Repurposed clothing brand design

 

Collage Experiment

 

For this week, I have done collage experiments using random photos and quotes that would create a meaning to kindness. During this experiment, it was suggested that I would use photos from magazines that I had no investment in. Therefore, I have used photos from magazines that I was unfamiliar with, which was the “How to Spend it” magazines and combined them in groups of two, along with the quotes, to create a meaning related to kindness.

Reference Posters

 

House Template, Village

 

Template Houses!

For this, I found house templates to eliminate having 

to fully build the houses at first, to be able to let others 

"decorate" or "graffiti" the house first and then be fully built.

After printing the templates on multicolored card stock, I had given

one to everyone in the seminar room to do what they had wanted with them,

resulting in very different houses, which was very interesting, a very different variety 

than just the houses I had created.

I photographed them outside in the grass, to look as if they were in a real setting, and 

I find the multiples colors and variety's of houses to be very satisfying!

House Template

Designs

 

notes and recollections, 5

Updated last week’s notes and recollections, 4 late (today Monday a.m.).
These are what I remember, and are thus partial (and perhaps even faulty!).

For Thursday, please submit (by e-mail, or posted on blog), or bring in to class, an updated/current thesis statement, that explains where you are in your project. It need not refer to earlier ideas/ambitions. It should have a title.
Someone should be able to read it, and then see your work, and not be mystified.

—

Shared a copy of
“My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer /
At times it caused suffering, but it also gave me a passion for words and language.”
By Darcey Steinke. The New York Times (June 9, 2019)
the print version title is better : “My stutter made me a writer”
paywalled link : www.nytimes.com/2019/06/06/opinion/reading-writing-stuttering.html

—

Have been thinking about Richard Diebenkorn’s “Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting” (widely available online, although there are variants... and — more dependably? — in print, here for instance).

Several of its ten rules pertain to things that have come up in seminar:

3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.
5. Don’t “discover” a subject — of any kind.
9. Tolerate chaos.

—

John Cage (1912-1992, wikipedia)
In relation to Thea’s work, but separate too, we watched/listened to an excerpts of his
4'33 (performed by William Marx) : link ; and
Sonata V for Prepared Piano, from Sonatas and Interludes, performed by Inara Ferreira : link

John Cage is known for his use of chance procedures, aften involving the I-Ching. In addition to his music, writing and visual art (e.g., 11 Stones, 1989), he was a prominent mycologist (mushroom expert) : link (review of John Cage: A Mycological Foray - Variations on Mushrooms, 2020)

—

these notes and recollections are in progress throughout the week.
 

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Josh (working title : “calculating the conscience”) showed three visuals incorporating text and waveforms —
 

transmission 1 / 00:02:52

orion / 00:03:27

catalyst / 00:03:31

and a revised passage of his sound and associated visuals (still with the green overlay) —

There was some discussion of the word “emotions” and other expressions, e.g., “tone” or “mood.” Can emotions be coded into music? Where do the emotions reside? (in the music, or in the mind/body of the listener?)

with regard to sound and emotions —
JM mentioned Yannis Kyriakides, a composer from Cyprus, lives/works in Amsterdam.
His “spinoza (or I am not where I think myself to be)” is “...based ...on the definitions of the emotions from the 3rd part of [Spinoza’s Ethics, and on a letter about free will”
see his text (including those definitions) and hear an excerpt of a performance here : www.kyriakides.com/spinoza.html
Some of his music has a visual and even typographic dimension, se for example : www.kyriakides.com/words_and_song_without_words.html
 

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Madison (graffiti’d houses; participation design...) showed houses unpacked/assembled (ours, and her own).

Exchange of ideas followed. Potential use in art ed/schools; therapy; getting to know others; one house for every person at Montserrat (one style? or many? stores? gas stations? churches mosques temples? ; would alterations to the houses/buildings be tolerated? etc etc). Madison reiterated an interest in making a “doll house.” Could it be virtual? What would constraints be? i.e., a story, or list of characters?

JM mentioned Georges Perec his novel(s) Life a User’s Manual (1978; Englished 1987) whose “story” involves a floor plan of an apartment building, and the people therein (and a chess game, I believe — a kind of puzzle. See the wikipedia article on the book : link.
 

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Patrick (wireless trackball mouse; text/image...) showed three versions. We continued to discuss where one would encounter these, and what could be excluded, what included.

$11.99 (top)
the mouse (image)
or free with the offer of your soul. (bottom)

or completely encircled by type/lettering. JM continues to urge thinking of these pieces (1) in a series, including other objects; and (2) as “art,” without too much consideration of marketing aspect.

Thursday —
Patrick showed reference images and repurposed clothing brand design done previously in a difference class.

