The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is a collection of statements on strategies for designers written by Bruce Mau in 1998. Not all of them I agree with, but some are interesting and helpful when thinking of methods for developing your work.
Download PDF here
I found an interactive version of this same text online.
Today I’ll be showing some examples of what I call typo narratives – stories told using typography.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES – A Korean/American art duo living in Korea.
Using flash, they animate various texts, varying from light to philosophical and intellectual, and use music as a soundtrack. The texts are in many different languages including, english, french, korean, chinese, portuguese, german and many more. They use the same lettertypes, most animations are just in black and white. The rythym of the animation, and how it matches the soundtrack make for a compelling reading/watching and listening experience.
Secondly I’ll show Beautiful World a typo-film made in 2006 by Dutch graphic designer Mieke Gerritzen.
Beautiful World is a film to read or typography to look at. It contains texts only: quotes by well-known and less well-known thinkers who shaping an image of the world. This film is about globalization and seeks to show that the world is being dumbed down because practically everything has become linked to economic interests.
A film about a visual language of signs, codes and trends with the goal of deploying products, visions, statements, politics, subcultures and everything possible in the name of visible economic growth. Text and language are taken apart and the film becomes a visual machine for the meaning, manipulation and seduction of the word.
Recognition is the most succesful product of today. Beautiful World is a film about visual culture in which form and content are no longer presented separately and the boundaries of entertainment and high culture are unclear.
I will show some media art works presented at the Sonic Acts Festival in 2006. (http://www.sonicacts.com/index_06.html/2006)
My reason for showing this is because it shows how in media art, artists often develop their own tools and applications. Also there are whole online communities that share knowlegde and software.
The Sonic Acts works seem to have a specific esthetic that I relate very much to technological art – and honestly, it is not so much my taste. I find it often to be nervous, attacking the senses, and sometimes rather soulless. Nevertheless it is interesting to take notice of, and there are always some elements that inspire.
From the website:
Autonomous computer art has seen a revival in recent years. Partly due to the rapid advances in hardware and software, over the last fifteen years applied and autonomous computer art has flourished in the visual arts and electronic music as well as in the worlds of film, video and games. As hardware and software have become more accessible and user-friendly a large group of artists has taken possession of this domain and developed a great deal of new work. In addition, ever more artists are developing their own hardware and writing their own software. This is an essential element in contemporary computer art.
PLAYLIST
> 200 Nanowebbers 02.49
artists: Semiconductor & Double Adaptor
> int.16/54//son01/30×1 05:43
lia [Video]. @c (Pedro Tudela & Miguel Carvalhais) [Audio].
> Berlin 04:11
artists: Karl Kliem / Dienststelle [Video]. Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto [Audio]
> Feedback / Flight Risk 04:33
artists: Robert Hodgin (flight404) [Visuals]. Bit Shifter [Audio]
> Chopping Heads 03:51
artists: Scott Pagano & Keepadding [Video]. Funkstörung [Audio].
> 4413 04:11
artist: Mateusz Herczka.
> Darkness (Not Darkness) 04:00
artist: Kurt Ralske.
> frozen music 04:22
artists: farmersmanual.
playtime: ca. 35 mins.
INFO ABOUT THE WORKS
> 200 Nanowebbers
Using custom-made scripting, the melodies and rhythms spawn a nano scale environment that shifts and contorts to the audio resonance. Layers of energetic hand drawn animations, play over the simplest of vector shapes that form atomic scale associations. As the landscape flickers into existence by the light of trapped electron particles, substructures begin to take shape and resemble crystalline substances.
> int.16/54//son01/30×1
the creation of a versatile system of audio-visual articulation that can be refitted to a variety of spaces or formats.
> Berlin
piano > direction | volume > size.
bass > color | treble > fissures.
> Feedback / Flight Risk
Feedback is the result of experimentation with beat detection, dynamic threshold levels, and 3D video feedback loops. The audio track was created by Bit Shifter, a musician who creates music with Nintendo Gameboys.
