Lines of Enquiry

Redtape #5

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:21:00 -0400

In rooms full of endings i.e. ends of projects Tim Gould’s et al’s Red Tape project stood out at last year’s RCA show because it felt more like a middle, something ongoing, exciting and crucially outward looking. Last night, I took the opportunity to attend the 5th installment of this ongoing discussion/forum which debates the contextual issues surrounding comms design.

The session was loosely themed around Storytelling — I particularly enjoyed artist Simon Faithfull taking us though his process of drawing as a way of plotting his story or ‘subjectivity’. Often using a Palm Pilot, he records fragments of places, moments and objects which he then publishes instantaneously on the web, building digital maps of drawing. Two things struck me as interesting listening to Simon — Firstly, he described how the art market’s ‘value through scarcity’ model meant that his ubiquitous ‘non-physical’ drawings had little monetary value, but he felt there was ‘value’ to be found in their accumulated ‘weight’… perhaps the investment of time that they embody as a whole. Secondly, as a person who loses possessions on a regular basis there was something reassuring about his playful 2006 project; ‘Lost: An Inventory of Wayward Things’, in which he made 500 copies of a book about all the objects he had ever lost. He then deliberately lost the ‘Lost’ books around S.Coast of England. Texts within each book encouraged finders to log where the books were found on a website which now tracks their enigmatic stories.

Alex Butterworth has been experimenting with the relationship between hearing and seeing — he showed the Hackney Hear location based iPhone app which plays snippets of conversations, music and poetry activated by the user walking through various locations. It was interesting to note that he felt that to make this high-tech story-telling effective an good understanding of pace and patterns of attention was vital. He also flagged up the importance of allowing space for the users imagination something he felt was often endangered by these kind of augmented reality projects.

Also, sharing the panel was the artist and activist John Jordan who is part of: Laboratory of Insurrection and Imagination. For him a compelling story was a crucial part of political activism generating media interst and momentum. Citing the example of the 1996 Reclaim the Streets take over of the M41 motorway he explained how in addition to taking over a motorway, the image of someone with a jack hammer, digging up the road and planting trees whilst concealed beneath the giant skirt of a women parading up and down on stilts became a tantalising myth for the press and led to plenty of coverage.

Looking forward to the next session which is scheduled for Summer 2012

Type workshop — WSA

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 08:50:00 -0400

To kick off a project introducing typography to 1st yr graphic design students at Winchester Sch of Art Rose Gridneff and myself ran a half-day workshop. The cohort of 55ish students were given a different typeface, then (in groups) they had to research the font family, origins, applications, popular usage and formal qualities in preparation for a short presentation. By the afternoon we had taken over one of the studios and created a type library which the students could then refer back to for the rest of the project.

Information can be beautiful but its what you do with it that counts

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 06:45:00 -0400

I recently helped organise a collaboration between our Winchester Sch of Art 1st yr Graphic Arts students and the School of Biological Sciences at Southampton University. Working with Professor of Neuroscience Lindy Holden-Dye the task for the students was to use information design to visualise data relating to a range of mental health conditions. The challenge of the brief was to find an effective and engaging way to show the stats without falling into the trap of producing what Edward Tufte describes as chart-junk. As part of my launch I included this interesting, if a little one sided, punch up between David Mccandless (Information is Beautiful) and Neville Brody on Newsnight. Also see below some work that came out of an intial 2 hour workshop I ran. In groups of 4 students were asked to visualise info about themselves or their habits and routines. The installations had to accurately reflect the data and be realised in the studio quickly and cheaply. I liked this simple idea by Jake Sharpe and Katherine Evans et al. which showed the different weights of individuals in the group (and hinted at personality) using different lengths of belts bought from the pound shop

Like economy

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 05:52:11 -0400

Thanks to Paul Caplan @internationale for giving WSA 1st year Graphic Arts students some interesting digital meat to chew over the holidays in preparation for his Contemporary Issues lecture after the Easter break: Gerlitz, C. & Helmond, A., 2011, [Paper presented at the DMI mini-conference] Hit, Link, Like and Share. Organizing the social and the fabric of the web in a Like economy. In a helpful and timely fashion a video of said paper being presented by Carolin Gerlitz at the conference was recently posted by Anne Helmond @silvertje:

Love this idea from Ether Press

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 04:38:00 -0500

Love this idea from Ether Press:

Taking tweets and other temporal messaging — collating and publishing them in book form. “We are a print-on-demand publisher a.k.a. a publish-on-demand printer.”