There was a discussion of branding, and continuing discussion of the wireless trackball mouse (and other objects?) and their relation to type. We also discussed the use of design tool apps on a smartphone — their uses, and their limitations (particularly involving type, and positioning of different elements in relation to each other).
 

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Thea (great-grandfather’s notebooks) showed lists of single words, and of single words and their surrounding language. So where to take these?

1. alphabetical order
2. chronological order
3. mesostic (row down the middle) format : link (Marjorie Perloff, on mesostic writing of John Cage)
4. if mesostic (which in form can be seen also in the Freud Concordance (shown below around the word “design”)
   Thea can decide how much of the preceding and trailing language to retain
   and what lines to include/exclude
5. bring in elements from other source “sets” (dreams; schoolwork, &c.), perhaps distinguished by color or (better) italic
6. look at/for examples of concrete poetry, procedural poetry, visual poetry (“vispo”); also
7. prose poetry (Penguin anthology in the room)
8. Madison mentioned Jenny Holzer, her use of phrases and aphorisms, in print and out in the world.
   example (Truisms 1978/1982, at The Met)
   her website : link : projects.jennyholzer.com/

It was suggested that the language be put in “a book” with photos etc. JM assumes a book (or books), but “book” doesn’t really help with developing what will be that book. Stick with the language for now.

JM also wondered if there was any interest in computational poetry/poetics (Obsidian is a tool in that general realm, that also includes Python). See bookmarks tagged #TC at pinboard.in/u:asfaltics/t:405F22.TC/
 

from The concordance to The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud / Samuel A. Guttman, with the collaboration of Stephen M. Parrish and Randall L. Jones. New York, N.Y. : International Universities Press, c1984.

Thursday —
Thea showed experiments involving her great-grandfather’s notebooks and her own dream notebook. There was discussion of technical issue (use tables or even tabs for alignment of the mesostic pieces), and also of pacing, pauses, reading aloud. Practice can make perfect, or progress, or at least change!
 

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Stacey (kindness) showed some collage pairings from the “How to Spend It” weekend supplement to the Financial Times. We discussed redundancies (e.g., two images of flowers, vs one image of flower, next to something else). Stacey wants to use quotes; JM suggests doing favorite quotes plus passages from Scripture.

Thursday —
Stacey showed some more collage “pairings” with quotes (too small to discuss usefully in class — better to show on blog or via the seminar drive). She explained that she prefers to use quotes — see passage from updated statement, below — rather than the Bible.

Currently, I am experimenting with collages using photos from magazines I had no investment in and quotes from Orly Wahba’s book, “Kindness Boomerang: How to Save the World (and Yourself) Through 365 Daily Acts” that would create a meaning to kindness. In these collages, I am combining photos in groups of two with a quote from Orly Wahba’s book to create a meaning related to kindness. My goal for this project is to explore many ways to create different art projects to visually express the importance of kindness.
 

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Sarah (Life after Death) showed (1) physical (3D) sketches/models in progress, of a styrofoam brain (a portion at top of photo), and other body parts that would/might be contained in a small skeleton model; and (2) some experimental drawings/writings made with the artificial blood she has made.

JM suggested that the flat work — and more of the same or similar — can, with further transformations, yield lots of opportunities. Would start by photographing (not scanning, if not dry) and working at different scales, maybe with type... etc etc.
 

---

Katie (color; windows) showed a new sequence of phrases (from DMs and poetry) each paired with/facing a photograph of window. The windows now were ordered by color (warm to cool, mostly). This change resulted in a rethink of the language: fewer phrases, used as chapter titles or epigrams, ahead of a few images.

Seemingly small change, had significant implications!
 

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John (shoes) showed some sketches of ideas discussed a week ago. In response to a question about what his design work looks like, John pointed to cover art at his portfolio site : link : nrwys.com/artworks/

shoes, shoes as action figure... shoes with wings — that would be Hermes (Roman equivalent : Mercury) — “considered the herald of the gods. He is also considered the protector of human heralds, travellers, thieves, merchants, and orators. He is able to move quickly and freely between the worlds of the mortal and the divine, aided by his winged sandals.”
wikipedia

JM suggested that John work in the mode he is comfortable with, as seen on his website, with shoes.
 

Word Wall

 As I’ve been doing my self assigned reading, I’ve been trying to get into the habit of note taking. Starting small, for right now I’m recording any new vocabulary, as well as it’s dictionary definition.

I’m surprised at the amount of words I’ve already come across so far, especially since the last book I was reading is by the same author, and didn’t seem to have as nearly advanced vocab. 

The Blood Bucket

 

full ingredients list (from greatest amount, descending); 

raspberry grenadine (corn syrup, color)

100% pure clover honey

eclipse coffee syrup (corn syrup, color)

corn starch

dish soap

acrylic paint

Design

 

Square Collages

 Collages #2 & #3, Paper on paper

Stickers

Stickers

 

The Arm

 

The Arm. Collage #1

notes and recollections, 4

We will discuss Adolf Loos his essay “Ornament and Crime” (1908) on Thursday.
Please come in with reactions and thoughts.