A feedback loop is created by mapping the contents of the screen onto a three dimensional space. The beat triggers control the position and rotation of the camera as well as the field of view and style of feedback.
> Chopping Heads
Keepadding supplied processed + remixed still images to Scott Pagano who handled the animation using a myriad of stock and custom visual tools to synthesize the movement. Experimenting with a wide gamut of visual freak-outs, from broken video cameras to custom-designed generative 3D tools, Pagano and Keepadding broke open the systems at their disposal to create a red veined stew of underage knife play that crosses into and breaks apart the realms of tech-savvy digital art and raw gritty graffiti-inspired visual insanity.
> 4413
4413 is a 12 meters wide video projection based on a single video take which I made during a train trip between Lelystad and Almere, documenting a trajectory through the artificial Dutch landscape. Because the topography is completely flat, the train acts as the operative mechanism of a slit-scan camera. 4413 is a combination of high speed and extreme slowness, somewhere between monumental landscape painting and visualization science
> Darkness (Not Darkness)
Darkness (Not Darkness) is created from images of Iraq in 1992 (in the aftermath of the First Gulf War). The images are time-manipulated with the artist’s custom software. Desert, sky, water, fire and oil flow and blend organically, mixing like liquids. Events that actually happened sequentially appear to occur simultaneously.
> frozen music
Our third presentation of BuckyMedia involved the public on as many levels as possible. The geodesic sphere was equipped with wireless sound system and digital sensors. It was at the same time musical instrument and concert hall. The stunning changes of daylight in the gallery space provided an atmosphere of high-altitude and lucid dreaming, while the sonified gravitational data of the structure added a narrow band of digital squeals and screams to the deep vibrations of the shrink-wrap window drums.
Another interesting example of subjective mapping, in this case of different hutongs in Beijing:
URBAN CARPETS
Series of 8 carpets representing different maps of Hutong areas with a size of approximately one square kilometre and a population of 30000. Each of them has been isolated and presented as autonomous town within the big city. They are embroidered by hand with the same technique of the propaganda slogans on large fabrics used by the communist party during the seventies. The carpets have been filled with white wire wool insertions. All along year 2009 the urban carpets will be shown to the Hutong dwellers inside the courtyards and on the public lanes in order to share the project with people and bring it back to the city districts it was inspired from.
Look at the different carpets here: red, cyan, brown, green, orange
IDENTITY
1500 red stamps on 1500 grey clay beijing bricks
Stamps have a central role in Chinese people’s life: they use them to confirm agreements and validate their actions. In a certain way loosing your stamp is like loosing your own identity. Each stamp is not carrying a name but it has been carved with a fragment of Hutong district map, a group of houses, a piece of city, to mark the relationship and identification between people and their living space. The installation is part of the Instant Hutong art project.
Look at the link here: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/identity/232326
In City One Minutes life in each city is divided into 24 one minute portraits, each depicting one hour of the day. Every film is a personal impression of the city in which the artist lives or in which he is staying.
A chinese explaination about the project can be found here:
http://weblogs.vpro.nl/cityoneminutes/over/chinese/
You can send in your own 60 second film and participate! The deadline is 1st October.
http://weblogs.vpro.nl/cityoneminutes/participate/
To walk in a city without a set destination is relatively new. It was only in the twenties of the last century that the writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin invented the flaneur, a modern day man who went drifting trough the cities that emerged.
The website The Last Tourist is an example of mapping through writing stories and making drawings. It’s a project by Dutch artist Jan Rothuizen, who traversed the Chinese cities of the Pearl River Delta in 2005.
‘The last Tourist’ is an online passage along hand drawn maps, texts and photographs. This website provides a personal reading of the cities that write themselves.
click here to download assignment 02
A few years ago, I tried to illustrate the process of developing an idea or concept for my 2nd year students at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. It is not to be taken too seriously, but may be helpful to you, when thinking of how to get started. It is very much a suggestion on how to get started.
You can download a PDF of the illustration here.
click here to download assignment 01 (128 kb pdf)