I’ve always found Tower Bridge a bit schmaltzy… This...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:40:00 -0500

I’ve always found Tower Bridge a bit schmaltzy… This is a much better version of this iconic landmark. Found it on the side of a dairy van at waterloo this morning.

Zine workshop at Elisava, Barcelona

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:56:00 -0500

In collaboration with Winchester Sch of Art, MA Design 11/12 students at ELISAVA made zines about their research ideas. Workshop run by Dr Cui Su.

Visualizer: Alex Zamora: "Let technology inform your ideas"

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 06:39:27 -0500

Visualizer: Alex Zamora: "Let technology inform your ideas":

wsaadm:

This sentiment neatly sums up a thought-provoking talk by Alex Zamora yesterday, who very kindly took time out to come down to WSA to tell our MA students how (not) to use social media. He showed how his commercial work (Poke London) and creative passions (Feverzine) are very much…

__Cui: Archizines LIVE - A Review

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 04:58:06 -0500

__Cui: Archizines LIVE - A Review:

cuii:

I dropped in at the AA for Archi-zines Live, an exhibition curated by Elias Redstone of fanzines about architecture. The exhibition was, in true AA style, really well put together and the zines on display featured from around the world, NYC, Chile, Japan, China, Canada, France,…

I just returned from 3 weeks teaching in China at the Suzhou Art...

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:23:00 -0400

Transforming drawings via scale

Drawing pool set up in the studio

Final presentations Suzhou wayfinding

Student's signage examples

I just returned from 3 weeks teaching in China at the Suzhou Art and Design Technology Institute. In the first week we worked on visual research skills with exercises aimed at developing observation and drawing skills. In the second week we holed up in the library and found some design heroes and heroines and conducted a series of Pecha Kucha style presentations. For the final week the students undertook some primary research on the streets of Suzhou looking at the wayfinding systems in the city and speaking to locals and tourists about their experiences of getting around.

Many thanks to all the students who participated in the sessions. Also big thanks to Harry and Sonia at Suzhou who made my stay so enjoyable!! I miss China already, in particular the huǒ guō!!

Zine exhibition – Hartley Library

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 05:29:00 -0400

We were asked by the Graphic Arts and Media department to curate, design and build an exhibition showcasing a collection of zines produced by students on the Graphic Arts programme at Winchester School of Art. Our idea for exhibiting these publications was to create a our own version of a reading room within the library. We asked our friend and artist Paul Teigh to build an Enzo Mari inspired reading table and lamp which would provide a pool of light in which the publications could be browsed and read by visitors to the exhibition. In keeping with the lo-fi nature of zines and their method of production, we fly-posted the walls surrounding the table with photocopied scaled-up pages. The exhibition opened on 24th January and ran till the 26 March 2010.

Print Matters – Tate Library and Winchester School of Art

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 10:03:00 -0400

As part of the Print Matters exhibition at the Winchester Gallery we were commissioned to design a catalogue which would bring together a range of text and visual materials relating to theme of print. The document included an article we wrote (see below) to accompany Zines an exhibition at the Hartley Library, texts from artists Michalis Pichler and Tom Sowden, as well as an essays by Maria White from the Tate Library and Linda Newington from WSA.