We will also show our graffiti-ist treatments of Madison’s (flat) house, and possibly do further work on these in class.

This page in progress (throughout the week).

—

“... there is something immoral about a well-paved road, and about the speed of departure to which many of us have subjugated our lives.”
      — Anna Badkhen, ‘Once I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara,’ in Bright Unbearable Reality : Essays (forthcoming, 2022) : link
 

---

Patrick (word/image) showed more in the $17.99 series. We discussed treatment of language (name of item) and the number ($17.99), and also contemplated showing the “framed” products/artifacts (e.g., winter cap) in a straight, uninflected manner (meaning: not drawn let alone digitally manipulated: photographs with minimal intervention.

This current series might be thought of as a kind of reflection on the magic of modern, manufactured objects of desire, and thus not (or not only!) as advertisements for those objects.

It was suggested (not by jm) that Patrick abandon the restraint of “$17.99.”

Thursday —
Patrick showed his “marketing” piece for a wireless trackball mouse (here). If an advertisement: where? magazine? website (for display in browser? on a smartphone?). All kinds of issues came into play. jm wondered why marketing. Why not just “art” (so to speak) around the object? We noted that noone in the room reads magazines (Sarah looks at old ones; Stacey reads zines, but that was it. Even the arrangement of the elements shown — an abstract "aura" graphic borrowed from work in another class, the price, the a for amazon logo at lower right — all of these were tentative or vague in terms of how they would work in an actual instance of marketing.

And yet. And yet the wireless trackball mouse had been treated, endowed/imbued with a kind of internal halo or glow. jm thought it was already sufficient. It need only be surrounded by language, perhaps a $17.99 below it, to be enough — enough in this case meaning, able to stand alone, or be incorporated in other settings (e.g., marketing, advertising), and even to stand alone as art.

jm pointed to orange crate art (one example on wall above door, and many more via a google search).

And there is also Lucian Bernhard’s advertising poster for the Priester match company (emphasized, because so important) :

source : MCAD Library, flickr : link
This and other examples of so-called Sachplakat or object posters are discussed in Meggs and other histories of graphic design.
 

---

Stacey (kindness) is working on a “zine” devoted to kindness; we saw page spreads of text and facing drawings of hands. jm had also printed these, and those spreads were on the homasote wall. Zines are not limited to design by designers; indeed, most are probably created by untrained (in typography, etc.) non-designers. A designer needs to be careful about her/his adoption of such default characteristics as 8.5x11 size, different type sizes, etc.: in done, it needs to be consciously (strategically) done. We talked about how one might select a book size, and also gave thought to different ways text can be presented in a book, e.g., snaking/flowing through, rather than distributed, one story per page spread. And thought was given to the symbolic nature of the illustrations of hands, and to whether each story required an illustration. Attention was also given to the sans serif type face chosen (there was something antiseptic, and even cool-y corporate, about the spreads).

When creating content for and designing a book, it can be useful to identify a book that one thinks is relevant, and borrowing its size at least for a trial.

Thursday —
Stacey showed photographs she has taken of instances of “kindness” she has encountered in her daily life, family events, comicon attendances, in stores, and so on. Upon closer inspection and interrogation (of the images, so to speak), kindness related to them in different ways, some strongly, some weakly or not at all, or in some un-obvious special way that would require explanation. Her idea for these photographs was to use them in collages.

And yet the images were already full of meaning, overdetermined, complete in themselves. JM thought Stacey was too close to them, anyway. Better to use material in which Stacey had no investment, and find ways to use that material, in collage form, with language, to explore the idea of — and ideas around — the concept of “kindness.”

There was some discussion of redundancy (caption = picture in an obvious way), and a different strategy of leaving some space between image and language for mystery (for want of a better word, at the moment) — some measure of ambiguity, some space (and/or catalyst) for thinking and imagination.

And so we turned for visual material to magazines (specifically, the “How to Spend It” (HTSI) supplement to the weekend edition of the Financial Times), and for language, to the Bible.

With regard to collage: we looked through a copy of HTSI for imagery. On first pass, found absolutely nothing. And so went back, shifted gears, jm's cropping tool in hand, and started to find parts of advertisements that might work, in combination with others. A box, in a model’s arms, with a plant coming out its top; butterflies in an advertisement... Could these work together? (The answer: yes.) Avoid clever over-involved collaging. Just two rectangles, different sizes ok, abutting each other (in different combinations, even some overlap: the point being, keep it simple). jm pointed to some juxtapositions (simple parataxis: side by side) in this flickr : milkshakenhoney/ (Kelsey Reilly).

