka and Typography:
We get the word “koan” from Zen Buddhism, where in Japanese it translates literally as “a matter for public thought,” sort of an open-source philosophy for ancient times. Koans often demonstrated the inability of logical reasoning to produce enlightened thought, and, as a trained lawyer and insurance clerk throughout his life, no one knew the deadening effects of logic better than Franz Kafka.
Yes, and that slip from “we” to “they”… Go look…
(Image above: “Walbaum, typeface design by Justin Erich Walbaum, 1804. Kafka’s favorite typeface and the original used for Meditation.”)
the telescopic sublime / criticism in 3D
As I work on my “real” writing, I increasingly find myself looking to embed images within my text, just like when I’m tapping away at adswithoutproducts. (Obviously, I could insert images – like, I know how to do that in Word – but I work in a field, literature, that doesn’t let you get away with gratuitous illustration.
And then there’s the burgeoning world of video. No one gets to put that in their book…
For instance, I am working today on this famous passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongwoes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:
Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongwoes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.
He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry.
And at one point as I worked on it, I found myself momentarily thinking that I would embed this into my text ((Via here):
But of course I did not, I could not. I will have to make do with a footnote and a link that will assuredly look strange to anyone who is not a blogreader. Blogreaders, I think, would get the not quite non-sequitur-ness of the gesture.
Now see, if was writing for an appropriately electronic medium, a freeform one that’s not, say, just a repository of print-type articles, the stub of a new book might have grown out of this right-angle point of contact with my first. The Joyce material might have proceeded along down the page while a new line of thought, taking up the topic of these particularly modern anti-narrative narratives like Stephen’s list, like the Eames’s film, these synchronic stories which gesture at a new fictionality both impossible and absolutely necessary, dictated by changing world conditions, the erosion of forms, technological emergences, etc…
Perhaps I would have dropped what I’ve been doing with the work that includes the Joyce chapter and taken up this new line. Or maybe both at once. Working in this fashion – a fashion that’s a bit closer to blogging than the academic mongraph, or perhaps would be a hybrid of both, would give a whole new meaning to the notion of scholarly oeuvre. One work per life time, branching 2 dimensionally, and then 3, and so on. And it would end up – or start out – looking something like this:
(which is a visualization of adswithoutproducts, from here, via here)
So while this might sound like a circa mid-1990s paean to the radical new possibilities of HTML for criticism and imaginative works, it’s not. That has all been said before, many, many times. Rather for me this youtube epiphany makes me realize that the technology is already getting old – we are getting used to it, it’s becoming second nature. And it’s starting to show, as is bound to happen, in the way that I work, but more importantly the way that I think.
UPDATE: It dawned on me only after posting this that the issue I’m working through with the Joyce quote above actually has quite a lot to do with the issues I’m working through in this post. The subtle registration of the important question very young Stephen has asked about the “poem,” the experiment that he has conducted, and what his author’s ultimate answer to that question will be… Stephen’s question is about the limits of conventional form and the conventional temporalities that these forms drag along with them…
à une passante
What began as a shocking development, as unsettling as it was enlivening -
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair… puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais! (translations)
- becomes the fix that we missed, what we’ll move mountains and monuments to have again. We’ll pay handsomely for it, this love at last sight. We will, we say, plan contingency into our plans.
Diventity: Identity, Density and Diversity
I propose one simple caveat urban design should strive to implement:
“Good urban space optimises Diventity” *.
Diventity is a concept that links diversity, density, and identity, and I define it as such:
Diventity allows identity to recursively emerge from the density of diversity, when that density reaches a critical mass.
[snip]A city is much more than its stones, a city is memories and relationships and friendships and fears and ambitions; it is stories and histories interacting in the society-space-time continuum.
We form these subjectivities only if the city provides us the right opportunities, because a city is first and foremost our memory-forming medium. We remember our first kiss through who we kissed and when and where we were when we kissed.
[snip]
A place with enough differentiated identities (spatial, social, etc), distributed in the right proximity (or density) to allow them to interact without obliterating one another, might create enough such moments to allow for identity-shaping memories to emerge. We can say that such a place has Diventity.
It is worth remembering that Les fleurs du mal was published during the early years of Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. An anti-”diventity” plan if there ever was one…
possibilities
Owen Hatherley, at The Measures Taken (one of the best blogs going, btw), on just what’s so disturbing about the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new exhibition, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939.
Rather, what disturbs here is what Jenkins, quite rightly, calls politics in the guise of art. One scribbled comment in the book asks why the connection between modernism and Nazism wasn’t emphasised (well, that would be because there wasn’t one), others use phrases like ‘cold’ or ‘brutal’…what the detractors have noticed is that much of this essentially comes from, or supports, the possibility of a system other than the one we are perpetually told is the only possible. Whether it’s the photos of militant stronghold siedlung Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna, a huge model of the Vesnin’s Pravda building, Rodchenko’s oddly alluring workers’ overalls, Corbusier taking a pen and scribbling out the centre of Paris…there are hundreds of possibilities dotted around these Victorian corners.
UPDATE: And today there’s more, complete with a very provocative quotation from Stalin:
“The combination of the Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficency is the essence of Leninism in Party and state work.”
Joseph Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, 1924
you are all so tired…
One place to look for Benjamin on Loos is “Experience and Poverty.”
A complex artist like the painter Paul Klee and a programmatic one like Loos – both reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past. They turn instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.
