An article showing that Duchamp’s “Stoppages” function on a different level to the one most Duchamp scholars accept, via Sam Woolf on eu-gene:
TOUT-FAIT Article
TOUT-FAIT Article
Tag: Uncategorized
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Materials Fetishism One: La Vie Boheme
Amongst other things, Evie gave me a Moleskine for Christmas. I’ve used Paperchase, Muji and Smiths for notebooks, but Moleskines are just altogether more notebook-y. My Newton will continue to gather dust… 🙂
Moleskine US, slightly larger site.
Moleskine ink discussion… -
Playing The Mall (1994)
“walking through a shopping centre is like being in a computer game. different levels to get to, rewards to be had.
it’s a very visual space. metal, glass, mirrors, windows, signs. glistening and reflecting each other, and reflecting you as you look at them.
you’re playing the mall” -
Underlying Aesthetic (Dis)Order
Looking at the image generators in the History Of Computing section of
the Science Museum I was struck by how un-artistic the regular
patterns and well defined forms of harmonic analysers and geometric
pens now look. Their artisticness has gone the way of the string
Concorde’s. That regular, predictable structure would once have been
the underlying aesthetic of an ordered world. Now you need something
messier to look like a competent reflection of the (dis)order of
things.This changed worldview is what is reflected in generativity’s
obsession with randomness. Randomness is a way of choosing things as
surely as linear progression is, but it is a way that now seems more
naturalistic. Randomness is generativity’s perspective: if you’re
going to do it a different way you’re departing from the norm.But randomness is a mid-20th-century reflection, one that very soon
may look as mannered as the output of a “Spirograph”. It was a
reaction to a set of social conditions that have not held for some
time. And imposing order on randmoness, finding patterns in the noise,
is a connoseurish and distracting activity to impose on the
viewer. More contemporary choice and noise functions are needed, ones
that give the viewer something more interesting to see and to do. -
ColorSplash
The camera is meant to be an objective recorder of optical fact (stop laughing at the back). So the thought of a camera that alters the scene that it is to capture, for example by changing the colour of the light in the scene (and I mean really changing it) seems the opposite of what a camera is meant to be:http://shop.lomography.com/colorsplashcamera/
This sort of aesthetic intervention seems somehow generative, in that the technology processes the input to create something new, but it’s a real-world generativity, a generativity before the fact. I want a camera that projects halftones…
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Reform
The reform movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
reacted to Industrialisation in two ways. Traditionalist
movements such as Arts & Crafts in Britain sought to reject the
dehumanising lifestyle and low-quality products of industrialisation
and to return to the values and styles of an idealised pre-industrial
past. Progressive movements such as Bauhaus in Germany sought to
embrace the efficient lifestyle and affordable products of
industrialisation in and to move on to an idealised social future. These social
agenda went hand-in-hand with each movements’ aesthetic agenda, each
seeking to improve material and social forms by their intervention.Post-Industrialism has led to the rise of contemporary reform
movements, similarly concerned with rejecting or embracing the
aesthetic and mode of production of the day.Anti-globalisation seeks to return the first world to a romanticised
pre-branding past with an aesthetic of genuine, unmediated
first-order experience and social exchange and space whilst bringing
the third world out of poverty. But as offshoring gains pace the
anti-globalisation dream of removing the intrusion of branding into
everyday life and levelling living conditions around the world may be
realised only ironically.The Open Source movement seeks to alter the ownership and rewards of
technological production and distribution, with anything beyond a
rough and ready functionalist aesthetic undetermined outside of
software development. Open Source is a flexible model that can be
applied to areas outside of software engineering and the media. Anything
that can be designed or distributed can be open sourced, with
competition based on quality of manufacture, delivery or support.Open Source, then is a model that can and must be applied to the
production of social and aesthetic forms as well as technological
ones. Open Source is a redistribution of capital (or at least value), but
distributed and voluntary rather than centralised and
imposed. How this will look has yet to be decided. Hopefully without a
centralised bureaucracy to impose a “Socialist Realism” or yBA-style kitsch
aesthetic the results will be vital. -
The Condition Of Design
It is not art that is weakened as it approaches the condition of design. It is the power of criticism. All art is design: a competent aesthetic response to a set of isomorphic demands. -
Drawing and Coding
(Figurative) drawing and programming are both about structuring perceptions in-keeping with representational schemes to enable engaging with subjects. Competent drawing is regarded as technically conservative. Which is ridiculous given that the last fifty years have seen drawing used more than ever before. Animation, computer games, graphic design, movies and web/UI design all use drawing as part of their design process. Programming must also be technically conservative, which means that “technically conservative” is a weak and suspect label. -
Dye
Procion MX and Rit are good on paper. There’s anecdotal evidence for lightfastness, but they won’t be as lightfast as acrylic (one poster had been told 25% by a sales rep).