The Concordance to the Bible might be useful; better to restrict oneself to what is found there, than to choose one’s favorite (and perhaps clichéd) phrases from other sources that are specifically devoted to kindness.
many resources out there, e.g., Bible Verses about Kindness : link

Looking forward to see the results of these experiments.
 

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Katie (color; windows) presented page spreads of short texts (from her writing, and from DMs), facing photographs of and through her venetian blind-ed window. jm had printed the spreads from screen grabs of Katie’s blog post. This document, like Stacey’s, was not consciously chosen. We considered the texts (24 of them) and how these might be used and even edited; we also considered different ways they could be oriented to the images, as well as whether the images should bleed, be large, medium or even small on their pages. Here, the concern was to let neither image nor text to dominate the other (i.e., so that this doesn’t become a “photo book” with captions.

jm will bring in examples of different treatments of photographs (of the same thing — Los Angeles freeways). One of these will be a catalog of Catherine Opie’s photographs of freeways (interchanges, under construction, etc), and urban strip malls. Two photographs, that were included in that show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, can be seen here : link

Thursday —
Katie continues to work on the (poetic) language.
 

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Madison (graffiti...) brought in the flat “doll house” templates, and distributed these for homework. We will discuss and may continue in class on Thursday, possibly in relation to the Loos essay.

jm pointed to @realtorsguide : link
“A digital road trip that explores American culture and issues of loneliness, greed, love and loss through the photos of real estate agents.”

Thursday —
Some of us brought in "tagged" or otherwise marked-up houses, flat or assembled; others worked on these during class; some took blanks home, to submit on Tuesday.
 

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John (shoes) showed drawings and photographs of shoe ideas. jm favored the drawings, as they also involved handwritten notes, but later saw that both drawings and photographs were good directions (see his comments at John’s post, 20 September) : link
 

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Sarah (life after death) showed (1) recently acquired artificial worms, maggots and (3D-printed) spiders; and (2) two square-shaped collages (5-6 inches square), involving found text and imagery. The latter are functioning as think pieces, and will (likely) continue. Sarah mentioned an interest in making 3D collages as well.

Thursday —
Sarah brought in her “blood bucket,” and explained its ingredients and shortcomings. There was some discussion of possible uses. jm took and displayed a photograph of a detail of an emptied container — bubbles, etc. — and rambled on about the importance of lingering at different stages of the process, looking sideways (tangentially, so to speak), alert to the potential of accidents along the way. There is the final aim or target, perhaps — which will matter differently to different designers/artists/writers — but meanwhile, there are the events that happen along the journey, that for some may be the more important aspects of a project, and yield greater opportunities for development and application.

jm’s photo, inverted but not otherwise modified.
 

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Josh (sound... gesamtkunstwerk ?) showed a passage (not so much different from what was previously seen) of his sound + images. The word “error” appeared several times, and seemed to promise (or at least allow) more glitch or leakage of visuals (of a different register) than we were seeing. Josh showed a photographic image of a plate of pasta (with sauce), as an example. Yes, this might work (or others), the point being, to see what the sound/image relationships yield.

To demonstrate how cuts (of sound and image) might be done, jm showed an excerpt of Jean-Luc Godard, “Hélas pour moi” : link.

1. “Jean-Luc Godard, giant of the French New Wave, dies at 91” : link
2. Peter Bradshaw, “Jean-Luc Godard: a genius who tore up rule book without troubling to read it” : link

Josh wondered about using some of the digital sound interface (“blocks” in the timeline) in the visuals. Good idea. jm showed his copy of H. H. Stuckenschmidt. Twentieth Century Music (1969) : link.
The book contains several rather visual scores.
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was mentioned in this context. : link (wikipedia)
Fratres (1980 : link

Thursday —
Josh will work on thumbnails for posters (using the sound interface visuals, mentioned above); jm suggested to bring in posters (plural), not thumbnails. Josh can (and should) use thumbnails in his own process; we don’t need to consider these unless there is a good reason to.
 

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Thea (Notebooks) showed some early derivations of her great-grandfather’s text, the result of work with Obsidian and simple text search functions. One was a list of a repeated word (singular and plural forms, and with apostrophe if memory serves). Another — a kind of concordance view of a single word and its surrounding text — was poetically charged: a mix of repetition and alliteration, but also because of its relationship to the lived and recorded life, the ordinarily unremarked activities that make up most of our lives.

jm mentioned concrete poetry in relation to what was shown. His own sense of what that term means is: an emphasis on the physical form in which letters and words are clothed/manifested; and an emphasis on placement of those elements, whether on a page or in the physical landscape, in which they might interact with or even call to mind or draw attention to other elements — or the general mood, or historical aspects, etc. — in or of those settings (this sentence has gotten away from its writer !).

Several anthologies are on the seminar room (glass bookcase, middle shelf at left).
 

The Shoe