Zines – Cui Su
The zine is a testament that print still matters, not as a fetishized form, but as a wonderful medium between people and the stuff they put in print. Zinesters make them because they are passionate about the content. No subject matter is too niche. Whether they are zines about feminism, punk, design, music, fashion or football, free and playful self-expression is the only rule. There is no such thing as a design crime. Cheaply made, self-published and circulated in small numbers, many zines defy the conventions of mainstream magazines. Early 70s punk zines embraced typos, misprints, messy collages and clashing fonts because they reflect the nature of punk music: immediate, incoherent and chaotic. This exhibition, Zines, is a collection of publications produced by current students of Graphic Arts at Winchester School of Art. The show features a diverse range of zines which reflect student’s personal interests. Some of them are the result of a classroom brief delivered in collaboration with Alex Zamora of Feverzine, in which students respond to a series of words: ‘motion’, ‘debris’, ‘reflection’, ‘type’. The fun and ad-hoc nature of production creates a rich body of work.

Zines matter not only because they are evidence of the creative ingenuity of their makers, but also because they lend, as Rob Peart, founder of Zineswap, once said, “a sense of permanence” that zinesters of this precarious Internet Age so crave. Every zine, as Stephen Duncombe (1997) observes, “is a community institution in itself, as each draws links between itself and others…zines are not only the voice of an individual publisher, but a conduit for others’ expression as well”. Certainly beyond having something ‘to hold in your hand’, as zine producers often say, each zine is a solid connection with their audiences. After painstaking work making a zine by hand, ultimately producers want to be read; hence the distribution, sharing and swapping of zines have become just as important as the zines themselves. Undoubtedly online social networking plays an important part of this process, but the desire for creating ‘virtual’ communities existed long before the invention of the Internet. The permanence achieved via zine-making and swapping – self-publication - overcomes not just the lack of tangibility, but also the lack of social involvement and participation in professional design practice.

The zine format is not simply a reactionary response to the digital; in fact, self-initiated projects are thriving because of rather than despite web technologies. Some of our 3rd year graphic arts students, Grant Killoran, Victoria Iles, Kat Mitchell, Neil Laws, Josh Fletcher and Chantal Mayhew – whose zine, Black & White, is in this exhibition – have set up Sauce Collective and shown work both on and offline at the Brighton Zine Fest, the London Zine Symposium and the monthly art markets in Winchester. Theorizations of why print matters – and in particular of its “form vs content” aspect – need to pay closer attention, both to the agency of exchange, as performed by the “zine – swap” in the shaping and changing the hallowed status of the printed text and the intelligibility of print “forms”. The temporary and ever-changing zine-ic prints offers a permanence that is not just about having a tactile and physical form; it is also about the relationships between texts, authors and readers - multiple actors of complex communities, i.e. zine scenes that thwart simple dichotomies of print vs internet, physical vs. virtual”

Zine workshop – Southampton University

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 04:12:00 -0500

As part of a series of events planned for the 2011 Interdisciplinary Research Week we were asked to run our ‘zine’ workshop with researchers involved in; Life Science, NanoScience and Sensored Environment. Thanks to everyone who got stuck into the process of making the zine. We would also like to thank the Tricia Worby who invited us to run the workshop. Again, we couldn’t have done it without the 1st year Graphic Arts students who did a great job copying, folding and binding at such a lightening pace!

Zine workshop – Southampton University

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:32:00 -0500

Last Friday, we had a zine party/workshop at the Winchester Gallery in WSA for our 1st yr PhD students from the Business and Law Faculty: 24 strangers + booze + pritt sticks + byros + magazines + Polaroid camera = a zine of PhD research printed, bound and gleefully handed out in TWO HOURS! The brief: get a partner (and some booze), explain your research to each other using a set of questions - Q: how would you explain your research to a kid? Q: if you can go anywhere in the world to do your research, where would it be? Q: what’s on your iTunes playlist when doing research? - grab some stationery, cut out some images and start laying out an A4 page that represents your partner and his/her work. We were initially really worried about whether this would work. Can we get people who aren’t used to thinking visually make a zine? These are no graphic designers or artists, but folks who write about ‘short supply chains’ and management theories. After all we make loads of assumptions, especially in education, about the ways people think and I think the success of this exercise shows that a zine is something that transcends disciplines and training!