This is a fantastic piece. Interesting stuff on an architectural theorist and novelist Paul Scheerbart, whom I’m going to look into when I get back to the library. A bit more:
Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they can make such pure and decided use of their poverty – their outer poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty – that it will lead to something respectable. Nor are they ignorant or inexperienced. Often we could say the very opposite. They have ‘devoured’ everything, both ‘culture and people,’ and they have had such a surfeit that it has exhausted them. No one feels more caught out than they by Scheerbart’s words: “You are all so tired, just because you have failed to concentrate your thoughts on a simple but ambitious plan.”
(What comes next, about Mickey Mouse, actually, is fantastic as well. But I’ll leave you to find it on your own…)
the yoke of ornament
From Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime” (1929)
Every epoch had its own style, and ours alone should be denied one!? By style, people meant ornamentation. But I said, “Do not weep. Do you not see the greatness of our age resides in our very inability to create new ornament? We have gone beyond ornament, we have achieved plain, undecorated simplicity. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfillment awaits us. Soon the streets of the cities will shine like white walls! Like Zion, the Holy City, Heaven’s capital. Then fulfillment will be ours.”
Interesting. It seems that Benjamin was a fan, which is doubly interesting. From the introduction to Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays:
The philosopher and art critic Walter Benjamin… rated this pamphlet [Ornament and Crime], with which Loos also used to harangue his audience in his notorious lectures, as the most important work “in combating the aesthetic imperialism of the last century, the ‘gold fever’ of those who proclaim the so-called eternal values of art.”
I’ll try to look up some of Benjamin’s references to Loos tomorrow and perhaps post them… But, for now, let me say that I’m interested in what Benjamin exactly means by “aesthetic imperialism.” Ambiguous. Does he mean the dominance of the category of the aesthetic in general or does he mean in particular the aesthetic of those who side with the “eternal values of art.” In other words, does Benjamin think of Loos’s essay as framing a critique of the aesthetic in general or the description of a new aesthetic, a counter aesthetic?
The category of the aesthetic – or even simply of taste – is difficult to distill from Loos’s essay. Take the following passage:
I do not accept the objection that ornament is a source of increased pleasure in life for cultured people, the objection expressed in the exclamation “But if the ornament is beautiful!” For me, and with me for all people of culture, ornament is not a source of increased pleasure in life. When I want to eat a piece of gingerbread, I choose a piece that is plain, not a piece shaped like a heart, or a baby, or a cavalryman, covered over and over with decoration. A fifteenth-century man would not have understood me, but all modern people will. The supporters of ornament think my hunger for simplicity is some kind of mortification of the flesh. No, my dear Professor of Applied Arts, I am not mortifying the flesh at all. I find the gingerbread tastes better like that.
OK, now wait, the last line is strange. The gingerbread most certainly doesn’t taste better when it’s “simple,” when it’s not shaped as a heart, or a baby, or whatever. It just tastes the same. This is more important than it perhaps looks, at first.
(I can’t decide whether or not to select “multinational capitalist chic” as one of the categories for the post. I will leave it provisionally untoggled.)
fadeur
But it is real, not computer generated. It is “low-income housing in Ixtapaluca, Mexico City.” (Again, via BLDGBLOG).
Can we learn to love the same? We have never tried. Our aesthetic, far outrun by our politics, was and has remained that of the autonomous individual, forever damned to assert her or his autonomous individuality, her idiosyncrasy, his exhausted maintenance of difference.
But perhaps in a world of true efficiency, an efficiency aimed at equality rather than one in service of exploitation, we will need to learn to love the same.
The study of art, all forms of art, has lost track of the aesthetic, the question of it, the putting of it up for question. It is not that a sense of form has deserted us, but rather that we have abandoned the hard questions of purpose and priority. We have bracketed off the aesthetic as compromised, rather than compromised ourselves in the development of a new one.
Moving forward, we will have to confront the same questions that Roland Barthes did during his 1974 Tel Quel fieldtrip to China, a China in the throes of the cultural revolution, when he found that having left behind the West, its
turbulence of symbols, we address very vast, very old, and very new land, where signification is discrete to the point of rarity. Right at this moment, a new field is discovered: that of fragility, or still better (I risk the word, quitting it to come back to it later): of blandness (fadeur)
He found in China “a people (who, in twenty-five years, has already constructed a considerable nation) which circulates, works, drinks its tea or performs solitary gymnastics, without drama, without noise, without pose, in short without hysteria.”
Barthes had his answer to this hysteria-less silence, an answer in a certain sense determinative or at least highly reflective of the sweep of critical thought over the the next thirty years. Perhaps it is time to rethink this answer.
Tatlin!
Go take a look at this post at BLDGBLOG on Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Be sure to stay for the essay that makes up the second half of the post. Absolutely excellent, this site. One of my favorites, and this post takes things to a new level.
The unbuilt status of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd International – or Tatlin’s Tower – is both befuddling and possibly contentious. In other words, are we sure that Tatlin’s Tower has not actually been built? Can this state of unconstruction be proven?
Perhaps Tatlin’s Tower exists after all – but we’ve been looking in all the wrong places.
See also this.
Olympic Pictograms
Really excellent post at the terrific site Design Observer . (Wish they posted more frequently though – I’m always excited to see something new up.
This one’s on the Olympics and design, and features some great stuff about the Olympic pictograms rolled out for the 1972 Munich games. God they’re terrific. Go take a look here, where they’re mixed in with a lot of other wonderful ones…
I’ve always had a serious thing for pictograms, road signs, etc… Remember when I was a little kid spending a whole summer staring at this comprehensive guide to street signs that was on the back of a Canadian road map I got at the tourist place by my grandmother’s house.
But theseMunich guys take the cake. Like to print them up at put them in little frames all around my house.
