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Otto sent me a paper copy of the thesis last year and because i'm about to leave to the airport i'm just going to copy/paste its abstract. It does what it says on the tin after all: This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able.
As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through "open source" fashion "cookbooks". By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative "hacking" at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on. Related: Interview with Otto von Busch, Experiments in fashion heresy. |
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Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments by Troika, Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel, and Eva Rucki (Amazon UK and USA)
Publisher Thames & Hudson says: 'Digital By Design' is a wide-ranging survey that considers the work of those visionaries who are reimagining the relationship between technology, design products, immersive environments and human interaction for the twenty-first century. The result is a captivating assessment of pioneering approaches in art and design that encompasses a broad spectrum of humanist values, humor, magic and sensory experiences. 'Digital By Design' features more than 100 objects, products and installations that exemplify this progressive new wave of technology infused art and design. Digital By Design features a foreword by Paola Antonelli and is completed by a series of incisive interviews by noted contributors such as Dunne & Raby, Ron Arad, Steven Sacks and Machiko Kusahara. In 'Digital by Design', Troika presents a new world of art and design in which the latest digital technologies are explored and exploited, enriching our lives and experience in new and unanticipated ways. Pushing the boundaries of interactive technology and 'intelligent design', the designers and objects featured in 'Digital By Design' are the ones tearing away the closed doors of the science labs and institutions, creating realms of experience, customization and beauty that engage their audience, surroundings and users in new, playful and subversive ways, ultimately bringing the future into the hands of the people.
This is the book that makes digital (or should i say 'interactive'?) design finally steps out of the gadget and design blogs and announces "Hello mainstream! Here we are!' At the risk of seeing burst into laughter those who say that i play admirably well the 'naivety' card, i will say that i'm a bit confused. There is the word 'design' in the title, the book is written by some of the most talented interaction designers in the world, the forewords and interviews star some of the people who are most intimately associated with design (Paola Antonelli, Dunne & Raby, Ron Arad, Steven Sacks and Mashiko Kusahara.) Yet the description of the book occasionally mentions the word 'art'. And here and there inside the volume, you'll find several installations created by artists.
I'm not happy. Not happy at all. The moment i turn my back on that damn issue 'Is it design? Is it art?' and pretend the question doesn't make much sense, the book lands on my coffee table and brandish its hefty pink arm to throw back the issue at me. Last week only, i was wearing my 'so what?' smile when i saw Pors&Rao's The Uncle Phone and 22 Pop exhibited as art works in one of the booths of the ARCO contemporary art fair in Madrid. A few years ago, these two projects were developed at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. They were interaction design products at the time. No matter the label you give them, i still like these two projects/art pieces. Here i am back in the days when a designer would be outraged because i bring up the 'art' word. Or vice-versa. Sometimes designers purposedly -or because it's part of their culture- play with the blurring between art and design. Most of the time they don't. Are the borders between (interactive/digital) design and art so flimsy and vague that we cannot discern any difference between them? Is it fair to throw them in the same basket? Does the whole RCA dream of being exhibited at ars electronica? Would that happen if it were a book about product design where technology wouldn't play a prominent role? Would tea cups be mixed with sculpture? I don't have an answer for that but, even if i believe that both disciplines can only benefit from spending more time with each other, i was hoping that the book would not make the issue even muddier for me. Does it matter? Let's say it doesn't, let's say digital design is a state of mind, a culture and keep on with the review, shall we?
Digital by Design is wonderfully well designed. The graphics are impeccable, the balance between words and images is most charming. The text is limpid, simple and lively. You'll be happy to see your favourite projects featured in the book and, as well as you might think you know the digital design field, i'm sure you will also make quite a few discoveries. Books like this one are precious, go for it!
More images "inside the book'. Image on the homepage: UVA's Constellation - Covent Garden Winter Lights. |
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I would usually not write about monographies but nothing feels better than breaking my own rules today: the first book is starring blackletter also known as Fraktur or Gothic type, the second one is dedicated to the paintings of Miltos Manetas.
Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Blackletter also known as Fraktur or Gothic type was commonly used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. By the end of the Renaissance it had mostly been replaced by the typeface Latin Antiqua. The use of Blackletter type became taboo in Germany after World War II because it was incorrectly associated with the Nazis who actually banned its use in 1941 because it was falsely believed to be a Jewish invention. Revelations about the true history and meaning of Blackletter type have resulted in a resurgence in usage by graphic designers. (...) Fraktur Mon Amour reproduces 300 variations of Blackletter fonts ranging from historical fonts to contemporary reinventions in a sensuous beautifully crafted hot-pink prayer book-style catalog that is destined to become a fetish object for designers and type enthusiasts. Each Blackletter font is presented on a full page along with its complete alphabet date of origin the name of its designer and its original foundry. On the facing page is a composition created from that font that explores the subversive beauty of this unique typeface. In addition 137 of these fonts--including four created exclusively for this book--are collected on an enclosed CD (Mac and PC) for free private and restricted commercial use. Fraktur Mon Amour is the winner of several awards including the Type Directors Club of New York's 2007 Award for Typographic Excellence.
Who knew that fonts could have such fascinating lives? I believe this book has received a huge echo in design blogs but as it is the most elegantly and skilfully designed book i have received in 2008, i thought it deserved a few more words here. Closed it looks like a bible. Open it and you get over 700 pages of pure pink font porn. My expertise and talent at discussing fonts being extremely limited i'll end with a video flip through the book:
Publisher Johan & Levi Editore writes: In his work Manetas acts as an observer of this daily phenomenon. At times he works from a 'subjective' angle, bearing witness to both our total involvement in technology, and the sense of alienation that comes from interacting with machines. Other times he takes a 'bird's eye view' to draw attention to the gestures, often underestimated or taken for granted in daily life, that man performs on machine, in a world which is lacking in concrete 'actions/ that point up to what is going on. Echoing Baudelaire's famous 'Painter of Modern Life', Manetas, as an observer of the contemporary world, is part of a time-honoured tradition in art> the practice of depicting man and the elements which represent modernity in the era in question has been a prerogative of the Impressionists, the Realists and the exponents of New Objectivity, not to mention the paintings of Post-Revolutionary Russia, where 'modern' meant 'industrial.'
Joysticks and joypads, plugs, keyboards and routers, a shoe lost among cables, a pair of feet emerging behind an open laptop, videocassettes, websites and girls watching intensely at a computer screen. Miltos Manetas hands a thought-provoking mirror to the gadgets blogs, tech magazines and even new media art exhibitions. The soft-coloured canvases reminds us that we are not merely 'users' 'interacting' with 'devices', but people absorbed in activities which might still appear as trivial to some but are nevertheless essential to our new human equilibrium. The introduction essay is penned by the only media theorist and guru who is as flamboyant as Manetas himself: Lev Manovich.
Image on the homepage part of Judith Schalansky's fraktur set. Related stories: Superneen world and Book review: Hand Job: A Catalog of Type. |
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Three D: Graphic Spaces, edited by Gerrit Terstiege, the editor-in-chief of European design magazine form. Includes a design-historical essay by Steven Heller, an interview of Stefan Sagmeister about his typographical installations and various interviews with graphic designers by Sophia Muckle.
Publisher Birkhäuser says: Three D - Graphic Spaces highlights a current trend in international graphic design: more and more visual designers are staging their compositions as three-dimensional scenarios, in order to turn them into posters, magazine covers, web sites, and animated films. The result is a host of suggestive new pictorial worlds that range from playfully arranged still lifes to room-filling installations. Edited by Gerrit Terstiege, editor-in-chief of the European design magazine "form", and designed by the prizewinning German studio Pixelgarten, this book offers an inspiring look at the various modeling techniques and means of expression involved. The book collects designs of about 50 international creative individuals and studios. A volume on a similar subject, Book review: Tactile - High Touch Visuals, was published last year but Three D: Graphic Spaces is way more talkative, offering essays, deeper analysis and descriptions. The projects are grouped into 4 main categories: Still Lifes Come Alive, Intricate Installations, Touching Type and Thrilling Animation. Nice touch: at the end of the book, you'll find a small description of the design studios as well as the contact address and url of their website. A few examples. In no particular order: Rebecca Stephany's Paradise is Made of Paper, an XL origami installation in the library of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. Damien Poulain, 3-D illustrations for Uniqlo paper no.3, 2007. Tokyo, New York and London are neatly and unmistakably represented using just a couple of landmarks and key elements of the local culture.
Rita's Living Room sketches the typical style of a Québec living room. Nothing glamor or ready for the pages of trendy design magazines, just simple, archetypical decoration and lay out. Ultimately, the designers ask: 'Where is the design? What is design anyway?'
Jocelyn Cottencin's practice stands at the intersection of photography, video, installation and graphic design. Her 2004 wall drawing La consommation d'oxygène est différente d'un individu à l'autre ('the consumption of oxygen differs from one individual to another' video) is based on the typo 'Floréale' that she created in 2003. Convinced that the fate of her work was to disappear swiftly, she used chalk to draw the floral pattern. Surprisingly the work remained intact for 3 years.
Elene Usdin's La Barbe Bleue series turns the most terrifying aspects of Bluebeard's butchery of his wives into dolls limbs and threads of wools.
Playarea for footwear Pointer. Models are robots given the illusion of 3D life with the help of soft shadows.
Emil Kozak's work for MAG, a competition for the best magazines in Denmark. All the posters Kozak designed for each award have a connection to the medium of the award.
Graphic comes to life in a more literal way in this video by Colors and the Kids and in another one shot by Jared Eberhardt for Cansai De Ser Sexy: Julien Valle and Nicolas Burrows' explicit paper metaphor of the way digital existence spills over our physical life.
Related stories: Book Review: Super Holland Design, Book Review - Enter Spanish Creativity, Book review: Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, Book review: Tactile - High Touch Visuals, Joshua Davis at OFFF - Lisbon. |
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Publisher Actar says: Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture. I was waiting eagerly for The Infrastructural City - Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. 3 reasons for that. Number one, is Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies, Varnelis' previous book which he co-authored with Robert Sumrell. Anyone who had that one in their hands will get my point.
Reason number 2 is Los Angeles, the one city on this planet i should be averse to. The first time i was there i saw creatures that freaked me out: Chupa-Chup ladies -heavy and round on top, super slim on the rest of the body- and all sort of people walking around with some rather stunning attributes that had been recently implanted. I could not accept that no one ever 'walks around the city center' to do some shopping, have a drink and sit down in a park. And where was the city center anyway? I realized i would never survive in L.A. without a driving license. The skyscrapers were tiny Lego structures thrown in a heap by the highway. And the river. Even that poor repudiated and alien river looked fake! I should never have liked LA. I tend to measure every city to a European one. I manage that tour de force almost everywhere but in LA the attempt is more preposterous than ever. That's what charmed me so much. That and many other things. Los Angeles is the only city in the USA where i would be tempted to live.
Let's get to reason number 3. The Infrastructural City will drive you way beyond Los Angeles. The idiosyncrasies, stories and lessons described are thought-provoking enough to make you look at your own city with a more inquisitive eye. In this book, Los Angeles is little more than a (fascinating) case study, a pretext to explore the effects that today's complex and distorted infrastructures, whether planned by public entities or developed by private and competing corporations, have on contemporary urbanism. As Varnelis writes: Our goal was not modest: we set out to replace Reyner Banham's Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) as the key text for understanding the city urbanistically. Instead of four ecologies, The Infrastructural City offers essays commissioned to researchers who bring the discourse on urbanism outside of its usual and sometimes way too formal boundaries. These essays cover the three scales of networks: landscape, urban fabric and the object.
In one of the essays of the book, David Fletcher invites us to 'embrace freakology rather than bucology'. The advice could apply to many aspects of the Los Angeles. Its river, for example. Instead of following blindly the assumption that it is an eye-sore and a disgrace whose dignity would only be recovered when the concrete is removed and its native vegetation and wildlife reimposed, one should be aware of the fact that coming back to the 'natural' state could only be done at the cost of anihilating a complex ecosystem made of exotic and native species that has slowly found its equilibrium over decades.
This hotchpotch of imported and original flora can be observed all over L.A. making it one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. Most of us however, tend to reduce Los Angeles to its ubiquitous and iconic palm tree, a tree that is actually not a native species either. Most of them were planted to beautify the city for the 1932 Olympics, at a time when a city built around cars felt that it might have to re-invent its landscape. The average lifespan of the palm tree is 70 to 100. Its days under the California sun are numbered. And it doesn't seem that the city is going to waste much tears on them as no palm tree has been invited to the Million Trees party. Hopefully this will mean that the new breed of palm tree that double as cell antenna is going to loose some popularity as well:
If trees of all sorts and a river are to be expected in a section dedicated to the landscape of L.A., lowly gravel is not. Neither is oil. Well, not in the way Frank Ruchala (don't miss another of his essays, Recovering oiLA, you can access it on Lulu) pictures it: an actor which used to supply as much of the US' oil demand as Saudi Arabia, an asset whose value nowadays has to compete (most often than not unsuccessfully) with real estate. Los Angeles contains one of the most intense concentration of pipelines in the world yet, the presence of the precious resource is often camouflaged behind mundane facades. As we all know now, the Industry with a big I in Los Angeles is no longer the one that earned it the nickname of 'Oildorado.'
The rest of the book explores what is below that patch of pavement, inside the backyard garden of an unassuming house or what goes though monster warehouses. Each chapter is written by a different expert but the many photographies, graphics and a certain spirit enable the book to find its own voice.
As i mentioned above most of the infrastructures analyzed in the book provide food for thought wherever you happen to live.
One Wilshire, the unassuming container of the U.S. telephone and data connections reaching across the Pacific evokes the very tangible spin-offs of information society. The analysis of Los Angeles & Long Beach's ports, both major dispatchers of an unprecedented rise in the volume of goods from the Far East to the city and to the rest of the country, speaks to our seemingly unstoppable gluttony. I found some of the most illuminating comments in Roger Sherman's essay about change-based thinking, a position that invites architects and urbanists to envision their work under a different lens, one that would 'sett a trap' to capture potential change that inevitably occur in the lifespan of a city. Image on the homepage from Lane Barden's series Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel. |
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Publisher City Lights says: Wafaa Bilal's childhood in Iraq was defined by the horrific rule of Saddam Hussein, two wars, a bloody uprising, and time spent interned in chaotic refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bilal eventually made it to the U.S. to become a professor and a successful artist, but when his brother was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005, he decided to use his art to confront those in the comfort zone with the realities of life in a conflict zone. Thus the creation and staging of Domestic Tension, an unsettling interactive performance piece: for one month, Bilal lived alone in a prison cell-sized room in the line of fire of a remote-controlled paintball gun and a camera that connected him to internet viewers around the world. Visitors to the gallery and a virtual audience that grew by the thousands could shoot at him 24 hours a day. The project received overwhelming worldwide attention, garnering the praise of the Chicago Tribune, which called it "one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time," and Newsweek's assessment "breathtaking." It spawned provocative online debates and ultimately, Bilal was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Artist of the Year Award. Soot an Iraqi is a tale that walks you through refugee camps and experiments in interactive art. It is both a biography of artist Wafaa Bilal and the chronicle of his one-month experience as a paintball target at Flatfile Galleries. The book pertains to the political, the art, the activist fields. It is not a novel but it reads like one.
Defining the book is no straightforward enterprise and things do not get any more clean-cut when ones decides to focus on the performance at the center of the book. Domestic Tension is a playful and provocative online game, a cathartic performance that went further than the artist expected, a reflection on the impact that a seemingly innocent online gesture can have in the physical world, an invitation to dialog -no matter how contentiously- about war in Iraq. The artwork attracted the attention and most enthusiastic comments from art critics but it also appealed to the geeky type who'd define conceptual art a pretentious bore. And even there, one should stear clear of any hasty judgment, the experience taught the Bilal (and now its readers) that people you wouldn't expect to have much sympathy for Iraq's plight or for conceptual art turned out to be more supportive than expected. Shoot an Iraqi has a lesson for everyone, even for those who 'know better.' I just wish all lesson-bearing books could be as devoid of self-pity, regrets, anger or hauteur as one is. City Lights also uploaded a video in which Wafaa Bilal discusses the motivation behind Domestic Tension: Photo on homepage by Shawn Lawson. Copyright: Wafaa Bilal, 2007. More images in Universe in Universe. Previously: A few words with Wafaa Bilal and When interactive art becomes bored with you. |
